Inside Story, a new publication on which I have blogged before, has an interesting article by Sally Young, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne, on changing habits in consuming news.*
I disagree with elements of Young’s essentialy pessimistic analysis. She says:”Even though we are spending more time with media today, we’re spending less time on news,” and backs this up with figures on declining newspaper sales and declining and ageing audiences for television and radio news and current events.
My main point of disagreement is the definition of news. If you define news as that which is put out by big media companies, then the picture is grim. But that definition is circular.
The decline of mass media does not necessarily mean the decline of news. Indeed, it would be strange if this were so. Gathering and passing on news is a basic human activity. It preexisted literacy, printing and broadcasting. It will outlive them, I believe. But what we think of as “news” has changed in the past and will change in the future.
Jan Schaffer, the US Pulitizer Prize winner who now runs J-Lab, talks about “news ecologies” that are developing, using online social networks among other things. News is no longer only that which is put out by journalists. (In fact, it never was, but we were able to kid ourselves…)
The young people I know are very well informed indeed about the things that interest them. On other things, they may not have the kind of broad yet superficial knowledge that comes from reading a daily newspaper or watching a television newscast. Yet they are able to bring themselves up to speed with astonishing rapidity when they want to.
For example, a twenty something friend of mine who has taught me much of what I know about new media might not know why Australia intervened in East Timor, but if he wanted to know, he might do some of the following things: Post a question on the issue in Facebook or some other social networking site, and follow the links provided in the responses. He might perhaps join a group concerned with East Timor on Facebook. he might look on Twitter for members who know about or are interested in East Timor, and “Follow” their posts. These Twitter posts would lead him to other sources of information - blogs, academic articles and the like.
He would Google, and the Google search would send him to many places: some established media sites, but also to lobby groups and special interest groups and East Timor based bloggers. And that’s all without even mentioning Wikipedia.
Meanwhile there are many things that he hears about long before they make it into the newspapers and television news broadcasts. For example, he was telling me about this story to do with Google’s Chrome browser controversy in great depth a clear week before it made page three of the Age. He heard about it from a friend online, and a visit to a few sites gave him an in depth briefing from international expert sources in moments.
He was also able to tell me, earlier this year, that the later episodes of the TV series Underbelly were available online at a time when Channel Nine was protesting to me and other journalists that this could not possibly be so, because the episodes in question were not even out of the production suite. Foolishly, I trusted Channel Nine and not my friend. He turned out to be right - something he has not stopped rubbing in. Thus his online knowledge undermined, or could have undermined, the claims of corporate PR.
Young writes about the internet, but makes the rather dismissive observation that young people use the internet for “email, socialising …doing homework/research”. Yet all these activities are often ways of accessing and disseminating news. Young acknowledges this possibility, but then dismisses it by saying that figures suggest that when citizens search for news online, three fifths of their searches are for the names of familiar news outlets, rather than searches by news topic. Once again, the circular definition.
Yet research by Hitwise here in Australia shows that when a topic is in the news, there are clear “spikes” in the number of searches on the topic - and the traffic from these searches goes in all directions. Hitwise figures also show that of the traffic to print news sites 13.34 comes from Google topic searches. Social networking sites are also becoming significant drivers of traffic to both traditional news sites and news-based blogs. I’ve written more on social networking as a driver of news and other media consumption here .
Certainly there is cause for concern about the loss of broad knowledge of current events. But we do also need to acknowledge that the concept what is news, and what consitutes current events, may need re-examining. After all, before the printing press “news” was what happened locally or could be passed by word of mouth, and “current events” did not really exist in the same way it does now.
We are living through a change at least equivalent to the invention of the printing press. It isn’t sufficient to say “this is what has been news, and this is declining, therefore news is declining”.
If I may (modestly) give an example. Four weeks ago this blog, which is mainly a source of news on media with an emphasis on journalists, did not exist. I gather my information from friends, colleagues, and the usual journalistic trick of wearing out the telephone keypad and some shoe leather. The audience at this stage is only just over a thousand strong - nearly all media workers or those closely interested in media. Before this blog came in to being that audience did not exist as a single, identifiable entity. I am glad to report that it is growing strongly, and there is no doubt that what drives site traffic most is news - about internecine ABC disputes, who is going to be the next editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and so forth. Stuff that would not interest the great majority of the population, but does interest this audience-in-the-making.
Media workers being what they are, they gossip, and the contents of that gossip both finds its way on to this site (if I can verify it) and is also fuelled by this site. Bloggers link to this site. I link to bloggers. When I have some news here, I Twitter about it, and Twitterers re-tweet my posts. And so it goes on. What I am doing here is news, yet it looks nothing like any traditional news source. The audience is niche, but if I do my job properly it will be intensely engaged. The boundary between “source” and “audience” is more than usually blurred.
This is my own little meta-journalism experiment.
More in the future on questions such as: “can serving an Australian niche audience pay enough to make it worthwhile”.
Sigh.
*Declaration: Inside Story is published at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, where I am employed part time.
7 Comments
This looks like a fab article. I will have to return to it. Got as far as “news ecologies”. Love that. I posted a similar point recently on the sledge on New Matilda where “investigative journalism” was only as per the Big Media. Nah na. Don’t quite agree with that. Ignores the minor and micro media.
Indeed my ‘business/life’ model has been to downsize, downsize, downsize, and as Thomas Friedman (I think) has said ‘go flat world’. By this I mean network but don’t aspire to the hierarchical get big, get rich, get time poor. Ironically this model makes very little money as expected but it also greatly increases influence and peace of mind. I feel I might be evolving into my own brand but in a serious way that I control, incrementally and for the long run not the shooting star wise.
My only evidence for this is the google of my name is now no. 1 result on global search compared to a Hollywood director/actor and any number of US paddies in New York in the banking and finance sector (or perhaps Tamany Hall?).
Shall return anon. Happy hols Marg. Who says the Big Media holidays rule applies to new media. I’m feeling very fiesty and productive between the big bicycle missions.
I like your your writing and your insightful analysis . The comment “Four weeks ago this blog,… did not exist.” strikes me as being the core probelm. Whilst what you write is not yet life changing, I would have appreciated being exposed to it through a relaibale named portal The Australian’s Media section (I’ll look foolish if it already has) The real implications are two fold. First. is that advertisers must now chase down target prosepcts through this unmeoidated labarynth and that is not going to be sustainable. Traditional media is losing spendng, with disastrous impacts for their existence, and so “can serving an Australian niche audience pay enough to make it worthwhile” becomes a self defeating prophecy.
Fundamentally. people will either pay you for the value your writing adds to their work (with the potential for plagarism) , but the commercial basis on which you might be employed as a freelancer or a consultant, keeps evaporating from the very companies from whom in the old equation you might have crafted a living wage.
That too is a pretty gloomy view, but I’m working on what are excrutiatingly described as “monetisation” strategies for independent media workers like yourself. Like your insight into decling news consumption, there can be some value if we think our way throught the probelm. It’s just that I haven’t done enough thinking yet!
This is a really interesting response to my piece and I enjoyed reading it. I agree that a lot depends upon how we define ‘news’. My article focuses on ‘traditional’ news formats and I took pains to point that out. I focused on traditional news because while much of interest is happening online and with other forms of ‘news’ (using a much wider definition), I don’t think we yet have the evidence to declare a new ‘golden age’ of news and journalism.
There’s a tendency with every new medium - from radio, TV, the internet and beyond – to see it as radically different and hope that it will revolutionise information access. But there is no blanket assessment for this – we have to work out how we judge its impact, with what criteria and with what measures. Who did it benefit and how?
Those who are very optimistic about the internet and its potential often draw on their personal experiences, single examples (such as new websites or blogs), what their ‘friends’ are doing online etc. But where is the evidence about what’s happening online – and in relation to the wider world? Who is using the web for ‘news’ and for what sort of news? To answer these questions takes research – mapping online use, performing content analysis of ‘news’ distribution on social networking sites, doing demographic profiles, etc. Few researchers have done this – one who has is Matthew Hindman whose book I mentioned in my article.
Also, there are two contradictory positions in the debate about what is ‘news’: 1) there is a claim that people have always created and distributed ‘news’ and that this pre-dates ‘literacy, printing and broadcasting’. OK. But then there is also a claim that online forms of news are very different. Margaret uses her very interesting blog as an example and says it ‘looks nothing like any traditional news source’. Does it? Or does it look a bit like a mixture of articles, op-ed pieces, gossip columns and letters-to-the-editor that can be found in newspapers? What about its audience? Is that very different? What sort of demographic background do visitors have?
Let’s look at another online news site as an example. While 6% of the Australian population earns over $100,000 per year, more than double this - 13% - of Crikey’s visitors do. This doesn’t necessarily make Crikey any less valuable (or interesting) but it does mean that Crikey is reaching the same sort of limited audience that broadsheet newspapers reach. One of the criteria we surely need to measure in terms of online change is the extent to which it is widening news access. Some might suggest that I’m still looking in the wrong places and I’m ignoring all the ‘news’ that is floating around social network sites or emails. Perhaps. But can you tell me exactly who and what it is that we are talking about here and show me the content? Is it news stories that have originally come from some traditional source? Is it something else? Have we widened the definition of ‘news’ so much that any communication counts? Theorising about the potential and actual uses of the internet is the easy bit - working out how we measure its impact and then actually doing this research is the big challenge.
I am glad Sally Young found my post worth responding to. I think she makes valid points. It is true that the research on how people use new media for news is close to non-existent in this country. The same is not true in the USA, although even there it is in its first stages. Wearing other hats, I am trying to get some practice-based research happening here as well. If my projects get up, they would both create online examples of news generation and distribution, as well as doing the kind of mapping Young correctly identifies as necessary for anything very definite to be said.
However, what I and others say about “news ecologies” is not completely uninformed by research. The Pew Center for Civic Journalism in the USA (www.pewcenter.org) has done a fair bit, most notably through its spin-off J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism. (www.j-lab.org), which has an emphasis on both exploring and measuring the impact of “interactive journalism”. Recent J-Lab publications include “Citizen Meda: Fad or the Future of News”. Another relevant recent publication is Reese, Tutigliano, Hyun and Jeong “Mapping the Blogosphere”, which can be found at http://jou.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/3/235. There is also Lowrey, Mapping the Journalism-blogging Relationship, which can be found at http://jou.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/4/477. More locally, there have been recent academic publications concerning the YOUDecide2007 experiment run out of QUT.I could go on, but this is a blog, not a reference list!
A few more points in response. I have not, and would not, predict a new golden age of news and journalism. I have said that we are a time of paradigm shift. I have also said that as we face a crisis in traditional sources of news, we also need to look at the opportunities created by technological change, and we need to do this without being blinkered by ideas of what news looks like that may no longer be relevant. The US historian Mitchell Stephens in his books History of News and Rise of the Image and Fall of the Word is very interesting on paradigm shifts, both in the past (invention of printing press) and present (use of moving images) and future (what he calls ‘the new video’). I don’t agree with Stephens on everything, but I take his point that new thinking is needed.
To take an analogy, Stephens makes the point that when books first began to be printed, there was an attempt to make them look like the illuminated manuscripts of old. That, of course, was swept away in time, as people began to understand what the new technology was good for, and what was no longer relevant.
I suspect that much of what is now being done online by our major media companies will in time come to be regarded as an “illuminated manuscript” approach. We are still discovering what the new technology is really good for. Social networking, I think, is clearly one of the things. But we are right at the beginning of the changes. It was centuries between the invention of the printing press and the rise of the newspaper - and early newspapers were nothing like the things whose decline we are now mourning.
It is far too soon to predict a golden age of anything, but not too soon to point out that we are going through profound change that will in time affect just about all we think we know about media, and we need to think deeply about the changes, rather than getting trapped in mourning the decline of what has gone before.
As a journalist, I am interested in trying to work out how much of what I do will remain important in the new media age. Then I want to work out how that can be supported and carried forward. I would make a stab and suggest that disinterested, independent journalism will remain important. But I think most of other things, including what we mean by “quality” journalism, are up for grabs and rethinking.
Young is correct in pointing out that I have overstated the case in saying that this blog “looks nothing like any traditional news source”. Of course, it grows out of the experience of a traditional news journalist using largely traditional techniques. It is an experiment, and an evolution, not a revolution.
However, I would say that there are several things about this blog that make it different from “traditional” media.
1. Immediacy, or at least the potential for it (depending on what else I am doing on the day). When Sue Howard was removed from RN, I had the news, and updates, up within hours and sometimes minutes. Now radio and television have been able to do that for a long while, but would never do it for “niche” news, because it would not be of sufficient interest to a mass audience.
2. Interactivity. Granted this is a matter of degree rather than kind. There have always been letters to the editor, and I have the power to moderate comments. But if you monitored my emails and my participation on Twitter as well as this blog, it would I think be clear that I am engaged in a much higher and more intense level of interaction with audience/sources than traditional media journalists have been able to do. This is party a by-product of immediacy, but not only.
3. Voice. I am not sure about this one, because I am still trying it on for size. But I think it is newish to write news, yet not try to hide behind the faux objective voice of traditional newspapers. I have written about this at more length elsewhere. (http://www.creative.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=205394). It is relevant to what I write for Crikey, as well as what I write here.
Hope Sally Young responds to this. It is an interesting conversation!
This is great. Please, both of you, keep going with it
It’s very interesting
Mark Bahnisch has a piece over at Larvatus Prodeo ( http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/01/the-summer-of-australian-culture-new-matilda-and-new-media-style/#more-7715 ) that is in part a response to this discussion.
Great discussion - from a student of journalism who fits into the bracket “twenty somethings”…!
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