Dr Luke Goode's lecture notes for the 'University of Auckland Winter Lectures 2010: The End(s) of Journalism?'
Dr Luke Goode is a senior lecturer in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, with a special interest in digital media and their social and cultural consequences.
Consider this scene, one that few could have imagined 10 short years ago:
Of the hundreds of millions of English language blogs tracked by blog search engine Technorati, a majority deal in topics that are the traditional preserve of mainstream journalism (politics, technology, business, film, sport and so on). Most are not merely confessional diaries or online family photo albums (though often those elements are blended in). Technorati's research suggests blogs tend not to made on a whim and then rapidly abandoned: 85% of them have been running for more than a year. About a third of American blogs have more than 1000 unique visitors every month.
On Twitter, Iranian opposition protests, earthquakes and celebrity scandals unfurl in real-time in a fine spray of 140-character tweets from innumerable and often uncertain sources, as mainstream media gets caught between a breathless game of catch-up and the time-consuming responsibilities of fact-checking and sifting.
Mainstream media, in turn, are being relentlessly fact-checked (and often found wanting) by dispersed but collectively potent online networks. So-called "crowdsourcing" sees once disconnected citizens pooling their resources to pore over documents on MPs spending or the Wikileaks military documents on Afghanistan, too copious for professional journalism to monopolise.
Internet users compile their own news agendas, defying the editorial craftsmanship that goes into the broadcast news bulletin or an edition (a rather dated-sounding term) of a print newspaper. News has become unbundled, it has become modular, and tools like Google News and RSS Newsfeeds allow users to compile a personal Daily Me (a concept developed by tech guru Nicholas Negroponte some 15 years ago in fact). Or, via platforms like Facebook or Digg.com, audiences concoct a diet of news shaped by networks of friendship and social influence... All, or virtually all, of this is free at the point of delivery, of course.
We often treat the current shape of online news primarily as a challenge to professional journalism (and on an economic level, so it may be) but, with the voracious consumption of journalistic copy online, it is in many ways the professional role of the editor at whom noses are being most vigorously thumbed by today's digital citizens.
It is difficult to see just how exclusively the changed and still changing digital environment is responsible for the apparent crisis across newsrooms. As we hear stories from around the world-and sometimes close to home-of newspaper closures, television news outlets 'restructuring' towards reduced journalistic staffing levels, and circulation, subscription and advertising levels foundering, some rather apocalyptic tones have steadily crept into debates about the future of journalism.
Revolution in the air?
Let me quote a leading and oft-quoted US analyst of digital journalism, Clay Shirky. With a rhetorical flourish worthy of The Communist Manifesto he says this:
"When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to."(1)
But I tend to find rather the opposite problem. I find that people are all too hungry for stories of revolution. More often, I think, they demand to be told that all that is solid is indeed melting into air: it certainly makes for better headlines. But I don't subscribe to quite such a dramatic storyline and so that's not the story I'm going to tell today. I think the changes and challenges faced by news media industries, by the journalistic profession and, by extension, by the structures of democracy and public debate, are serious indeed, and the future is certainly opaque. But that's in no small part because the future is still for the making.
Citizens and consumers
In the blurb for this talk, I've declared my intention to focus on the civic, rather than the commercial implications of the current challenges posed by digitization and the explosion of online news, information and comment. Let me give an important caveat, though. Whilst I'm not going to discuss paywalls, advertising revenues or the future of free news on the Web, I do recognize that the fates of journalistic business models and of democracy are inextricably linked. This is especially so in a news media ecology so heavily dominated by commercialism.
As a migrant Pom still tied by an emotional umbilical cord to the BBC and The Guardian (respectively, a tax-funded institution and the cross-subsidized product of the Scott Trust), it has taken me some time to acknowledge the reality that in this small nation it's utterly unrealistic to imagine that the future of journalism might be buffered, benchmarked and even saved entirely by non-market mechanisms. But the small size of the market also exacerbates elements of market failure. I don't see any alternative to a mixed model. And public broadcasting, whether formalized as with Radio New Zealand and Maori Television (MTS) or de facto as with TV7, needs protecting and, indeed, growing. But we media researchers and critics with an interest in journalism's contribution to public life also need a healthy dose of market realism.
We need to engage in dialogue with commercial media and acknowledge their imperatives, rather than treating any commercial logic with lofty disdain as we, in academic media research, are sometimes wont to do. The commercial news market is an insufficient but absolutely essential part of the New Zealand public sphere.
Power-sharing arrangements
I've titled my talk "Citizens as Gatekeepers". To those who subscribe to a view that the commercial news market is not only an essential but also a sufficient condition for a democratic media ecology-that is, those who perceive non-market mechanisms such as public funding to be distortions and not remedies for distortions-the concept of citizens as gatekeepers will seem unremarkable, perhaps even tautological. After all, the liberal free press dream is one in which citizens determine the news-or get the news they deserve-by voting with their wallets (in the case of newspapers) or their time in the case of ratings-driven broadcasting.
But, of course, many would argue that the roles of citizen and consumer, though not necessarily always at odds, cannot be so easily merged. The kinds of news and information we require in order to empower us as citizens are not always quite the same thing as our immediate desires. Uncomfortable truths are often unpalatable in the short term and their value is only realized in the longer term.
In any case, consumers can never be truly sovereign in a commercial news marketplace: citizens have always been partial gatekeepers in a range of complex power-sharing arrangements that include editors and journalists selecting, filtering and framing the news before citizens get the option to vote with their wallets or their time.
Just to avoid any misunderstanding, when I say that, I do not mean it in a sinister way: we, as citizens, require professional newsmakers to exercise good judgment on our behalf about the news agenda - all the more so in a digital environment now characterized by information overload and some pretty chaotic news delivery systems. What matters is what values and imperatives are driving those selection and filtering decisions and how media literate the public is in terms of understanding newsmaking processes. I find it irritating and regressive when I hear people talk about the gatekeeping functions of professional news media as if they are, by definition, some kind of affront to democracy and thus some kind of feudal power bloc that can be swept away by opening the information floodgates of the internet.
Other agents in this complex power-sharing arrangement have, of course, long included sources and the PR professionals that often mediate them, advertisers (and their target demographics who hold disproportionate sway among the audience), shareholders and, in some cases, old-fashioned proprietorial powers, though this kind of power has often been over-egged by our appetite for demons (and the Murdochs and Berlusconis of this world do make wonderful demons): it's the economic clout of large media empires rather than the eccentric and ideologically driven personalities of their figureheads that have done more to shape the increasingly globalized media landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
But the power-sharing arrangements have started to shift quite dramatically during the last decade with the rise of the Internet and especially so-called Web 2.0 or the "participatory web" of bloggers, citizen journalists, YouTube and news recommendation engines hooked into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Clearly, we can see citizens themselves leveraging more gatekeeping power with ever greater choice, personalization and unbundling of news as well as enriched opportunities to discuss and even shape the news agenda. Clearly, too, we see a fairly acute sense of alarm on the part of some of the established gatekeepers: editors whose raison d'etre appears called into question in the era of the Daily Me (as I've said, I think there remains a strong raison d'etre to be argued for, but it now needs arguing for nevertheless); proprietors and shareholders who see the Internet steadily eroding their advertising, subscription and cover-price business models; and journalists incredulous at the apparent hypocrisy of a blogosphere so acutely critical of "mainstream media" and yet so very often sloppy in its own journalistic standards and ethics.
Google isn't 'just a tool'
Before we fall into the trap of seeing the current situation as a tipping of the balance between just two broad power blocs, citizens and professional news media, we need to recognize the emergence of other gatekeeping powers that complicate the picture. At an institutional level, I'm talking about the major online players - the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters and the others no doubt to come. At a professional level, I'm talking roughly about software engineers and interface designers.
It is emphatically not the case that Google exercises the same kinds of gatekeeping powers as news providers: its influence is at the level of information architecture, not content. And yet it is emphatically not the case that the software driving Google search, Google news or Google reader is a neutral gateway to information. Neither, for that matter, are YouTube's search or recommendation engines, or Facebook's Newsfeed algorithms.
These are man-made systems designed to sift, rank and filter information flows on our behalf. They are, for the most part, proprietary (i.e. jealously guarded commercial secrets) and subject to far less critical scrutiny or public awareness than even the relatively mystified domain of the newsroom.
Neither is there anything intrinsically natural about the 140-character limit on Twitter; nor the assumption made by Facebook that the kind of news I am exposed to should be determined by the things that cause my friends to click a "like" button. Such features may have all sorts of attractions and benefits (for some people, at least) but they are man-made interfaces that shape the way we consume news. Just as there is nothing natural, timeless or necessarily permanent about daily newspapers, hour-long tea-time news bulletins, or the bird call on Morning Report.
These are historically grounded, man-made artifacts. It doesn't necessarily mean we should want to get rid of any of them. But it does mean we should always be thinking critically about their benefits and their limitations, their usefulness and their fitness for purpose at any particular historical juncture. And at this point in history, just as we ponder the fate of the 'dead tree' newspaper (often confused with the fate of professional journalism), so our critical scrutiny must also now extend to the various online platforms and news delivery systems that are shaping our news consumption and, by extension, our conversations and our debates.
The digital divide: a question of time?
Nevertheless, for all the constraints, features and quirks of these new online delivery systems, citizens are granted unprecedented opportunities to shape the news agenda for themselves and, in many cases, for their fellow citizens in their networks. That sounds like we are talking, at root, about a process of democratization and, in some ways, it undeniably is.
But the idea that there is a broad devolution of power from the few to the many, from professional media to the citizenry at large, is of course simplistic. Power is not distributed evenly among the citizenry and new communication tools can create new forms of inequality just as they can help to level others.
The so-called digital divide is usually viewed from a supply-side perspective, as a primarily socio-economic and geographical (i.e. urban versus rural) problem requiring redress through infrastructure investment. But one of the major factors often overlooked (because it lacks any obvious policy implications) is the divide between the time-rich and the time-poor. An abundance of news sources to navigate and opportunities to "join the conversation" (whether by writing blogs, re-Tweeting stories or commenting on the Herald's website) scarcely "democratizes" news for the many citizens who work double shifts or have round-the-clock care responsibilities.
In fact, there's a perception, at least, that we are all leading increasingly busy and more time-pressured lives. Under time constraints, we look to professional news media to provide packaged digests of the important news of the day: this can be a useful antidote and complement to the rather amorphous news agenda that flows round the web. But as and when time allows, active citizens want and need longer-form journalism in order to understand issues sufficiently and this is really important as an antidote and complement to the bite-size chunks of news flowing especially around platforms like YouTube and Twitter. Can mainstream media do both the long and the short well, both the wide-area survey and the deep-drilling? It's a tall order, which is perhaps exemplified by much of the criticism directed at the current state of TV news which stands accused of falling between these twin imperatives with both excessive soft news padding and a shortage of in-depth coverage: too long and too shallow are common complaints.
The digital world isn't flat
To return to the digital divide, however, this issue goes beyond the haves versus the have-nots. It's not simply a question of who has the access or the time. There are all sorts of interesting power dynamics emerging within online platforms. In blogging, the A-list blogger phenomenon is now well-known: the likes of Huffington Post and Instapundit in the US enjoy consistently high billing in the blogrolls and traffic stats, as do David Farrar's and Russell Brown's blogs in this country. Unlike mainstream media, of course, there are relatively low barriers to entry in the blogosphere and fewer instances of loyalties divided between audiences and advertisers as compared with the mainstream media: in a relatively transparent market such as blogging, the stuff that rises to the top is stuff people like.
Except that even in blogging, there are certainly some first-to-market advantages and snowball effects: in an incredibly crowded and competitive marketplace like blogging, traffic is driven largely by word-of-mouth (its online equivalent, anyway), by referrals and links, not to mention profiling in the mainstream media: visibility begets visibility in what is essentially an "attention economy". This is not to claim that top blogs can rest on their laurels and expect to remain prominent for long if audience satisfaction falls significantly. There is definitely some brand loyalty in blogging but it doesn't run too deep in such a competitive market. But it is to suggest that new entrants to the market can face considerable challenges in gaining the kind of visibility required to compete - this is truer still of societies larger than New Zealand.
But we also see power laws at play in other aspects of online news consumption. The social news media site Digg.com has been grappling since its beginnings with seeing a small fraction of its power users responsible for submitting a majority of the stories that get voted onto its front page because those power users accumulate visibility and influence and their stories are more likely to be seen and then voted for than those submitted by lower profile users. Under criticism that this looks more like a popularity contest than a platform for deciding the merits and newsworthiness of stories, Digg has made attempts to tweak the algorithm that weights votes for stories to mitigate this snowball effect: in turn, it has then come under fire for using secretive algorithms to undermine the meritocracy of a system that rewards the hard work and success of power users. Either way, "democratizing news", it turns out, is no straightforward business.
Statistical research published earlier this year by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence(2) showed some striking things about Twitter. This research tracked 54 million users and almost 2 billion tweets across an 8 month period in 2009. They looked at 3 different measures of social influence in the network: first, who gets the most followers; second, whose tweets are most often re-tweeted (i.e. forwarded) through the network; and, third, whose names are mentioned or cited most often in other tweets. They found only a very modest level of overlap between these measures (less than 10%): the so-called 'million follower fallacy' mistakenly assumes that the people on Twitter who can recruit the most followers are necessarily the ones who are shaping the agenda and the conversations on Twitter. So, on a positive note, Twitter appears to be more than just a popularity contest.
But the researchers found strikingly low levels of reciprocity which requires us to be cautious about seeing Twitter as some kind of gigantic water-cooler or digital coffee house. Steep power laws characterize all three measures of influence: the top 100 users across all three measures enjoy average levels of influence (whether in number of followers, number of re-tweets or number of citations) exponentially greater than the top 1000 whose influence is exponentially greater than the top 10,000. In fact, the statistical models used in this research don't capture levels of influence beyond the top 10,000 users: it becomes statistically negligible. And this from a dataset of 54 million users.
Yes, there are water-cooler conversations going on in the Twittersphere but, at a structural level, it is closer to a broadcast medium than many think. The are many followers and few followed; many tweeters and few re-tweeted; many commenters and few commented upon. There are agenda-setters and gatekeepers. Some of these are mainstream news outlets. In the research I've just cited, the Twitter accounts that have most followers include outlets like CNN and the New York Times, alongside those of celebrities and politicians, headed by Obama (the Twitter account "johnkeypm" lags just a little behind in these global rankings).
With sources that were most commonly re-tweeted (a better indication of who are the agenda-setters than who has the most followers) this research found that whilst the New York Times makes it in there too, traditional news outlets were largely eclipsed by successful new players: news aggregator services are important new gatekeepers in this environment with services like TweetMeme amplifying the power law by aggregating the most popular links and drawing yet more traffic to them in a self-propelling upward spiral.
Much more blunt research from 2009 which looked just at the volume of traffic on Twitter without trying to measure its influence on users found that the most prolific 10% of Tweeters post over 90% of total tweets(3): most people use Twitter primarily to hear rather than to speak. And there are numerous other examples of how variations on the 80:20 rule prevail in social networks. Social networks are not flat; they are hierarchical; and they are not as conversational as we often assume.
Does this matter? There have always been opinion leaders who hold disproportionate influence within communities. For sure, their potential reach is greatly extended in online social networks. But this doesn't render such communities undemocratic in and of themselves. In fact, online social network research is at such an early stage that we do not have a clear picture of whether and just how much hierarchies of status and influence among peer networks are artificially bolstered by the design of those networks rather than just a reflection of the ways in which influence is naturally hierarchized in society at large. The point to take from this is that anyone seduced by the idea that blogging, citizen journalism and social media is driving us towards some kind of egalitarian nirvana in the news where, truly, anyone can become an influential journalist, columnist, political commentator or opinion leader, where status and social connection cease to matter and merit alone prevails, needs to take a reality check.
News as conversation
None of this is meant to sound dismissive. My aim is to put some of the headier claims about the digital revolution into some perspective: to reiterate, there is greater choice, greater access, more opportunities for participation, and a massive reduction in at least economic barriers to entry for aspiring amateur and even semi-professional newsmakers. That is a form of democratization, for sure.
Democracy is not just a quantity, though. It's not just about how much choice, how much participation, how much opportunity is opened up. It's also a quality. It's a question of what citizens can do with these extended opportunities to engage with news and journalism. Dan Gillmor is a leading champion of citizen journalism and author of the influential book We The Media (a title to tickle the revolutionary fancy)(4). Gillmor famously argued (and it's a rhetoric that has now become commonplace) that the Internet has been steadily transforming news from a lecture into a conversation. I've already indicated that we need to put the apparently conversational nature of new online platforms into a bit of perspective. But I also find that language deeply problematic and not merely because I make a living lecturing and don't appreciate the implied negative connotations (in case you get the wrong impression from today's event, most of my lectures are not just sermons without the religion and we do normally take questions).
To put it simply, I am deeply in favour of the idea that news should nourish and stimulate conversation: without conversation, we lack the wherewithal to test, refine and enrich our interpretations of and responses to the news we read, hear and watch. How much better still, then, that there are now more (albeit limited) opportunities to engage in forms of conversation with the newsmakers themselves as well as with our peers. But the idea that news should become conversation is deeply problematic. It risks understating the importance of listening first before saying your piece. To turn news and journalism itself into conversation smacks of a rather juvenile impatience: I think of parents, teachers and now journalists trying to say to rowdy children: "wait, listen, I haven't finished yet". We risk celebrating instantaneous feedback and ignoring the values of reading below the fold and processing at a pace fitting for the complex issues news throws up. Etymology links the word 'lecture' to an act of reading and on that level I'm not sure it's such a bad thing.
To be fair, unlike some who just run amok with the rhetoric of news-as-conversation, Dan Gillmor is deeply concerned with the quality of the conversation. He's no a speed-junkie. In fact, late last year Gillmor suggested we might need something like a slow news movement analogous to the slow food movement(5). Actually, this idea had also emerged out of a discussion with some of my students before I discovered Gillmor had already proposed it: clearly I wasn't quick enough out of the traps on that one. And as if to emphasise the restless amnesia of the online public sphere, the 'slow news movement' is now a meme credited to columnist Walter Shapiro who proposed the idea in his Politics Daily blog just a couple of weeks ago(6).
Ironies aside, and without forgetting the point I made earlier about the importance of catering for time-poor citizens, there is something significant in this concept. We tend to focus our scrutiny on the supply side of shrunken news cycles and competitive scoop-fests trumping the time-consuming journalistic values of analysis and even, at times, verification.
But we often neglect the demand-side of the equation: a slow news movement would have to be one that encouraged audiences to slow down, to chew their news slowly, to moderate their portion sizes rather than assuming more is better, to appreciate dishes that have been marinated and slow-cooked, which is what the best long-form, investigative journalism tends to be.
Educationalists may have an important role to play here and schools are grappling with ways of using IT to promote healthy information diets. This is happening with mixed success, I think. Sometimes, when one of my kids comes home from primary school with a homework assignment that requires them to do little more than a Google or Wikipedia fact-hunt that doesn't involve any kind of contextualising, evaluating or cross-checking of sources, it's very tempting to write a note for the teacher saying she didn't do her homework because I told her to spend the time on something more educationally valuable such as playing a video game or watching The Simpsons. But it's a serious issue and, I think, a fine line. Young people can engage with IT in ways that foster intellectual curiosity and enhanced information literacy, but they can also do so in ways that encourage intellectual passivity and a kind of information fetishism.
What next week's speaker, my colleague Joe Atkinson, terms the 'morselisation' of news is, in my view, a supply-side but also a demand-side problem. I don't wish to let professional news media off the hook or support the simplistic claim that news outlets serving up morselised news are just giving audiences what they want. Supply and demand are shaped by all sorts of exogenous factors but also by each other. Moreover, I don't accept that it is simply market realism to say that audience demand is driving us inevitably towards faster, softer, more bite-size news. That sounds more like market timidity to me: has the audience research really explored what audiences want rather than what they don't want, and what citizens with an interest in news want to see and not just the uncommitted viewers at the margins-the news media equivalent of the precious floating voter in electoral politics?
As Colin Peacock pointed out in this room a fortnight ago, it is simplistic at best and really quite condescending at worst to trot out the mantra that no one outside the chattering classes wants serious long-form news and current affairs any more. He quoted Brent Impey's quip that, in New Zealand, no one outside Grey Lynn, Herne Bay or Parnell would watch it. To answer Colin's query, I live on the Shore and can confirm that I have met one or two people even over that way who watch TV news and current affairs and wish it was a bit less fluffy and explained the issues behind the stories a bit more fully: and I didn't notice them swigging lattes as they said it. So my point is not that the public just gets the news it deserves.
But actually, there are some serious demand-side issues at stake as well here and we misread the problem, I think, if we don't acknowledge them. The issues at stake are about citizenship and civic engagement. When we hear about long-term trends in declining voter turnouts in Western democracies, declining political party memberships, declining audiences for the main news bulletins and declining newspaper readership figures, especially among the younger generation, some will say we're going to hell in a hand basket. Others, though, will say that things aren't getting any worse, they're just getting different. After all, young people in particular might be increasingly disaffected with mainstream national politics but they're engaging with politics in new and different ways: protest groups, petitions, online campaigns and the like. So too, a turning away from traditional news sources such as newspapers and national TV news doesn't signal a decreasing interest in news and current affairs. Quite the contrary, in fact, as an explosion of new outlets for news, and opportunities to interact with the news, are being tapped into.
That's all well and good, of course, unless you think that whatever the diverse array of debates and conversations going on at local and global levels, there's also something important about the kinds of shared conversations required to keep some element of democratic light shining on the national polity and its key players (both elected and unelected). So if increasing numbers of, particularly younger, citizens are turning away from those conversations then we have a much wider social issue at stake, I think, than the quality of the news. To highlight the shortcomings of mainstream news media does not oblige us to single out and scapegoat the media for the state of the contemporary public sphere.
Google isn't evil
In that same spirit, I don't think it makes sense to unduly scapegoat the new media players for the current perceived crisis in mainstream news and journalism. Google, whose unofficial motto is "don't be evil" is, of course, the devil incarnate for Rupert Murdoch who argues that it has been brazenly stealing its content. Others, though, have cited Google for other sins. In particular, it is seen as one of the major driving forces behind the unbundling of news: it deep links audiences into news stories, bypassing their front-door portals with the advertising and branding that brings with it; and it fosters a fragmented, decontextualised approach to news consumption, encouraging greater morselisation and less critical scrutiny of the source behind the content.
This accusation is extremely simplistic, of course. Google and its rivals have, indeed, had a profound impact on the way news is accessed and consumed. But whilst it allows for some audiences to skim rapidly across the surface and enjoy a wide-ranging but superficial engagement with news, the very same platform allows for other audiences to plumb incredible depths on a story, issue or event. It takes reading below the fold to new levels and allows citizens to interrogate and assess the credibility of news sources through cross-referencing and fact-checking. It also allows suitably motivated citizens to sift the hard news from the soft, to skirt the fluff or the infotainment that is seen as increasingly prevalent in the bundled news of broadcasting and the press.
A technology such as Google can have such profoundly contradictory consequences precisely because its consequences are not hardwired into the technology: they are very strongly contingent on the user, the citizen, and his or her social context. Again, it is about the demand-side as much as the supply-side.
A recent article by James Fallows in The Atlantic(7) discusses how Google is actively attempting to redress the reputation it is acquiring for damaging both the business models of commercial news outlets (and especially newspapers) and the culture of long-form journalism. His article (a nice example of long form investigative journalism) discusses several projects designed to get Google partnering more constructively with mainstream news outlets than at present. One of the most interesting is the so-called Living Stories project. Here, Google engineers are working to fix the search algorithm so that it ranks more highly those news stories that appear on pages where there are links to an archive of stories on the same topic. In other words, outlets like The Guardian that are already pretty good at linking to related stories in a way that is properly curated and not merely automated by keywords will end up getting an automatic leg-up in search engine rankings. Google is, in other words, trying to counteract the kind of decontextualisation or morselisation it is held responsible for. Not only is Google not the sole factor driving the fragmentation of news but, as Fallows argues, Google also doesn't have any vested interest in destroying quality, in-depth journalism: quite the opposite, in fact, as that would be to the detriment of its own value as a gateway.
If it's refreshing that Google wants us to have access to a Daily Me comprised of in-depth, credible journalism, it's less uplifting to hear the cult of personalized news so unequivocally celebrated. Again, Google is not wholly responsible for (but an important symbolic marker of) the so-called 'echo chamber' effect where citizens seeks out sources that reinforce their own views and prejudices and are not exposed to or challenged by alternative perspectives. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, has an answer to this. He calls it the 'serendipity principle'(8). In other words, his vision of a healthy online news environment is one in which individuals can get finely grained bespoke news whilst still stumbling serendipitously across unexpected topics and perspectives.
It sounds like a healthy balance. But it leaves shared conversations about matters of common public interest and making sure the relevant voices are heard very much to chance. If personalized news diets and micro-conversations are increasingly dominant, then perhaps the role of mainstream media is increasingly one of complementing (rather than competing with) the Daily Me, to regularly draw people out of their news bubbles and to convene debates on matters of public interest fueled by in-depth coverage of the range of salient facts and perspectives. That, of course, will sound somewhat idealistic or abstract and I have no real comeback to that.
But I do strongly believe that the perceived antagonism between mainstream journalism and the participatory web has got to and, indeed, is beginning to wane. One way of drawing citizens out of their micro-conversations into a shared arena is to actively engage with citizen journalists, amateur bloggers and social media rather than seeing them as attempting to encroach on professional territory or merely paying lip service to them.
To reiterate, let us not forget that for all the committed bloggers (many of whom are either journalists or consider themselves journalists), a majority of citizens relate to mainstream media as audiences first and foremost and not as participants. Yet without trying to reduce news and journalism to conversation, it may be possible to encourage more members of the audience to participate and contribute in order to foster greater engagement with the news and, more specifically, with a particular news media brand.
For mainstream media to treat its audience as intelligent citizens and as potential contributors to an ongoing conversation does not mean treating them as equals. As a citizen whose own journalistic career never went beyond the student newspaper, I look to professional journalists to keep me informed about important events and to access places and people on my behalf to do that. But I also look to them to interpret, analyse, sift fact from conjecture and opinion, dig beneath the surface, bring me the different voices, and tell me interesting stories. I don't want to be the professional journalist's equal and nor do more than a minority of citizens, even among those blogging and tweeting away on a daily basis. Gillmor and others have referred to citizens as "the people formerly known as the audience". But in what other context does audience participation spell the end of the audience?
Who is in the driving seat?
At the beginning of this talk, I quoted Clay Shirky and it's back to him I turn now. I don't want you to think I've really got it in for him, but he has a knack for helping me understand what I don't think. In a 2009 essay, Shirky drew an analogy between journalism in the digital age and driving cars:
"The transition here is like the spread of the ability to drive... We still pay people to drive, from buses to race cars... Paid drivers are, however, no longer the majority of all drivers. Like driving, journalism is not a profession... and it is increasingly being transformed into an open activity, open to all, sometimes done well, sometimes badly... The journalistic models that will excel in the next few years will rely on new forms of creation, some of which will be done by professionals, some by amateurs, some by crowds, and some by machines."(9)
There's more than a germ of truth in the substance of this comment. But the analogy with driving is an odd one, to say the least. It does, perhaps, capture something of the lethal risks that can arise when the roads are opened to all (recent debates about whether Wikileaks is a sufficiently safety-conscious driver on the information highway spring to mind). But I don't think that's the meaning Shirky intends. The driving analogy greatly diminishes the craft and complexity of journalism, whether or not we want to call it a 'profession'. Truly anyone with basic motor, visual and cognitive skills can be a proficient driver; not so a proficient journalist. Good journalism pushes the boundaries, is creative and involves taking risks; not so, good driving (at least not off the race-track).
A much better analogy would be with music. Many of us enjoy participating in music as well as listening to it. But picking up an instrument, whilst enjoyable and rewarding, teaches most of us just how big the gap is between great musicianship and our own efforts. Participating can sharpen our appreciation (and critical skills) as listeners. Just because I can bash out a few chords on the guitar does not mean that I am less respectful of or less interested in listening to professionally produced music-quite the reverse. And I think that's the mindshift we need in respect of blogging and citizen journalism. Mainstream news media shouldn't be disdaining or fearing the growth of amateur journalism: it should ideally be engaging with it, offering master classes in it, showcasing the best of it, and treating it as an opportunity to increase understanding of and appreciation for the journalistic profession.
Again, that may sound like heady idealism, so let me end on a note of realism.
We outside the profession should care about the state of journalism because we care about democracy. Journalism is shaped by many forces on the supply-side and also on the demand-side. On both sides of the equation, there are forces which go much wider than journalism itself (including the economic climate on the supply-side and a growing culture of cynicism towards public life on the demand-side). But journalism, new or old, is neither the exclusive cause of nor a potential panacea for the shortcomings of democracy.
The internet is bringing citizens greater choices and some really interesting opportunities for enriched forms of engagement with, and even participation in, the news. It also brings some risks for citizens: of fragmentation and polarization, of information overload and acceleration. But the extent to which the internet can democratize news is a much less important question than the extent to which it can help democratize democracy itself.
References
1. Shirky, C., 2008. 'Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable'. Edge: The Third Culture.
2. Cha, M. et al, 2010. 'Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy', Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
3. Heil, B. and Piskorski, M., 2009. 'New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets'. Harvard Business Review Blogs, June 1.
4. Gillmor, D., 2006. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.
5. Gillmor, D., 2009. 'Towards a Slow News Movement'. Mediactive, November 8.
6. Shapiro, W., 2010. 'After Breitbart and Shirley Sherrod, We Need a Slow-News Movement'. Politics Daily, July 28.
7. Fallows, J., 2010. 'How to Save the News'. The Atlantic, June.
8. Eric Schmidt talks about threats to Google, paywalls and the future at 'theguardian.co.uk'.
9. Shirky, C., 2009. 'Not an upgrade - an upheaval'. Cato Unbound, July 13.
