The Future of Journalism: In an Age of Digital Media and Economic Uncertainty

Bob Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317417552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The development of digital media has delivered innovations and prompted tectonic shifts in all aspects of journalism practice, the journalism industry and scholarly research in the field of journalism studies; this book offers detailed accounts of changes in all three arenas. The collapse of the 'advertising model', in tandem with the impact of the continuing global recession, has created economic difficulties for legacy media, and an increasingly frenzied search for new business strategies to resource a sustainable journalism, while triggering concerns about the very future of journalism and journalists.

The Future of Journalism: In an Age of Digital Media and Economic Uncertainty brings together the research conversation conducted by a distinguished group of scholars, researchers, journalists and journalism educators from around the globe and hosted by 'The Future of Journalism' at Cardiff University in September 2013. The significance of their responses to these pressing and challenging questions is impossible to overstate. Divided into nine sections, this collection analyses and discusses the future of journalism in relation to: Revenues and Business Models; Controversies and Debates; Changing Journalism Practice; Social Media; Photojournalism and visual images of News; Local and Hyperlocal journalism; Quality, Transparency and Accountability; and Changing Professional Roles and Identities.

This book is essential reading for everyone interested in the prospects for journalism and the consequent implications for communications within and between local, national and international communities, for economic growth, the operation of democracy and the maintenance and development of the social and cultural life of societies around the globe. This book was originally published as special issues of Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies.

TWILIGHT OR NEW DAWN OF JOURNALISM?

Evidence from the changing news ecosystem

Robert G. Picard

Introduction

The enormous business challenges confronting newspapers, news agencies, and other news providers have multiplied in the Western world in the twenty-first century. Mature and saturated markets, loss of audiences not highly interested in news, the diminishing effectiveness of the mass media businesses model, the lingering effects of the economic crisis, and the impact of digital competitors have all taken a toll on news organizations.

Compounding these factors are changes in technology and communication economics that are dismantling the traditional financial configurations that made Western media wealthy. Digitalization has destabilized business models—arrangements that were based on high market power over distribution platforms, mass audience, and mass advertisers. Simultaneously these changes have created opportunities for many more news, information, and commentary providers to emerge, and these afford access to content through multiple platforms. The combination of these factors has produced lower returns and resulted in redundancies and restructurings as it stripped wealth from the established enterprises of the news industry (Küng, Towse, and Picard 2008; Currah 2009; Levy and Nielsen 2010; Picard 2010).

Understanding of the conditions has been difficult because media and scholarly portrayals of the causes and solutions have been so poor. Much of the journalistic coverage of the news industry has been anecdotal, narrow, and inordinately concerned about journalistic employment rather than social effects and opportunities. News coverage of changes has been criticized as shallow and self-interested (Chyi, Lewis, and Zheng 2012). Scholarly work on the subject has been polemical, offered limited historical or comparative context, much less direct evidence of social effects from which to more fully comprehend the impact of the changes (Siles and Boczkowski 2012). Consequently, there is a widespread perception that legacy news providers are dying, that quality journalism is disappearing, and that we are witnessing the twilight of an age in which journalism informed and ensured democracy.

Many commentators cling to an idealized and illusory vision of journalism in days past and are now dancing in circles, beating their chests, and chanting that the end of journalism is nigh; but that does not make it so. Journalism scholars and critics, who used to bemoan the lapses in the press five years ago, lament the loss of those “golden” days. Corporate owners who were vilified for buying papers from independent owners three decades ago are suddenly lionized because private individuals—many with economic and political interests—have begun buying papers from the media corporations, especially in the United States. Time clearly changes perspectives.

Change is Producing Opportunities

Certainly things are changing. The unusually lucrative moment of late twentieth century is over, but it was an anomaly not the norm in the history of news provision. The income from advertising that funnelled riches to news organizations and their investors—and provided journalists with comfortable, upper middle-class lives—has diminished. Its departure is lamented as much by journalists as capitalists, for much the same self-interested reasons.

The changing ecosystem does not mean that opportunities for quality journalism have disappeared, however—only that the opportunities are different and that we require new ways of providing it. Interestingly, while journalists and social critics continue their dances of mourning for the loss of news organizations’ capabilities, there is growing optimism among news company executives and fresh forms of operation and funding are emerging. Consider these examples:

• The New York Times revenues from readers surpassed advertising in 2011 because of income from the rising numbers of digital subscribers, making readers pay higher prices for quality news, and the decline in advertising revenue. Despite challenges, it paid dividends to investors in 2013 for the first time in five years (BBC News 2013).

• The Globe and Mail in Canada has 300,000 print readers and now has 100,000 digital readers. It is one of the vast majority of newspapers in Canada now charging for digital news.

• The Times of London has about 400,000 print subscribers and now has about 130,000 digital subscribers paying between £104 and £312 annually.

Foundations are stepping in to providing funding for specific types of coverage and legacy media are benefiting:

• The Los Angeles Times received a $1 million grant to bolster its coverage of immigration and ethnic communities (Rainey 2012).

• The Miami Herald, Seattle Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Texas Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch received grants from Kaiser Health News to improve coverage of health-care issues (Young 2013).

Numerous digital journalistic start-ups and smaller news firms operating online are becoming sustainable enterprises:

• The digital-only investigative site Mediapart in France has acquired 62,000 subscribers, produces €6 million in revenue, and generated €700,000 in profits last year. Its work is of such quality that it has brought down ministers in the last two French governments (France 24 2013).

• Arkansas Times, a weekly alternative newspaper in the central United States, became the first alternative weekly to operate a daily online site funded by digital memberships. It now has 600 members paying enough to provide $66,000 for the online operation (Millar 2013).

• The St. Louis Beacon, an online site now working in partnership with the local public radio, attracted 66,877 average unique monthly visitors in 2012, has 6400 Twitter followers, and produces a daily and weekly digital newsletter. It operates on a budget of more than half a million dollars, with the bulk coming from individual donors (Knight Foundation 2013).

Such developments are not signs of an apocalypse in news provision, but of journalists and enterprises adjusting to new conditions, undertaking regeneration and renewal, and pursuing new opportunities.

Charitable/Not-for-profit Activity is Not Sufficient

Although some put great stock in charitable enterprises, not-for-profit operations, and foundation support to fund news provision in the future, they are no panacea for contemporary challenges. Not-for-profit and charitable news enterprises are just as beholden to economic imperatives as commercial news firms, so ignoring those factors places at peril any initiatives designed to overcome limitations of contemporary commercial news provision. New forms of news providers require start-up capital and working capital, all of which carry implications to their operation (Picard and van Weezel 2008); they incur costs that must be met with revenue; and they require reinvestment to sustain their operations (Picard 2011). These factors, along with lack of business acumen and conflicts of interest with new funders, often impede their effective operation (DeLorme and Fedler 2008; Naldi and Picard 2012).

These alternative forms of ownership and operation, however, do reduce demands for owners’ profits, lower tax payments, and allow supporters to benefit from charity and tax laws (Levy and Picard 2011). They provide some advantages for smaller, community-based news providers and news organizations providing specialized coverage that is not itself commercially sustainable.

Many start-ups in recent years have gained foundation support because of their perceived importance to communities, but they will have to achieve growth in other revenue sources to sustain themselves over time. “Foundation support … is primarily limited to start-ups and is unlikely to provide a long-term, sustainable revenue stream”, Shaver (2010, 26) has observed. Consequently, it is only one of a growing range of revenue sources, including syndication, corporate sponsorships, events, and advertising services, that are helping finance born-digital journalism sites (Knight Foundation 2013).

Despite the increasing sustainability of online news providers, it appears that online news enterprises are not replacing traditional media. A review of scores of digital start-ups worldwide found they are “not challenging the legacy media, rather supplementing it by serving smaller niche audiences or finding a place in the media ecosystem as suppliers of niche content to bigger media outlets” (Sirkkunen and Cook 2012, 17).

A number of large well-established news organizations are being preserved under charitable and trust ownership forms, but these differ widely from most of the newer forms of charitable new organizations. Most of these were formed to handle succession issues when the companies were financially successful and obtaining approval for such structures under charity laws is difficulty in many countries today (Levy and Picard 2011). Shaver has observed that “The traditional not-profit model represented by the Christian Science Monitor, the St. Petersburg Times and The Guardian are unlikely to provide a satisfactory alternative to the problems affecting for-profit newspapers” (Shaver 2010, 26).

Most existing, for-profit news organizations have no inclination to become charities at this point, however, because they are starting to reap financial benefit from the digital opportunities. Legacy news providers are moving from protective strategies in digital activities to opportunity-based strategies and are showing greater willingness to charge for digital news because more users are evidencing willingness to pay for access to digital content (Reuters Digital News Report 2013). Canadian newspapers are leading the way in pay systems, with about 80 per cent charging for digital content, compared to about 40 per cent in the United States and about two-thirds in the United Kingdom (Toughill 2013).

What is the Transformation Doing to News?

All of these developments show news production is in a period of transformation and, like many previous transformations, the process is creating and emerging from turmoil. It should not be a reason for fear or dread about the future of journalism. Research has shown that technological and economic revolutions based on general-purpose technologies have profound economic benefits for society, even if they are harmful to existing companies and industry (Lipsey, Carlaw, and Beker 2006) and that such technologies create instability only until new norms and practices of operation are established and accepted (Spar 2003). Why should we expect any difference in the transformation to digital media and news production?

The fundamental challenges that news production faces today are not monetary, but reflect the changing mode and structures of production. Although technology, recent economic conditions, and changes in audience preferences are all contributing to the transformation, a more consequential shift is altering the nature of news production and the actual work of journalists. These create changes in the institutional logics of organization and activity (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012) that need to be considered separately from the general performance trends of news enterprises.

For more than a century news has been produced within an industrial mode of production. Companies brought together the resources and equipment to gather, mass produce, and disseminate news, and they relied on trained and professionalized news workers to undertake the task. Although elements of that production mode remain in place, new modes are emerging and traditional news production is being split into a service production mode and a craft production mode.

The service mode is one in which news products (traditionally newspapers and broadcasts) are being transformed into services that firms stream across a variety of platforms (print, computer terminals, tablets, and smartphones, and other screen-based devices). The companies are becoming more focused on distribution rather than gathering and producing news. They are increasingly relying on news and commentary available through syndication, content provided by the public, and linkages to other news providers. The change to the service mode is altering the functions of news organizations, the actual work carried out within them, the types of skills they require, and their relations with journalistic labour.

Because of that shift, news service providers are relating to consumers differently than in the past and employing pricing models that differ from those of the original print and broadcast products. Many offer varying prices for access to different bundles of platforms and for different levels of access to premium and specialized news content. No longer is all content provided to all consumers at the same price. Assisting in this process are pay systems such as Press + and Piano Media that are providing paid access to multiple news providers—a new form of service.

Concurrently, a craft mode of news production has emerged. Although this is a long-established form of production, it is novel to contemporary news production. In this mode, news is produced by individual entrepreneurial journalists and small-scale journalistic cooperatives that emphasize the uniqueness and quality of their news. Journalists working in this craft mode are focusing on special topics such as climate or defence, employing specialized techniques such as investigative or data journalism, or serving smaller localities as general news providers. Most are providing news directly to consumers, but some provide their materials to companies that practise the service mode of news provision. These journalists act as suppliers and partners in a business relationship that is very different from that of freelance journalists in the twentieth century.

Both of these new production modes have important implications for how journalists work, the resources available to them, how they organize their careers, compensation, insurance, and pensions, and how they construct their professional identities, values, and behavioural norms.

Central to this shifting ecology of news provision is the deinstitutionalization of news and the profession and trade of journalism. In the past, journalism was typically provided by media and organizational structures located within geographically determined markets. Journalism was often provided by insular news organizations that rarely cooperated with other news providers and that detached themselves from the society they claimed to serve. Institutional elites owned or controlled these news providers, determining what news organizations would focus upon, and how it would be framed. They used the journalism as a tool for social control and influence; they aligned themselves with business interests and created commercial news enterprises whose self-interests came to dominate news provision and their relations with the public and with journalists. Concurrently, journalists created trade and professional standards, trade unions, and professional societies—all of which institutionalized the practices of journalism. This separated journalists not only from their employers, but from the public at large—a factor that is hindering journalists’ relationships with the public in the age of digital interaction. All of these factors created institutionalized forms of news provision based on common belief systems, structures, relationships, and standardized practices and norms—key elements of institutionalized organizations and professional fields (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Scott 2010; Greenwood et al. 2013).

The journalism of the twentieth century was itself constrained by an institutional bias in news coverage. Because of the organization of labour under the beat system in most newsrooms, coverage focused on selected institutions—government agencies, educational institutions, financial institutions—and consequently much news became based on official statements at press conferences and the self-interested press releases from those institutions that were designed to service the working needs of journalists. Other parts of public and individual life were downplayed or ignored. Social lives, social histories, ordinary individuals, and the activities of day-to-day life tended to fall outside traditional beats, to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – The Future of Journalism: In an age of digital media and economic uncertainty
• 1. Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism? Evidence from the changing news ecosystem
• 2. Homogenisation or Differentiation? The effects of consolidation in the regional newspaper market
• 3. Paid Content: A successful revenue model for publishing houses in Germany?
• 4. Assessing the Sustainability of Latin American Investigative Non-profit Journalism
• 5. Future Business Innovation in Minority Language Media: Back to basics
• 6. Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Digital News Media: Ethical implications for journalists and media organisations
• 7. Revisiting Narrative Journalism as One of the Futures of Journalism
• 8. Dialogue as a Journalistic Ideal
• 9. Why Democracies Need a Functional Definition of Journalism Now More than Ever
• 10. Morbid Symptoms: Between a dying and a re-birth (apologies to Gramsci)
• 11. Constructing the Crisis of Journalism: Towards a cultural understanding of the economic collapse of newspapers during the digital revolution
• 12. Code, Collaboration, and the Future of Journalism: A case study of the Hacks/Hackers global network
• 13. The Construction of Participation in News Websites: A five- dimensional model
• 14. Journalism in Dispersion: Exploring the blurring boundaries of newsmaking through a controversy
• 15. Enter the Robot Journalist: Users’ perceptions of automated content
• 16. Data Journalism in Sweden: Introducing new methods and genres of journalism into “old” organizations
• 17. Visualizing News: Make it work
• 18. A Time of Uncertainty: The effects of reporters’ time schedule on their work
• 19. The Future of Breaking News Online? A study of live blogs through surveys of their consumption, and of readers’ attitudes and participation
• 20. Follow-up Communication in the Blogosphere: A comparative study of bloggers’ linking to professional and participatory media
• 21. Media Convergence Revisited: Lessons learned on newsroom integration in Austria, Germany and Spain
• 22. Journalism and the City: Redefining the spaces of foreign correspondence
• 23. Networking or Not Working? A comparison of Arab Spring coverage in Belgian newspapers and TV news
• 24. Citation Needed: Investigating the use of hyperlinks to display sources in news stories
• 25. Revealing the News: How online news changes without you noticing
• 26. Tailor-made News: Meeting the demands of news users on mobile and social media
• 27. Social Media References in Newspapers: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as sources in newspaper journalism
• 28. Engaging the Social News User: Comments on news sites and Facebook
• 29. Identifying and Verifying News through Social Media: Developing a user-centred tool for professional journalists
• 30. Digital Gatekeeping: News media versus social media
• 31. Proximity as a Journalistic Keyword in the Digital Era: A study of the “closeness” of amateur news images
• 32. The Robot Eye Witness: Extending visual journalism through drone surveillance
• 33. Anyone Can Take a Photo, But: Is there space for the professional photographer in the twenty-first century newsroom?
• 34. Textual DNA: The hindered authorship of photojournalists in the Western press
• 35. The Role of Non-Government Organisations (NGOS) in Practising Editorial Photography in a Globalised Media Environment
• 36. The Undressed Newsroom: The application of visual ethnography in media research
• 37. Re-establishing the Relationship with the Public: Regional journalism and citizens’ involvement in the news
• 38. The Hyperlocal in Practice: Innovation, creativity and diversity
• 39. The Changing Role of the Local News Media in Enabling Citizens to Engage in Local Democracies
• 40. You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: Transparency’s (lack of) effect on source and message credibility
• 41. Accounting for Journalism
• 42. The Journalistic Quality of Internet Formats and Services: Results of a user survey
• 43. Mr Gates Returns: Curation, community management and other new roles for journalists
• 44. The Dynamics of Professional Identity: Why journalists view journalists working in PR as a threat to journalism
• 45. To Intervene or be Neutral, to Investigate or Entertain? National and intranational factors in the formation of Nordic journalism students’ role perceptions
• 46. Towards the Liberal Model: The professional identity of Swedish journalists
• Index