The Future of Journalism

Bob Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317985709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

The future of journalism is hotly contested and highly uncertain reflecting developments in media technologies, shifting business strategies for online news, changing media organisational and regulatory structures, the fragmentation of audiences and a growing public concern about some aspects of tabloid journalism practices and reporting, as well as broader political, sociological and cultural changes. These developments have combined to impoverish the flow of existing revenues available to fund journalism, impact radically on traditional journalism professional practices, while simultaneously generating an increasingly frenzied search for sustainable and equivalent funding – and from a wide range of sources - to nurture and deliver quality journalism in the future.

This book brings together journalists and distinguished academic specialists from around the globe to present the findings from their research and to discuss the future of journalism, the shifting quality of its products, its wide ranging sources of finance, as well as the economic and democratic consequences of the significant changes confronting Journalism.

The Future of Journalism details the challenges facing the press in contemporary societies and provides essential reading for everyone interested in the role of journalism in shaping and sustaining literate, civil and democratic societies.

This book consists of special issues from Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice.

INTRODUCTION

Bob Franklin

2009 was a year of significant developments in the debate concerning the future of journalism. With hindsight, it was the year in which fiercely held conventional wisdoms and seemingly self-evident truths were rigorously interrogated, readily abandoned and promptly metamorphosed into yesterdays’ news; it was also the year in which debate about the future of journalism became markedly less congenial.

Undoubtedly the most significant “truth” to be challenged was the long-held belief that journalists and news organisations must offer online content for free since the widespread availability of news on multiple sites means that exacting payments for access to one site will simply trigger readers to migrate to another where effectively the same news is available without charge; and all this at the click of a mouse. Rupert Murdoch’s public pronouncement that News Corporation intended “to charge for all our websites” offered a radically different truth. His explanation for the change was that “quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting” (Murdoch cited in McChesney and Nichols, 2010, p. 70). Expressing testament to this new conviction, Murdoch promptly closed his free LondonPaper which distributed 330,000 copies daily in the UK capital; another 60 jobs were lost (Brook, 2009).

Where Murdoch led, others quickly followed. In January 2010, the New York Times announced the introduction of a “metered” system which allocates readers a quota of free articles but applies charges when that quota is exceeded (Clark, 2010, p. 17). Sceptics expressed their doubts about the efficacy of this policy shift but offered at least a cautious two cheers of endorsement, wished Murdoch success and prayed that his simple Pauline conversion to placing journalism behind pay walls might resolve at a stroke the problem of how best to monetise online content and deliver resources to fund journalism.

Murdoch has adopted an increasingly abusive rhetoric to drive home his arguments and is now brusque in debate. When Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger suggested in his Hugh Cudlipp lecture that positioning pay walls around websites would lead the industry to “sleepwalk into oblivion” (Rusbridger, 2010), Murdoch’s response was unequivocal; “that sounds like BS to me” (Murdoch cited in Greenslade, 2010).

Journalism and Change

These blunt exchanges undoubtedly articulate anxieties about the depth and significance of the changes which journalism confronts. Developments in media technologies, financial strategies, business models, organisational and regulatory structures, the fragmentation of audiences and a growing public concern about some aspects of tabloid journalism practices and reporting, as well as broader political, sociological and cultural changes, have combined to impoverish the flow of existing revenues available to fund journalism. They also impact radically on traditional journalism practices, while simultaneously generating an increasingly frenzied search for sustainable and equivalent funding—and from a wide range of sources—to nurture and deliver journalism in the future.

In the global north, the future for journalism seems especially precarious for some sectors. The identified problems confronting the industry are routinely cited in both scholarly and professional analyses, while the well-rehearsed discussions of the causes of these difficulties has come to resemble a round up of the usual suspects (Franklin, 2009a; McChesney and Nichols, 2010; Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009; Starr, 2009).

In print journalism, for example, journalists’ jobs have followed the downward spiral of published titles, shrinking circulations, reduced pagination, the truncated range of editorial content and sections along with the volume of advertising revenues; and sometimes very rapidly and dramatically. Additionally, newspapers have been obliged to confront the challenge of substantially increased competition from news online, news updates distributed via mobile technology, news aggregators such as Google news and micro blogging sites like Twitter. The economic recession since 2007 has accelerated and exacerbated the consequences of such revenue shifts and trends for jobs, investment and the news product. A New York Times journalist queried wryly in a column about news room redundancies: “Clearly the sky is falling in. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it” (cited in Beam et al., 2009, p. 734).

Newspapers have responded to such digital and market challenges by supplementing print editions with an extensive online presence which distributes news as text, streams news in audio visual formats and offers podcasts for downloading. A key ingredient in this online presence has been print (and broadcast) journalism’s expansive uses of readers’ contributions to news via user-generated content (UGC) which includes posted comments, readers’ blogs, but increasingly and more typically, readers’ video clips and photographs submitted to newspapers and television stations. The BBC has established a “UGC hub” to “process” this innovative news source (Harrison, 2010), but research increasingly suggests that the development of a more participatory, “pro-am” model of news which reshapes the relationship between journalists and readers, prompting changes to news content and formats, has seemingly stalled, or at least faltered. Studies of UGC at the BBC (Williams et al., forthcoming), in the regional and local press in the United Kingdom (Singer, 2010) and in online newsrooms across Europe and the United States (Domingo et al., 2009) suggest that while readers’ contribution to news has expanded considerably it has been “absorbed” into traditional journalism practices with journalists retaining their gatekeeping editorial roles. “Business as usual” offers a better description of the implications of UGC for news reporting than journalistic “revolution”.

But new media technologies continue to create innovative opportunities for print journalists to tell stories in new and creative ways; and also to make money. Enthusiasm for the Guardian iphone App, for example, launched for use with mobile phones late in 2009, surprised even the editor with 70,000 sales in the first month (Rusbridger, 2010, p. 4). But the £25 million digital advertising revenues enjoyed by the Guardian in 2009 is promising but still modest and insufficient to sustain “the legacy print business” (Rusbridger, 2010, p. 6); the metaphor of bereavement is on the tip of every pundits pen. There remains a substantial shortfall between the recent digital revenue gains and the income lost by traditional newspaper sales of news to readers and readers to advertisers; closing this gap is a matter of some urgency. “The reality” as distinguished scholar Paul Starr notes, “is that resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than new media can develop them” (Starr, 2009, p. 28). For certain sectors of the local and regional press, especially the larger, city-based papers, the situation is acute as they confront and record alarming collapses of readership and plummeting advertising revenues (Franklin, 2006, pp. 4–7). Market sector is influential in shaping distinctive journalism destinies, with the decline of the Sunday titles, but especially Sunday tabloids, being markedly more evident than for the “quality”, “broadsheet” or “compact” papers (Cole and Harcup, 2010, pp. 19–45; Franklin, 2008, pp. 5–10; Williams, 2010, pp. 221–42).

Broadcast journalism fares little better with commercial radio stations and the independent regional television stations in the United Kingdom suffering a dangerous collapse of advertising incomes, shifts in regulatory requirements and increasing challenges from Web-based alternatives which deliver news and information on demand, around the clock and in more audience-accessible formats (Starkey and Crisell, 2009, pp. 22–43). For radio, the transition to an online platform presents a paradox. On the one hand, the shift has been relatively easy with listeners readily downloading podcasts, listening to a vastly increased number of stations from around the globe on Internet-only radio, while tuning in via their computers more often than their radio. But on the other, such practices are so widespread that the “State of the News Media report 2009 claims they risk making “radio” redundant. “Radio” the report suggests, “is well on its way to becoming something altogether new—a medium called audio” (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009).

The BBC remains an influential, world-leading centre for journalism delivered on radio, television and online platforms, but it faces increasing opposition and sometimes stridently expressed demands from politicians, the public, but especially commercial rivals, to change the value and sources of its revenues (both licence fee and income from the market aspects of its operations), while reining in its editorial and programming outputs and reducing its currently over-dominant position in the UK broadcasting ecology. James Murdoch believes the BBC is engaged in nothing less sinister than a “land grab”, describing “the scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions” as “chilling”. The expansion of the “state sponsored journalism” which Murdoch believes the BBC delivers, “is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision which are so important for our democracy” (Murdoch, 2009, p. 16).

Amid all this curious mix of information, polemic and partisan babble, Murdoch raises an important issue: namely that the difficulties confronting journalism (whether local, regional or national) have significant consequences beyond journalism and the news media for the (local, regional or national) communities they serve, their economies and for peoples’ prospects for accessing the kinds of political information, commentary and debate necessary to exercise democratic accountability within those communities (Fenton, 2010; Franklin, 2009b). Cuts in resources and journalism jobs means that certain foci for journalism coverage are no longer reported or can be reported only with journalists’ overreliance on corporate and public sector-sponsored press releases or agency copy, rather than journalists initiating their own inquiries (Davies, 2008). Any prospect of journalists fulfilling a fourth estate role by monitoring the activities of economically and politically powerful groups is considerably less likely when journalism is so poorly resourced. As Tom Rosenstiel notes, adopting the confused and tautologically expressive style of US politician Donald Rumsfeld, “More of American life will occur in the shadows. We won’t know what we won’t know” (cited in Starr, 2009, p. 28).

News journalism is increasingly focused on soft news, entertainment formats and celebrity news with a markedly reduced attention to foreign affairs—regrettably war reporting is the exception here. In the United States, newspapers are closing foreign bureaux and consequently “vast parts of the world are woefully under covered by the American press” (Hamilton and Lawrence, forthcoming). In the United Kingdom, the same neglect of foreign affairs is evident in broadcast journalism; and across a long period (Barnet and Seymour 1999; Franklin 1997; Starr, 2009).

Similarly, journalists have less time available for attention to national political events in Washington and Westminster or for Presidential and Parliamentary affairs, the reporting of local ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: The two-legged crisis of journalism
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Future of Journalism
• 3. The Future of Journalism and Challenges for Media Development: Are we exporting a model that no longer works at home?
• 4. The Past is Prologue, or: How nineteenth-century journalism might just save twenty-first-century newspapers
• 5. Labour, New Media and the Institutional Restructuring of Journalism
• 6. From “We” to “Me”: The changing construction of popular tabloid journalism
• 7. Rethinking [Again] the Future of Journalism Education
• 8. The Shifting Cross-Media News Landscape: Challenges for news producers
• 9. Rituals of Transparency: Evaluating online news outlets’ uses of transparency rituals in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden
• 10. Journalism in Second Life
• 11. The Form of Reports on US Newspaper Internet Sites, An Update
• 12. The Gradual Disappearance of Foreign News on German Television: Is there a future for global, international, world or foreign news?
• 13. The Future of Newsmagazines
• 14. Journalistic Elites in Post-Communist Romania: From heroes of the revolution to media moguls
• 15. News from and in the “Dark Continent”: Afro-pessimism, news flows, global journalism and media regimes
• 16. The Journalism “Crisis”: Is Australia immune or just ahead of its time?
• 17. From Credibility to Relevance: Towards a sociology of journalism’s “added value”
• 18. Exploring the Political-Economic Factors of Participatory Journalism: Views of online journalists in 10 countries
• 19. Twittering the News: The emergence of ambient journalism
• 20. “We’re Going to Crack the World Open”: Wikileaks and the future of investigative reporting
• 21. Competition, Complementarity or Integration? The relationship between professional and participatory media
• 22. The Impact of “Citizen Journalism” on Chinese Media and Society
• 23. Changes in Australian Newspapers 1956–2006
• 24. Where Else is the Money? A study of innovation in online business models at newspapers in Britain’s 66 cities
• 25. Transparency and the New Ethics of Journalism
• 26. The Development of Privacy Adjudications by the UK Press Complaints Commission and their Effects on the Future of Journalism
• 27. Letters from the Editors: American journalists, multimedia, and the future of journalism
• 28. Not Really Enough: Foreign donors and journalism training in Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda
• Index