The Future of Journalism: Blog tasks

The Future of Journalism: Blog tasks

Part 1: Clay Shirky lecture

Go to the Nieman Lab webpage (part of Harvard university) and watch the video of Clay Shirky presenting to Harvard students. The video is also available on YouTube below but the Nieman Lab website has a written transcript of everything Shirky says. 

Play the clip AND read along with the transcript below to ensure you are following the argument. You need to watch from the beginning to 29.35 (the end of Shirky's presentation). Once you've watched and read the presentation and made notes (you may want to copy and paste key quotes from the transcript which is absolutely fine), answer the questions below:


1) Why does Clay Shirky argue that 'accountability journalism' is so important and what example does he give of this?

The Bishop Accountability Project, which set up a database to prevent the “this is a rare occasion that doesn’t happen elsewhere” kinds of excuses from taking hold, added that article and then used those documents to expand their observations to elsewhere.

There is an unbroken line from that article — there is an unbroken line from the Globe’s publication of that article to the worldwide pressure of the Catholic Church is now under, to both account for its past and alter its behavior in the future. Which, by way of introduction, makes it clear what’s at stake with what Professor Jones calls accountability journalism. This is a classic example of, again quoting from Losing the News, of the iron core of journalism and in particular the investigative journalism category, where three reporters are dispatched for a long period on a story that may or may not pan out.

The other input to that — the other input, besides accountability journalism mattering in this way, is that newspapers’ ability to produce accountability journalism is shrinking. And those two facts together put us at really, I think, an epochal moment of figuring out what to do. So I want to offer up some observations in two parts.

One, why it is I think that newspapers’ ability to produce accountability journalism is shrinking, and why I am convinced that those changes are secular, monotonic, and irreversible, rather than being merely cyclic and waiting for the next go around. And then two, I want to talk about the features of a journalistic ecosystem that I think we’ll have to obtain in to get anything like the accountability journalism we’ve been used to out of the current media landscape.

2) What does Shirky say about the relationship between newspapers and advertisers? Which websites does he mention as having replaced major revenue-generators for newspapers (e.g. jobs, personal ads etc.)?

I think the first thing to recognize about the commercial structures of the newspaper industry is that it is not enough for newspapers to run at a profit to reverse the current threat and change. If next year they all started throwing off 30 percent free cash flow again, that would not yet reverse the change, because there were other characteristics of the commercial environment as well.

The first of them was that advertisers were forced to overpay for the services they received, because there weren’t many alternatives for reaching people with display ads — or especially things like coupons. And because they overpaid, the newspapers essentially had the kind of speculative investment capital to do long-range, high-risk work. So it isn’t enough to be commercial; you have to be commercial at a level above what some theoretical market would bare.

My friend Bob Spinrad — who recently passed away, but who ran Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, for a while — said, “The only institutions that do R&D are either institutions that are monopolies or wrongly believe that they are.” Xerox is an example of an institution that wrongly believed it was a monopoly and was willing to fund the invention of Ethernet and laptops and the graphic user interface and all the rest of it that we take for granted now. IBM, AT&T — the list of commercial entities that believed that they were monopolies, and during the time that they were monopolies could take this philosophy of overinvesting in speculative work is large. But when the commercial inputs to that kind of R&D work, the R&D work ends as well.

The second characteristic of the happy state of the 20th-century newspapering was that the advertisers were not only overcharged, they were underserved. Not only did they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn’t even get to say: “And don’t report on my industry, please.” There was a time when Ford went to The New York Times during the rollover stories and said, “You know, if you keep going on this, we may just pull all Ford ads in The New York Times.” To which the Times said, “Okay.” And the ability to do that — to say essentially to the advertiser, “Where else are you going to go?” — was a big part of what kept newspapers from suffering from commercial capture. It worked better for bigger papers than smaller papers, but that bulwark of guest commercial capture was a feature of the 20th century commercial market. Neither of those, neither the overpaying or the underserving, is true in the current market any longer, because media is now created by demand rather than supply — which is to say the next web page is printed when someone wants it to be printed, not printed and stored in a warehouse in advance if someone who may want it. Turned out that when you have an advertising market that balances supply and demand efficiently, the price plummets. And so for a long time, people could say analog dollars to digital dimes as if — well, when do we get the digital dimes? The answer may be never. The answer may be that we are seeing advertising priced at its real value for the first time in history, and that value is a tiny fraction of what we had gotten used to.

Underserving is even a bigger problem, right? The institutions harrying newspapers — Monster and Match and Craigslist — all have the logic that if you want to list a job or sell a bike, you don’t go to the place that’s printing news from Antananarivo and the crossword puzzle. You go to the place that’s good for listing jobs and selling bikes. And so if you had a good idea for a business, you wouldn’t launch it in order to give the profits to the newsroom. You’d launch it in order to give the profits to the shareholders. This is Bob Garfield‘s thesis from The Chaos Scenario, which is — it’s not just that advertisement is moving from the analog world to the digital world, but that advertising in the digital world is not inherently connected to other kinds of media. Advertising can be media in ways that improve both the advertiser’s outlook and the public’s. So the ability to tell the advertiser, you have to keep advertising with us even though we’re covering your industry is going. That protection’s going.

3) Shirky talks about the 'unbundling of content'. This means people are reading newspapers in a different way. How does he suggest audiences are consuming news stories in the digital age?

And third — deepest down — the coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial. Which is to say, if you’re running a website and somebody’s on your website and they just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what’s the next thing you’re gonna show them? Is it news from Tegucigalpa? No. It’s another crossword puzzle, because that’s the only thing you can [inaudible]. The idea that someone who is doing a crossword puzzle may also want news about the coup in Honduras or how the Lakers are doing — it doesn’t make any sense. It’s never made any sense, in terms of what the user wants. It’s what — it’s what print is capable of as a bundle. What goes into a print newspaper is the content that, on the margins, produces commercial interest in the least interested user. So, in the language of my tribe, the aggregation of news sources has gone from being a server-side to a client-side operation — which is to say, the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not at the level — and not by the producer.

Now, there’s been considerable wringing of hands and rending of garments around what Nick Negroponte calls The Daily Me — the idea that we get the newspaper [or] there’s nothing but pure echo chamber. The good news seems to be that people are interested in bulk sources, and they are interested in expert editorial judgment, and they are interested in serendipity. But they’re not interested in omnibus, single omnibus publication. The New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.

None of those three things -– overpaying, underserving, and the incoherence of the print bundle in a web of content — none of those things will be altered by reversing the revenue trend. So the New York Times currently getting out of the business of summaries or recording and they’ve opened an online university and a wine club. The university and the wine club, even if they generate the resources to support the newsroom, don’t change those other three characteristics.

Now this doesn’t mean that all newspapers go away. It does mean that a lot of them go away. Syndication makes no sense in a world of URLs, as the AP is realizing, so they’re saying you can send the traffic to us, instead of us sending the stories to you. So the restructuring that environment, even for those newspapers that survive, will mean that newspapers play a less significant role in accountability journalism in the future then they have the past.

Which leaves us with a giant hole, and a very threatening one. And in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

4) Shirky also talks about the power of shareable media. How does he suggest the child abuse scandal with the Catholic Church may have been different if the internet had been widespread in 1992?

So what now? Right? The other big question, and the one that’s vaguer in the way; it’s easier to see what’s broken than what’s coming, as is always the case in my work. The first thing, back to the John Geoghan story, back to the Boston Globe report — a huge number of the positive effects from that report were not created by The Boston Globe. They were created by The Boston Globe’s initial audience. The Globe does not have a worldwide audience of millions of Catholics. The Globe is a regional paper. The worldwide audience of millions of Catholics got that story because it was forwarded and forwarded and forwarded. The audience created the public, in fact, to use Starr’s word from The Creation of the Media. The public created itself.

The important audience for that article wasn’t Bostonians, Catholic or no. It was Catholics, Bostonian or no. And the Boston Globe can’t reach those people. So the ability to reuse and republish that material was a huge part of the battle. The ability to take that material and put it in databases like the Bishop Accountability Project, the ability of SNAP to have itself found, because anytime anybody read about it, Google put it one hop away from wherever anybody heard about it. All of those things — that penumbra of reuse around the original article — created an enormous amount of the value of that article.

There is, eerily, something vanishingly close to a two-slide comparison here. In 1992, a priest named Paul Shanley was pulled in for having raped or molested almost a hundred boys in the Archdiocese of Massachusetts. His bishop was also [Bernard] Cardinal Law, and the group covering it was also The Boston Globe. And they ran 50 stories that year on the priest abuse. And that story went nowhere. It shocked people, people were horrified, they were upset, and then it died out. And in the intervening decade, Geoghan kept after it.

We can’t say that if the web had been in wide circulation in ’92, that the Stanley case would have created the reaction to Geoghan case. But what we can say is that many of the good effects in limiting the Catholic Church’s ability to continue doing this were a result of the public reuse of the documents in ways that were simply not possible in 1992 and had become not just available, but trivial by 2000.

I could clip out an article in the paper and mail it to one other person, at great hassle and expense, and that’s about it. By 2002, I put it on a mailing list, suddenly a hundred people read it, and they forward it, and they forward it. It’s one of the cases where the difference in degree becomes essentially a difference in kind in terms of assembling an audience.

5) Why does Shirky argue against paywalls? 

The prevailing story among some parts of the media enterprise now for recovering from the current difficulties in the commercial model of the 20th century is user fees. Either a paywall, micropayments, per-user charges, per-articles charges, what have you. The effect of that would be to make the kind of value that the public got from the Geoghan article illegal — not illegal, uncontractural. A violation of contract to make use of the news.

Because the whole point of adding these restrictions is to take an infinite good, and to be able to sell it as if it’s a finite good. And you have to prevent the audience’s ability to act as a publisher in order for that business model to work. Now this would be — if it was just a commercial operation, it would be no big deal, right? The people trying to get more revenues than expenses are trying to do it in this particular way. Let the market sort it out.

There’s two reasons, I think, to be skeptical of that. One, we need the public good of the accountability to journalism, however produced. But two, they’re going down to lobby the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption in order to be able to engage in some form of coordination that borders on price fixing if it doesn’t actually constitute price fixing. But the irony is the argument they’re using at the Justice Department is the creation of a public good even — as what they’re looking to do is to erode that public good in order to charge a scarcity premium. So the proposal by Steve Brill et al for effectively an RIAA for newspapers is destroying the village in order to save it. That suggests to me that the ecosystem we’re in now is already different enough from the 20th-century ecosystem that we should be looking at ways of balancing the very expensive and time-consuming production of accountability journalism with the possibility of public reuse of same. Because that public reuse produces a kind of value that doesn’t just come from publication. It comes from republication and reuse.

6) What is a 'social good'? In what way might journalism be a 'social good'?

So there’s three methods for creating public goods. You go to the market, right? Not public goods, but rather things that are accessible to the public. You can go to the market, and things in the market are created when revenues can reliably exceed expenses. And then you expect some company to set itself up and provision.

You can have a public organization that has some source of income other than revenue, whether it is endowment, donations, taxes, whatever. It typically operates in different legal regime. Producing goods because they believe that that is the right use of that money and they are constituted to pursue those goals.

And then you can have social production where a group of people, just to get together and do something for themselves. Markets are how most cars are produced. Public goods are how much roads are produced. Social stuff is how most birthday parties are produced, how most picnics are produced, right? It has just not been a big feature of the landscape. But, now it is.
The positive supply-side shot to the cost of coordination represented by the Internet means that groups of people who are assembled in non-market and non-managerial modes of production — Yochai Benkler, who’s here, is the great unpacker of this logic — but groups of people who come together outside the market and outside managerial culture can nevertheless provision for themselves enormously valuable goods. Famously open-source software, famously wikis as modes of production, but also things like Amanda Michel‘s Off The Bus experiment first situated at Huffington Post, now essentially reconstituted at ProPublica, or Wikileaks — are models that aren’t using market or managerial culture to nevertheless produce this kind of range.

What the Internet does is it makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain — not impossible, but harder. And it makes public models easier to sustain — partly because of the lowered cost, partly because of the [inaudible]. And it makes social models much, much easier. So we’re seeing, I believe, a rebalancing of the landscape in terms of the logic of the creation of public goods away from a market dominated by commercial interest into a market where all three of these modes of production are going to be operating side by side in different ways.

The other…so that is, I think, one feature of what we want from the future, which is that whatever experiments are undertaken, we want them to be across that range — all three of those different modes of market production. The other thing I think we want is we don’t want to replace newspapers, right? Not just because we can’t, but also because the problem we’re facing now isn’t that a commercial entity that did something we like is going away. That happens all the time. It’s the nature of capitalism. The problem is that the thing that’s going away, newspapers account for 85 percent of, by the figure Professor Jones has in Losing the News — which is the vast bulk of this iron core of news is produced by one class of entity. And anybody who thinks about large-scale system design recognizes that is effectively a single point of failure problem. And if anything bad happens to the institutional model of this 85-percent producer of this thing we care about, the whole system is suddenly at risk. And that’s effectively the issue we’ve got.

7) Shirky says newspapers are in terminal decline. How does he suggest we can replace the important role in society newspapers play? What is the short-term danger to this solution that he describes?

So we don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you — we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That’s the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers, because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role, right?

It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself — and I’ll end shortly. But I want to distance myself, with that observation I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.

I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein, from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, there was a long hundred years between the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years.

So I have no idea how long this transition will take. But I don’t think that some degree of failure and decay is avoidable. I think our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough, to constrain that trough to the areas we can constrain it to, and to hasten its end. But I don’t think we can get away with a simple and rapid alternative to what we enjoyed in the 20th century — in part because the accidents that held that landscape together in the 20th century were so crazily contingent.

And so I’ll end with an observation that I think may give Professor Jones and I a place of both agreement and disagreement. And that word is “irreplaceable.” I believe, and I only take seriously people who believe, that newspapers are irreplaceable in their production of accountability journalism. And then the questions becomes, “So what do you think of — how do you regard the media landscape?” People who believe that the media landscape is still amenable to a high degree of the kind of commercial support that would keep newspapers alive, look at the irreplaceability of newspapers and think, “We should expend any effort or resources we can to keep ourselves from having to replace them.”

On the other hand, people who look at the media environment and say the current shock in the media environment is so inimical to the 20th-century model of news production that time spent trying to replace newspapers is misspent effort because we should really be transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of smaller, overlapping models of accountability journalism, knowing that we won’t get it right in the beginning and not knowing which experiments are going to pan out.

So it’s possible, I think, for people to agree about the irreplaceability of newspapers, but to disagree about how serious the change in the media environment is. And the more you are convinced, as I am, that this is a fairly significant revolution in media production, the likelier it is that the irreplaceability of newspapers suggests that the next step needs to be vast and varied experimentation, not the transfer of allegiance from one institution to another.

8) Look at the first question and answer regarding institutional power. Give us your own opinion: how important is it that major media brands such as the New York Times or the Guardian continue to stay in business and provide news?

Without major media brands, the view on news will always be swayed based on the rise of fake media and AI getting stronger. No one would know if the news being presented is truthful or not.

Part 2: MM55 - Media, Publics, Protest and Power

Media Magazine 55 has an excellent feature on power and the media. Go to our Media Magazine archive, click on MM55 and scroll to page 38 to read the article Media, Publics, Protest and Power', a summary of Media academic Natalie Fenton’s talk to a previous Media Magazine conference. Answer the following questions:

1) What are the three overlapping fields that have an influence on the relationship between media and democracy?

• The political field intervenes when the state powerfully limits or enables the diversity of voices and views in the press, through its power to regulate, deregulate or subsidise the media.
• The economic field refers to commercial influences that encompass elements such as concentration of ownership; profit pressures relating to types of ownership; type of funding (such as advertising or paying audiences); and level and intensity of market competition.
• The journalistic field refers to assumptions that have emerged over time about what constitutes ‘news’, and about the purpose of journalism; practices of news gathering and sourcing; norms of objectivity and impartiality – the ethics and practice of journalism that contribute to the news ecology in any one place at any one moment in time.

2) What is ‘churnalism’ and what issues are there currently in journalism?

In a corporate news world it is now difficult to maintain profit margins and shareholder returns – unless you employ fewer journalists. This means not only insecure, short-term contracts, but also fewer journalists with more space to fill in less time. And this often leads to a greater use of unattributed rewrites of press agency or public relations material, and the cut- and-paste practice now known as churnalism. Once you combine the faster and shallower corporate journalism of the digital age with the need to pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons, it is not difficult to see how the traditional rigour of professional journalism is quickly cast aside.

3) What statistics are provided by Fenton to demonstrate the corporate dominance of a small number of conglomerates? 

Just three companies control 71% of UK national newspaper circulation while only five groups control more than 80% of combined online and offline news.

4) What is the 'climate of fear' that Fenton writes about in terms of politics and the media? 

Four successive Prime Ministers admitted to The Leveson Enquiry that they were ‘too close’ to the big media players because the political stakes were so very high. In this climate, political parties, the police and other institutions are reluctant to investigate wrong-doing in the news media, hinder the expansion of large media conglomerates, or introduce new regulation of news organisations and journalistic practice. They also avoid certain areas of public policy, for fear either of hostile reporting or media owner conflict, creating an environment where politicians are more likely to discuss populist policies.

5) Fenton finishes her article by discussing pluralism, the internet and power. What is your opinion on this crucial debate - has the internet empowered audiences and encouraged democracy or is power even more concentrated in the hands of a few corporate giants?

In my opinion, I think so as the media has more reach and big names essentially control the mindset of the view.