Patrick Kingsley on Everything
Journalism is dead. Long live journalism.
Why the transition from print to web doesn’t spell the end for the news.
Times have changed.
Sometimes I get to meet real journalists. “It’s great to talk to you,” I usually tell them, “because I’m actually considering a career in the media myself.” Typically, silence follows. And then, if I’m lucky, a raised eyebrow, or even a strained smile. But most often, it’s a smirk, a patronising laugh, and then that withering aside, “Good luck, because you’ll need it.”
It’s not just me, though. Whether you’ve watched the fifth season of The Wire, or just occasionally peruse the pages of MediaGuardian, it’s clear that print journalism now faces its biggest watershed since Caxton invented type. Every month another newspaper teeters towards doom: if it’s not the Independent, then it’s the Telegraph, the Observer, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – or even David Simon’s fictionalised Baltimore Sun. Thanks to overambitious mergers, media groups are saddled with debt; thanks to the internet, print runs are down; and thanks to Craigslist, Ebay and the success of major department stores, retail and classified ad revenues have tailed off. And it’s not clear where new money’s going to come from; the web doesn’t yet have any answers, at least in economic terms. Website adverts don’t pay – Guardian Online gets 30million readers a year, but only a pitiful £25million in advertising income. And paywalls – the system where only paying subscribers can access content – reduce readership because of both their subscription cost, and, I’d argue, their complex administration.
And for someone who’s dreamt of working in newspapers since the age of eight, this is all a crushing blow. I love print media. I worked on three or four magazines at school, I edited this very rag, I dream in em-dashes and en-dashes, and the smell of ink fresh off the printing press gives me shivers. But I’m also a realist, and I know that print – as a means of transmitting news – is dead.
Yet I don’t think this transition from print to web quite constitutes journalistic doomsday. Rather, it gives us an opportunity to be more creative about how journalism makes its money. If advertising isn’t going to bankroll web-based news, for example, then revamped paywalls might. At the moment, paywalls prove unpopular with readers because one requires different accounts for different websites. Murdoch’s News International titles (The Times, The Sun etc) are allegedly erecting individual paywalls this Spring, but I’m sceptical about their success: web-readers tend to get their news from lots of different sites, and won’t therefore want to restrict themselves to just one news source. What’s needed, then, is a simpler and more wide-ranging paywall system which allows users easily to access thousands of news sources through just one commercial portal – something a bit like Sky, but for text instead of television. Web users could pay £17-a-month to access not just The Times, but the New York Times, the Economist, the FT, Le Monde, and scores more.
There’s money to be made in diversifying beyond pure journalism, too. Newspapers already earn tidy sums from Fantasy Football schemes, but the concept can be expanded further. The Sunday Times’ ‘Culture+’ has shown the way; rather than articles, the subscription-based club offers, for instance, half-price cultural tickets to its members, and has encouraged a growth in the paper’s sales. Internet dating services, meanwhile, earn the Guardian £2million a year, and I suspect the next big earner will be iPhone applications. Time Out has just released a brilliant free app which works out where you are in London, and then lists every cultural event in your vicinity. If they charged for it, they’d rake in the cash.
We could also do worse than treat newspapers like we do universities: as charitable organisations, rather than for-profit ones. Here in Cambridge, for instance, the University is bankrolled by its endowment. It receives donations, and lives off the interest made from their investment. There’s no reason why, with a little change in perception, newspapers can’t do the same. In the States, in fact, some already do.
In journalistic terms, too, Web 2.0 gives us rookies a much bigger opportunity than print ever did. Our generation can pioneer a form of journalism which incorporates both text and video media, which is edited, updated and accessed in real time, which instantly incorporates readers’ responses, and which is viewed on something as small and transportable as a mobile phone.
It is a confusing time to be entering the industry, then, but it’s also an exciting one. Many budding hacks here in Cambridge are still applying, undaunted, to City, Columbia or a paper-led training scheme. As for me, well, those real journalists I sometimes meet can breathe easy for a bit: I’m hopefully off to teach in a Merseyside comprehensive for a couple of years. Not the most careerist of moves, I know, but it will give me experiences I could never gain on Fleet Street. Besides, in the vacations, I’ll still do what most wannabe hacks do: apply to journalism school, pitch features at unsuspecting editors, write a blog, and watch Citizen Kane over and over again. And then maybe – just maybe – I’ll one day get to be a real journalist, too.
For wiser heads than me, read:
- Jeff Jarvis’s excellent journalism blog: www.BuzzMachine.com
- Clay Shirky’s similarly excellent journalism blog: www.shirky.com
- Michael Massing’s A New Horizon for the News (thanks to @Daniel Cohen for the tip): www.nybooks.com/articles/23050
Topics: Journalism, Media
Yes very wise. However, one could argue that those qualities which you claim will boost internet news in fact make the internet an inappropriate forum for serious journalism. The possiblity of combining “both text and video media” quickly translates into a compulsion to shoehorn in multimedia presentations to every single article, regardless of relevance or quality. “Real time” journalism places an emphasis on speed above accuracy, leading to ephemeral and often shallow work. And the integration of “readers’ responses” is more often than not worthless, as we reach the startling realisation that those who are paid to write the news usually do a better job of it than witless internet commentators (I appreciate the irony).
Also, this is not Twitter; “@Daniel Cohen” is not someone’s name.
But otherwise excellent.
PK U R MY HERO.
Thanks Oli.
Hugo – I agree: lengthy, well-researched analyses are at the very fulcrum of journalism, but I don’t think the internet shift is going to render them extinct.
Instead, the web will give us additional tools which can supplement already existing formats rather than replacing them.
As long it works in tandem with the kind of analysis and investigation you talk about, “real-time” journalism – with its unlimited webspace, immediacy and variety of mediums – offers a real progression from the next-day, word-only, print-constrained journalism of newspapers, which, by the time you read it, is often already out of date.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has just come out strongly against Paywalls (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/guardian-editor-paywalls), and all power to him if he thinks the Guardian can survive as a free website. I just wonder if it’s not a little too optimistic.
PK, Caxton didn’t invent type! How Anglocentric – I would have thought better of you. The invention of European type is generally credited to Gutenberg – Caxton simply set up the first press in England, copying established continental methods. And anyway, the Chinese developed movable type some 400 years before Caxton’s birth. Did someone mention something about internet journalism being poorly researched?
Anyway, it’s a very interesting topic, and it’s going to take commitment to the sort of imaginative revenue raising that you mention to keep reputable text news sources afloat.