Is the newspaper about to meet the same fate as Dinosaurs?
Photo via
the Media Briefing.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the arrival of
the Internet has disrupted the media business, and in turn
journalism as a whole.
So first the business model went. Newspapers, which for
years had made boatloads of profits from classified ads,
found themselves losing advertising dollars to online ad
platforms such as Craigslist and Auto Trader.
Source: The Future of Journalism Project.
And, corollary to the diminishing of advertising
revenues, was the rise of blogs, online news platforms and
social networking sites which then siphoned audiences away
from traditional media. So, as the media theorist Clay
Shirky has pointed out, just as the business model was being
scrambled, the authoritative place of traditional sources of
news was being challenged. After all, anyone with a decent
Internet connection, or even a simple smartphone, can now
become a journalist and break news. For audiences, it is no
longer about the source of news, it is about who can get it
to them.
One key thing that has happened in the media business,
as a result of this disruption, is that the audience is
now King. Because of so much choice for viewers and
readers,
media organisations are now forced to chase the
audience
as opposed to the other way round.
On the one hand, this has been great for readers and
viewers – you can now get information about
anything you want, any way you want it. But on the other
hand, in their efforts to reach this fragmented
audience, the news media is now forced to behave in a
way that has, at times, been detrimental to the overall
project of journalism.
Here is one high profile example. The venerable Rolling Stone magazine has just been forced
to retract
an explosive story on rape, published in November, after
it turned out that one of its key sources had allegedly
manufactured the whole incident. Now,
as it has been catalogued by the Columbia Journalism
Review, key editorial steps were disregarded as the story
moved forward towards publication. Why?
The New York Times provides this explanation,
gleaned from the CJR report:
Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, [Managing Editor]
Mr. Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about
Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the
issue. “We didn’t think through all the implications of
the decisions that we made while reporting the story,
and we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the
story we were being told was not true,” he said.
On top of these clear editorial failures, I would ask
another question. That is, did the pressures of chasing
readers contribute at all to such decisions? This was a
powerful story that promised to generate significant
interest. And one wonders if this recognition at all
played into the editorial choices made at at the
magazine.
Going forward, as journalists, we need to be mindful of
this, that the chase for readers, viewers, traffic not
blind us from our journalistic standards. The disruption
in the industry has made it such that thinking about those
things crucial towards many news organisations’
editorial strategies. But leaning too much towards such
thinking could undermine the very nature of why we do
journalism.
