Newspapers: The future of journalism

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?

Father John Geoghan, who was a priest and pedophile who had been employed by the Catholic Church since the 1960s. Three Globe reporters had been working on this story and they had gotten hold of the documents the church had been forced to submit in the upcoming trial. Turned out that Geoghan had raped or fondled over 100 boys in his care, and was able to do this in diocese after diocese because every time the accusations would start, the Catholic Church would take him off to rehabilitation, which was ineffective, then assign him to a new diocese, and he went and moved through several parishes in the area.

The reaction to this story as you can imagine was instant and horrified shock on the part of the Catholic laity. Story went worldwide

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.)?

So the first observation — made wily and probably in the most depth by Paul Starr in Creation of the Media — is that, dated from some time between the rise of the penny press and the end of the Second World War, we had a very unusual circumstance — and I think especially in the United States — where we had commercial entities producing critical public goods. We had ad-supported newspapers producing accountability journalism.

Now, it’s unusual to have that degree of focus on essentially both missions — both making a profit and producing this kind of public value. But that was the historic circumstance, and it lasted for decades. But it was an accident. There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.

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?

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.

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?

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.

5) Why does Shirky argue against paywalls? 

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.

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

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.

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.

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? It may be important for these brands to stay in business because they can expose the hidden parts of society through accountability journalism and spread it to a wide base of people.

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?

Yet the business model for newspapers has struggled to adapt. 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.

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. Unchecked media concentration over several decades has allowed

some media groups to accumulate vast amounts of revenue, along with social and political influence,

which has adverse consequences for independent journalism and democracy. Such market dominance of news media results in an excess of power and unruly political influence that breeds fear.

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

Politicians are fearful of career-wrecking and life- ruining negative publicity, along with damage to their parties’ chances of re-election. 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.

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?

I think the internet has empowered audiences because now their views can be shared and viewed online by thousands if not millions of people. Their voice has not been silenced but instead has been promoted more heavily which encourages democracy. However, majority of online news is still concentrated in the hands of corporate giants which can influence/ convince the audience.