Journalism: A profession under siege

June 8th, 2009

Journalism as we know it today – the active collection, verification and processing of news for audiences by dedicated reporters - evolved early in the 18th century in London and a little later in the US. There was news before that, and there were newspapers before that, certainly, and these papers had correspondents around the country and the world, but this was the first time that individuals were hired for the distinct purpose of following news events and writing them up for their newspapers.

The emergence of reporting was brought about by the rise of the mass newspaper market in the great cities of the time – notably London and New York. Until then, newspapers had been the mouthpieces of a single owner-editor, and they were expensive, small-circulation products, filled mostly with opinion and the recording of society events for a small elite. In the US, the rise of reporting was marked by the growth of the Penny Press - newspapers which were cheap, sold on the streets, aimed at a popular audience and funded by advertising.

This was the advertising-driven model – the more readers one had, the more effective the advertising was, the more you could charge for it. Papers competed for readers and this began the rush to break news which would encourage buyers to choose your newspaper over others.

To break news, you needed reporters, and you needed them to chase down the big news quicker than anyone else. That helped you sell more newspapers than your rivals, and this enabled you to sell adverts, which in turn funded the newsroom. In the US, the first reporters would hire boats to go out and meet the steamships coming from Europe, in order to be the first to carry that news. In London, the first reporters were those who “thrust themselves into coffee houses” to pick up gossip and titbits, and sell them to the newspapers. But the boom came when journalists managed to break the ban on covering parliament. By 1774, at least seven newspapers had parliamentary reporters – though they were not allowed to take notes and often had to remember the details of a 12-hour debate to summarize for their newspapers.

Essentially, that was the model of journalism which held sway for about 200 years: newspapers used content to attract audience which it sold on to advertisers. This model shifted somewhat with the emergence of rival media, first radio, then television and latterly the internet, and this brought changes to how news was gathered, processed and delivered, indeed these media changed the very notion of what we consider to be news, but the model of using news to attract audiences and selling that audience to advertisers for profit was the dominant one from the late 18th century – until now. It was an imperfect model, for sure, but it also produced some remarkable journalism over the years and as a results the best newspapers came to play a central role at the very heart of communities and cities.
Now, after some 200 years, that model is collapsing.

You have read the recent headlines: newspapers are in crisis across the northern hemisphere. A number of the USA’s most prestigious papers are in bankruptcy - the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Already closed down are Denver’s Rocky Mountain News and the San Francisco Chronicle. Others are reported to be close to closure: in Seattle (the Times), Chicago (the Sun-Times) and Newark (the Star-Ledger). The 101-year-old non-profit Christian Science Monitor has folded its daily print edition and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer scrapped its print edition and reduced from a news staff of 165 to about 20 for its online-only edition. The New York Times needed an emergency injection of $250-m and is losing money with every edition.

Others are cutting jobs - 300 at the Los Angeles Times, 205 at the Miami Herald, 156 at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 150 at the Kansas City Star, 128 at the Sacramento Bee, 100 at the Providence Journal, 100 at the Hartford Courant, ninety at the San Diego Union-Tribune, thirty at the Wall Street Journal … Gannet, which owns 85 newspapers, recently asked all staff to take a week’s unpaid leave.

Of course, newspapers have been in steady decline for some years. It started with the proliferation of media outlets a few decades ago, and the resultant fragmentation of the advertising market. Newspapers, which had always had a big piece of the advertising market, found themselves having to share it with more and more media outlets – and had to adjust to receiving a smaller piece of the pie.
This was accelerated with the advent of the Internet, which offered so much information so much quicker and cheaper than newspapers could ever offer. The Internet has recently overtaken all other media as the first source of news for most people in the northern hemisphere.

55. This is the magic number - the average age of an American newspaper reader, and it is going up every year. That is perhaps the clearest sign of a dying medium – its audience is closer to retirement and approaching death. Young people view newspapers with bewilderment.

The current global economic crisis has speeded things up dramatically. So serious is it, that the US congress recently held hearings into the future of newspapers. In France, the government has announced a Euro600-m rescue package, which includes giving a free newspaper subscription to every 18-year-old. To arbitrarily choose another example, in Scotland, total newspapers sales are at half of what they were just 10 years ago, and the number of people who regularly read a paper has dropped from 75% to less than 50%.

But I am not simply saying that newspapers are in decline. I am going much further, in saying that the advertising model of newspapers is what is falling apart.

It is not that people are not consuming news, In fact, the Internet has in many cases increased these newspaper’s global audiences (in the case of the New York Times, by a factor of about 10) but does not produce the revenue to pay for the newsroom. Traditional advertising does not work well on the Internet, and attempts to charge audiences for internet subscriptions, as is done with the newspaper itself, have fallen flat. There is resistance to paying because so much information is free online.
In South Africa, the problem is somewhat different. Only about 7% of the country uses the Internet, so it has not yet presented the threat to newspapers that we have seen in those places with cheap and fast connectivity. In fact, our total newspaper sales have been going up in the last few years (as it has in other developing countries like China and India).

But it is only the tabloid newspapers, the new ones which target the working class, which are growing (most notably the Daily Sun). South Africa’s traditional (older) newspapers have been in gradual and steady circulation decline for decades. The Star, for example, is selling fewer newspapers than it did 50 years ago, when it’s audience was only about R3-m whites. The same is true of every single newspaper in the Independent group.

Nevertheless, at least some of our newspapers have been making stupendous profits in recent years. The Sunday Times is a veritable money-machine, with some of the highest margins in the world of newspapers. Independent’s group is in trouble internationally, crippled by debt, but their SA newspapers are by far the most profitable in the global group, with margins of over 20%. They contributed Euro26-m to the international groups profits last year, an increase of more than 30% over the previous year.

But from October 2008, advertising revenue plummeted suddenly, forcing cutbacks in already depleted newsrooms. At Independent Newspapers down the road, they have retrenched a dozen sub-editors as they merge all the production operations of all 14 of their newspaper titles into one subs room.

At Media24, just up the road, they are merging the four newsrooms of their “serious” Afrikaans newspapers (Beeld, Burger, Rapport, Volksblad) into one multimedia operation which will provide the material to all these papers and their websites.

At the Mail & Guardian, they are examining whether they can avoid retrenching about 12 of their staff of 102 people by cutting work hours and pay.

Business Day is slashing its editorial budgets, with editor Peter Bruce saying he is trying desperately to avoid retrenching in this process, though it is by no means certain he can. They have merged their newsroom with the Financial Mail.

Our newspapers have been sheltered by the fact that we do not have quick or cheap internet access, but this is a condition which cannot last. It is only delaying the inevitable. Our newspapers are already being squeezed, and it is only a matter of time before the life is squeezed out of them – as surely as email and the fax are killing traditional snail-mail.

You might ask, as many young people do, what does this matter? Newspapers are old media, ridiculously slow and expensive to print and distribute, no longer of much interest to young people – and of course the internet can offer cheap and superquick distribution of news as well as a host of other capabilities, such as interactivity, multimediality and social networking?

Why do we care about newspapers?

Well, we do so for two reasons.

The first is that newspapers have driven real journalism. It is newspapers which have for the last 200 years put reporters in courts, have them sit in city council meetings, watch parliamentary committee hearings, read annual reports and do all those tedious, time-consuming things that tell us what is going on in the world. As one US commentator put it, a world without newspapers is one in which the small-time corrupt politician will thrive. Nobody will be watching him or her.

Newspapers have not always done this effectively, nor consistently, and most recently have done less and less of it. But radio has barely done it for years, and television has never really done it.

The second is that the internet is not producing the revenue to fund newsrooms. The internet may have the audience, but it does not have the advertising revenue, and this means there is a proliferation of masses of information on the internet, but there is little journalism. There is opinion, there are assertions, there is speculation, there is news stolen from other media, there is plenty of noise and masses of clutter, but there is very little verification, or investigation, or fact-checking, or editing, or the gatekeeping that sifts the wheat from the chaff.

The problem is this: the traditional advertising model does not work well on the internet, so news sites do not have the revenue to fund news-gathering and editing, and people are not prepared yet to pay for information on the internet.

So the Guardian of London and the New York Times might have increased their audience tenfold through the internet (NYT has 20-m online readers; the Guardian about 18-m, and grew 30% in the last year, while its print edition has about 1,3-m readers), but they can only do it for as long as the newspaper can pay for the conventional newsroom. And on current projections it will not be able to do that for much longer.

In the long run, it seems inevitable that we will have to move towards paying for the information we need and value on the internet. But how we get there is the difficulty. Those who have tried a paying model, have just had to watch their audience go get free information elsewhere. There is too much available for free to get people to pay.

We know we have to get to a paying model, and that we will probably have to pay substantially more for quality news and information, but we don’t yet know how to get there.

Various pay models have been tried and failed. Others are being mooted: meter-system, loyalty donations (like PBS), micropayments.

We are in that in-between period when an old system is dying and the new is not yet born. In the interregnum, as Gramsci put it, a great variety of morbid symptoms prevails.

I want to end by presenting you with two views of the road we are on.

The high road comes from those who are adamant that the internet can be a much more powerful social, community, political, investigative, watchdog tool than newspapers ever were. On the net, we can do what newspapers do, and so much more, and quicker and cheaper. It gives much wider democratic access to the media with much lower barriers of entry; freedom of the press will no longer belong only to those who own one, but to anyone with a computer and a phone line. It is much les susceptible to control by governments, and it multiplies our choices as readers manifold times. It puts the reader/consumer in command; if journalists can adapt, and learn how to make it work, they are much more indepndent and flexible than ever before – argue writers like Dan Gillmore.

Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist.com, calls this a period of “creative destruction”.

The low road is one that says that on the internet there is not gatekeeping, no quality control, no editing, no verification, no fact-checking. We will be swamped by a barrage of nonsense like Wikipaedia – what purports to be an encyclopaedia, but is in fact an agglomeration of some fact, some fiction, lots of self promotion and pr, and very little quality. I tell my students that taking information from Wikipaedia and many other parts of the internet is like finding a date from a toilet door phone number: it is full of potential, but very risky. These warnings are given by writers such as Kovach and Rosenstiel of the US Committee of Concerned Journalists.

More pertinent, perhaps, is to analyse how the internet will inevitably and fundamentally change journalism. The relationship between a journalist and his audience becomes a conversation, rather than the top-down lecture style of old media. Individual journalists can build their own audience and their personal credibility becomes more important than the authority of the masthead.

Of course, journalists have always been underpaid and unliked. Now it seems they may also be unemployed.

*This talk was delivered to the Wits Alumni Association, 29 May 2009

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print