Does journalism have a future?

Does journalism have a future?

NICHOLAS LEMANN

George Brock
OUT OF PRINT
Newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age
242pp. Kogan Page. Paperback, £19.99 (US $24.95).
978 0 7494 6651 0

Published: 18 December 2013, The Times Literary Supplement

People tend to have little sympathy with accounts of crisis in a trade or profession. It comes across as evidence of excessive self-preoccupation, or as a prelude to special pleading before government. Journalism’s difficulties seem to be drawing this kind of reaction from many people who aren’t journalists. Isn’t the press still a swaggering, even power-abusing actor in politics and society? Doesn’t it command vast attention and resources? Isn’t more news being read by more people than ever before?

Out of Print: Newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age shows that something really has changed quite suddenly and dramatically in the press industry. George Brock is a veteran newspaperman, and his main concern in this clear-headed, synoptic and never whiny book is with the institutions where he has spent most of his career. In the United States, newspaper advertising revenue – the main source of economic support by far – was $63.5 billion in 2000. By 2012 it had fallen to $19 billion. (During the same period, advertising revenue at Google went from zero to $46.5 billion.) Employment in the American newspaper industry fell by 44 per cent between 2001 and 2011. In the European Union, newspaper revenue is falling by more than 10 per cent a year. In the UK, newspaper circulation has dropped by more than 25 per cent during the twenty-first century. It would be hard to think of another industry that is going through such a sudden collapse.

Journalism operates, Brock says, at “the intersection between a social, democratic purpose and the market”. This makes it difficult to sort out the aspect of the industry’s economic crisis that is only a problem for media owners and their employees, and the aspect that is a problem for everybody else. As Brock rather gently puts it, “in the main journalists are convinced or easily persuaded that what they do is so good and important that someone should pay them to do it”, but this is too broad a conviction to be persuasive to non-journalists. A more carefully argued version of what journalists feel would be that, when done well, institutionally produced news has distinctive, socially advantageous qualities. It can pull together large groups of people with diverse perspectives and interests into a shared public conversation. Jürgen Habermas has presented the rise of the press as having been essential to the creation of the public sphere, and newspapers are also central to Benedict Anderson’s idea of nations as “imagined communities”.

Journalism can provide verified, impartial information about public affairs, rather than offering up a cacophony of opinion and conflicting claims as the internet often does. Reporters can surface and present to the public important material that otherwise would not be available, for example about the misdeeds of the powerful.

It would be hard to think of another industry that is going through such a sudden collapse. One reason this view of journalism isn’t more widely accepted is that, as Brock says, it represents only a small, time-limited part of the overall history of the press. Brock’s account begins in the late sixteenth century. As he usefully reminds us, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that a commercially supported, politically independent, fully staffed, mass-produced press came into being. Before that, the press was a medium for the printed dissemination of free speech and for making public basic information about government and business. The term “journalist”, denoting a full-time livelihood, wasn’t used in Britain until around 1830. Interviewing, a socially impertinent American invention [JB emphasis], became a standard British journalistic technique only in the 1880s. Newspaper journalism as we know it also required the invention of fast rotary printing presses and the growth of cities, and the editorial content that made news into a successful business had a generous complement of crime, sports, human interest and entertainment, along with more elevated material. In the early twentieth century, the elite newspapers, at least, began to depend economically on advertising and long-term subscriptions rather than on street sales, and this dovetailed with a stated editorial creed of sober, dispassionate objectivity. But successful newspapers were never completely high-minded. As Brock puts it, “there has never been a mass audience for serious news”. The economically viable material paid for the socially valuable material.

During the second half of the twentieth century, now remembered in the newspaper business as a golden age, the position of newspapers was already weakening, Brock argues, mainly because of the advent of radio and television. In the US, newspaper sales per thousand people fell by 55 per cent from 1950 to 2008. The trouble wasn’t obvious at first, because economies in the developed world were generally growing, populations were rising, advertising revenues were increasing, and the losses in newspaper audience came mostly in the form of the weaker papers going out of business (London had more than fifty daily papers 200 years ago) while the more established papers grew. By, say, 1975, it had become just about impossible for a new entrant to start a big daily newspaper or a television station, because of prohibitively high costs and regulatory barriers. Protected from competition, news organizations, for one historical season, were able to assemble, print and deliver a big collection of information people wanted and could not get from anywhere else – sports scores, movie times, stock prices, as well as more conventional news – into an unbreakable package. This allowed them to charge substantial fees to advertisers and subscribers.

Satellite and cable television, and then, especially, the internet, have brought the protected position of big news organizations to a sudden end, and made the underlying erosion of the newspaper audience more obvious. Previously, defining journalism had been easy, at least for journalists. As Brock puts it, “Journalists were people who worked for these quasi-industrial organizations”. Much of what news organizations produced was replicative – substantial press packs covered the same stories in roughly the same way – or was merely a repackaging of public information. But, operating from their safe perch, journalists could tell themselves that if they produced something, it must have economic and social value. Those comfortable assumptions are now gone. As a business, newspapers have been subjected to devastating competition from new entrants in advertising sales and in information provision. As a social activity, they have had to meet a much higher standard of originality and distinctiveness.

The situation in journalism is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to get a sure sense of what is going on. There is a great deal of discussion but it mainly takes place in an endless series of panel debates and blog posts where there are plenty of confident assertions, but not much reliable data. Roughly speaking, the discussants divide into two teams: Team Digital, whose members are quick to predict the imminent and not especially tragic death of the familiar news organizations, and Team Mainstream Media, whose members look hopefully at every new development for evidence to support their wish for a restoration of the good old days. When Buzzfeed raises millions of dollars from venture-capital firms, or a member of the public with an iPhone produces the first picture of a breaking news event and posts it to a global audience, Team Digital proclaims victory. When the New York Times introduces a reasonably successful online subscription system, Team Mainstream Media does. The great virtue of Brock’s book is that it deals comprehensively, intelligently and unsentimentally with the entire range of major questions about journalism now. Although it doesn’t present a lot of new information, it is the best single source available for context about the situation as a whole.

Brock is so persuasive at presenting professionalized journalism as a late and unexpected development in the history of the press that he can then suggest that it might simply disappear without sounding melodramatic or alarmist. “It may one day in the future seem odd that societies had a large group of well-paid professionals whose job it was to select and provide the words and images that people looked at in order to know the world beyond what they could see and hear with their own eyes and ears”. This has been the prediction of at least a large portion of Team Digital for some time – that news producers and news consumers between them can replicate almost all of what the newspaper industry in its glory days produced, at no cost. Conversely, because journalism was created and sustained far more by market conditions than by public policy, news organizations always have the option of surviving by becoming purely commercial and dropping the high-minded parts of journalism, which grew and thrived only because they were subsidized by other material. This is more obviously the case in Britain, which has the ever-present example of the mass-circulation tabloid papers, than in the US, where most of the major newspapers have been middlebrow regional monopolies.

The economically viable material has always paid for the socially valuable material

To work in a traditional city newsroom is to witness every day what is still quite an impressive industrial process. Information flows in from an enormous variety of sources, gets sorted, sifted, processed and translated into a clear, accessible form, moves onto gigantic machines for an instantaneous mass production process, and then gets physically distributed to hundreds of thousands of locations. As Brock points out, this routine did not change much between 1890 and 1990, so the newspaper business rewarded with its leadership positions, on both the business and editorial sides, people who would perform its logistically challenging operations well. Then, suddenly, journalism needed people who could reconceive its mission, which wasn’t a talent it had thought to develop within its ranks. On the business side, this now means grappling with a new world in which readers have become accustomed to getting their news for free and advertisers have the luxury of paying far lower rates to reach far more highly targeted audiences through websites such as Google, Facebook and, most recently, Twitter.

Brock doesn’t try to solve this problem, but he does take on the project of defining the social value of journalism more precisely than merely asserting, implausibly, that everything journalists do is essential: “I would define journalism as the systemic, independent attempt to establish the truth of events and issues that matter to society in a timely way”, and he offers a menu of four sub-categories – verification, sense-making, witness and investigation. It still leaves the question how this mission will be supported, if not by readers and advertisers. The news you read today that meets Brock’s definition is often supported by government (as in the case of the BBC or Al-Jazeera) or by a rich patron who finds the role of press lord attractive and has other means of making money. These are not entirely satisfying solutions to the problem of how to support the socially useful aspects of journalism: state support is out of sync with the current resources and inclinations of the developed world, and support by patrons is a happenstance, not a guarantee.

There are alternatives, and, towards the end of Out of Print, Brock notes some American examples of relatively new, online-only news sites that seem to be self-sufficient. One senses that Brock is trying to be optimistic about these, but he is intellectually honest enough to mention that all of them are still small and struggling. It is difficult to say with a straight face, and George Brock does not, that the fabled “new business model” for news – that members of Team Mainstream Media often see just around the corner – has arrived, or will arrive any time soon. The internet might end up returning journalism to a faster, more technologically sophisticated version of what it was before the advent of the commercial newspaper business.

Nicholas Lemann teaches at Columbia Journalism School, where he is Dean Emeritus. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker.