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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

The Changing Media Landscape « Previous | |Next »
August 24, 2009

I will be on one of the panels of The Future of Journalism: Blueprint for Progress Forum held at ABC Studios 24 August 2009, Adelaide. My talk notes for the forum are below.They are more or less some ideas that function as reference points for a free ranging discussion.

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There is common agreement that the rapid development of digital technology means that our mediascape will be almost unrecognizable in the near future. This commonness is what rhetoricians call a common place (common and community) that establishes a particular path for an argument about the future of journalism.

Newspapers have been hit by a ‘perfect storm’ of threats surrounding their business models, including: declining print circulation (particularly among young people); the shift of classified advertising to the Internet; the rise of low-cost alternative online news outlets; the rise of citizen journalism, blogging and self-publishing; and fundamental shifts in user behaviour toward accessing news content. In countries such as the United States and Britain, this has led to leading newspapers either going bankrupt or online-only, and threatens to bring down even flagship publications such as the New York Times.

However, there is limited evidence in Australia of a fundamental shift away from mass media such as television and radio. Rather, what appears to have primarily occurred is a substitution effect between print media (newspapers and magazines) and the Internet. Secondly, the decline in newspaper circulation has not been as sharp in Australia as in the United States. Crikey, On Line Opinion and New Matilda attract only about 5-10% of the readership of online sites such as theaustralian.com.au

Let’s be clear that the core problem is that advertisers--not readers--are deserting newspapers. And it is advertisers, not readers, who have always paid the expensive cost of newspaper journalism.

‘blue print for progress’
Before I make an argument some philosophical points need to be made about the terms ‘blueprints’ ,‘progress’ and ‘media’ used in the title of the forum---The Future of Journalism: Blueprint for Progress. These presuppose a certain mode of knowledge/power that underpins traditional journalism.

‘blueprint’. The process of change in the mediascape is such that there can be no blueprint. We just don’t know with certainty. Those who say they have one do so on the basis of ignorance and are more than likely to be engaged in deception than enlightenment. How many economists had any sense of the global financial crisis or the extent of its fallout? Their blueprint consisted of them all endlessly spinning about the eternal mining boom that would deliver utopia. Instead of ‘blue print’ we should use ‘threshold’ with a map. We stand on a threshold and we can make educated guesses.

"progress" is two edged not a linear path to the future akin to a yellow brick road. Some things will improve or develop whilst others will deteriorate or die. Consider the effects of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme and the emergence of irrigated agriculture on the ecology of the Murray-Darling river system. Or, if that is not persuasive, consider the powering of capitalism’s growth engine with cheap black and brown coal. This enabled Australia to have a competitive advantage. It has given rise to a global heating now weaving a swathe of destruction through irrigated agriculture whilst drying out our landscape.

This implies a regime of knowledge that is universal, knowledge of truth is rock solid certain, accurate knowledge is an instrument for control and mastery. The role of the intellectual/journalist is privileged as a legislator articulating universal and necessary truths. Its a form of knowledge/power that underpins the traditional ‘gatekeeping’ models of journalism, where the process of news gathering is highly centralized and controlled, authority is exclusively held by credentialed professional journalists, and public input is restricted to token measures such as the Letters to the Editor page,

We have shift from the ‘high modernist’ era of crusading investigative journalism towards the 24-hour news cycle, and a growing public distrust of journalists increasingly being seen as the conduits for material provided to them by well-funded special interests (political, business etc.).

Let’s pick up on the term ‘threshold.’ The economics is that we are experiencing a transitional phase: the process of creative destruction in which old industries die and new ones emerge due to long wave structural change in media technologies. This creative destruction is the way that capitalism works and that means losers and winners in a changing mediascape.

We do have a bit of a map to guide us in this new terrain of digital connectivity emerging from the process of creative destruction. This enables us to make “educated guesses" about past and future processes based on our present knowledge about the way the world works.

And my argument on this point? We need to loosen up the way we habitually think about the media and journalism if we are to get a handle of the emerging multiplicities of the new media and our mutating digital connectivities. It is a history of the present”, grasping the present in its contingency, unsettling it from its prejudices and exploding their hold on reality, to understand life in its becoming.

An example of this is the professional ideology of journalists themselves. The interest of the profession is in preserving an insider/outsider distinction between journalists and the rest of society, not only as a means of safeguarding jobs and professional standing, but also because journalists fear the consequences of the opening up of information circulation to the wider public.

The professional ideology of journalism as it developed over the 20th century, where the expectation was that a small, self-defined professional cadre of journalists produced news according to established industrial techniques, on behalf of a mass public bumps up against the emerging participatory media culture.

educated guesses
What then are my educated guesses about past and future processes in the mediascape? They are:

(1)What is passing is the old industrial or Fordist order with its mass production and mass audiences to a more flexible economy based more upon services than manufacturing. In this process a more diversified, multiple and niche based media is becoming.

(2) What we know from the experience of the 1980s is that major structural change is always painful in that people will lose their jobs as the old industries contract whilst the jobs in the new industries expand. Traditional newspapers are old industries.

(3) Most newspapers aren’t watchdogs, and most of the rest don’t spend an inordinate amount of time being watchdogs. Most papers are instead lapdogs--the Most newspapers in the U.S. aren’t watchdogs, and most of the rest don’t spend an inordinate amount of time being watchdogs. Most papers are instead lapdogs--the arts and entertainment section is mostly promotional offering pages of fluff.

(4) Difference is crucial in the provision of media content buttressed by intellectual property rights a ‘media mix’, a term used to describe the creation of a series of connections between and across media texts: a photojournalist story about say the Snowtown murders is turned into a comic serialization then into an anime television series, then a live action film, a video game and a novel, which is read by a journalist who uses as context for story on a serial killer. Suddenly, we are talking about the culture industries.

(5) the assemblages or multiplicity of new media will be diversified and indeterminate as they constantly construct and dismantle themselves, break down and transform into something else.

(6) one of these transformations is that the binary divide between active, communication media and passive, silent, fixed subjects is being broken down with user generated content. As a blogger I consume the media but I also generate content.

(7) many of these media assemblages are a line of flight from the digital price wall erected by the extension of intellectual property right, will locate themselves in the public domain, and so develop the commons.

(8) these media assemblages will break down the traditional bifurcation of amateur versus professional; create multiple understandings of journalism as writing and image making; reconnect more with an active and critical audience turn more to the local and everyday life. Flickr gives us picture of what this might look like.

(9)within this multiplicity the knowledge workers become more interpreters of cultural meanings, political and historical events and social change.

(10) some argue that what is at stake in the media city is not the flow of information, which appears and disappears instantaneously, but the nostalgia and memory of traces of the past that will continue to remain in the urban space. Flickr suggests that the fleeting information will be used by media workers as a building block of a social narrative that forms part of an ongoing conversation in the public domain.

My argument about the media past is that vast swaths of a typical Australian daily is filled with news whose primary source is a press release of one form or another, from entities governmental, political, or corporate. The web mercilessly exposes the emptiness of the infotainment content of most papers, and it indicates that newspapers don’t have anything to sell that approximates the lost value of their monopoly.

With a personalized Google home page, to cite just one example, I can put together a much better window—one that comprises headlines, a clock, weather, recent postings on any blogs that interest me, and hundreds of other things—in about 15 minutes.

freelance, niche content and audience
I haven’t said much specifically about the future of journalism in this. It is just another form of writing isn’t it. It has historically been marked by certain professional conventions, ethos and codes and myths about the fourth estate as watchdog for liberal democracy. These forms of journalist writing are rapidly changing into multiplicities, or a swarm of differences.

One multiplicity is the ABC’s digital town squares based on content generated by citizen journalists trained by them. This form of web journalism is the recovery of the local hidden by the global. Presumably the digital town squares become the centre for the local.

The argument against this is that locally-based citizen journalism is dependent on newspapers. Difference is the key word. Difference or multiplicity means more than a low cost Fairfax newspaper in competition with Murdoch’s Advertiser, such as the Independent Weekly. Brian McCarthy, the CEO of Fairfax, has one strategy--cost containment. However, the low cost online newspapers in Perth and Brisbane do not make the turn to user generated content, because of the entrenched newspaper ethos of professional journalism.This limits its capacity to contribute to an expanded and more dynamic public sphere.

The innovation will come outside newspapers. Apart from the independent bloggers there will be an assemblage of sites and networks emerging around a variety of crucial local issues--eg., the River Murray, sustainable cities, the media, indigenous, health, music etc etc.

An example of an umbrella organisation is the Society for Responsible Design (http://www.green.net.au/srd). So a participatory media culture is being expanded, if this is understood in terms of media pluralism and it is connected to deliberative democracy and the conversation in the public sphere.

There are bits and pieces ---sites, blogs, newsletters, reports, papers, forums produced from a variety of sources--- already; but these configurations of desire will coalesce into assemblages and produce content that pulls from everywhere and does away with the old alliances and allegiances. It is possible that The Adelaide Review may reposition itself from a long established literary and cultural magazine to a magazine with strong political commentary on the basis of recruiting high profile bloggers who contribute to the magazine while blogging on a daily basis.

Three points can be drawn from this that go beyond the emergence of more channels or voices in the mediascape to give us some indication of the contours of the developments in the media landscape.We are entering into a different world to the one that we are leaving.

media landscape
Firstly, one innovation has to do with news framing: the way that sources in government and corporations frame issues and events in order to make information interesting and palatable to journalists, so they can then communicate their frames of an issue to audience members. Journalists cannot negate this framing of issues and events because they need sources’ frames to make news informative to audiences, and to keep their sources. So they add their own contextualization to their sources’ frames – news values and the like – in order to have some measure of professional autonomy in light of the fact that they know they are being used by their sources. The umbrella organizations will do their own framing of issues and events. So once excluded frames and narratives are bought into the public sphere.

Secondly, there is the significance of the public goods. This can be seen in the context of the role of the market. Adam Smith argued that you could only understand the role of the market against a background of public goods (including civil society), and one critically important question is how a society produces those public goods. Smith was fascinated by emergent public goods -- goods that were public goods (since nonrival and nonexcludable, as economists later would formalize the concept), but that were created not by any central actor like the state, but by the mutual and voluntary actions of individuals. Language is the simplest example -- language is a quintessentially public good, but no central coordinator is necessary to produce language. Currency is another public good.

These are emergent products of individuals seeking only their own private ends. Smith’s ‘market model’ in which public goods are the emergent and unintended product of private endeavors to meet private needs applies not just to the way markets serve the common good and produce public goods, but also to the way language, currency and social mores emerge – all of which are foundations of a market order.

Web 2.0 open source software is an emergent public good, as are blogging, Flickr and Wikipedia, as they are part of the the dialectic of human sociality. We are creating our own world through our communication, our interest in what each other are thinking – and our interaction. These free forms of open source culture are structures of knowledge that the Internet is enabling. Open source culture isn't meant to replace mass media but it is changing the way big media operates as we have a Read-Write" Internet with its “remix" and "mashup".

Thirdly, is the idea of an active process of remaking and remixing culture. The idea here is that you take creative work, mix it together and then other people take it and they remix it; they re-express it. In this sense, culture is remix; knowledge is remix; politics is remix. remix is free. It is free. In our tradition it has always been free, free in the sense of unregulated by the law. You need no permission to engage in this act of recreating your culture by commenting or transforming or criticising or praising. You need no permission: it is free. It needs to be free. Four hundred years of culture has produced a legal tradition that embraces this idea that writing is free.

Digital technology opens up the opportunity to speak and criticise and transform to anybody connected to this digital network--remixing images, text and sounds through technology taking the culture that is around us and re-expressing it through these technologies.

new ways of working
The second part of my argument addresses “niche” content and freelancers gathering audiences within a media landscape. Firstly, ‘the media’ no longer refers to television, radio, magazines and newspapers as it includes the assemblages of PDA’s, laptops, I-Phones, cameras etc. These offer greater possibilities for both downloading media content and capturing, recording, and transmitting images and sound. Secondly, we move through different worlds watched and recorded by CCTV cameras, the listening devices of spooks and computer spyware.

The city we move through is in the process of change as the production of space changes from the industrial doughnut city to a digital visual city in which the media record, transmit and process the global flow of information. A liquid culture of image and spectacle is producing new forms of text and image even as the image takes precedence over the text.

In this landscape the knowledge workers become more interpreters of cultural meanings, political and historical events and social change. Their form of knowledge is more local, contextual provisional; a learning to live with ambivalence, uncertainty, contingency and difference; and there is a greater acceptance of a variety of goods, values and truths.

Consider the shift from unsustainable way of life to sustainment in a low carbon economy opens up opportunities for content as what is involved is a change in our way of life and the significant failure to initiate adaptive measures to mitigate the effects of climate change. Lots to write about including the politics and culture of disinformation.

In doing so we become participants in a national conversation; participants struggling to find more sustainable ways of living, limited in capacity and ability, responsive to the suffering of others, and hoping to help make the shift to sustainment as best as one can.

How the web journalist/writers/imagemakers is financed is emerging. Crikey and Business Spectator point to one pathway towards a mixture of free and paid. The strategy appears to be one of not charging for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere; not charging for the most popular content on your site; and the content behind a pay wall appeals to niches, the narrower the niche the better.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:03 PM |