‘He confidently predicted the imminent demise of print newspapers.
“Everyone will be reading their papers on flexible computers in five years’ time,” he declared, with another cavernous cackle.
“Rubbish,” I said.’
In his autobiography, The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade, ex-tabloid editor Piers Morgan recalls having this conversation in 2000 with the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Apparently Mr Bezos had a crystal ball.
Digital is the way the media industry is inevitably heading. People are already reading their headlines on websites, getting information from tabloids and broadsheets at the same time through a simple search on Google. And instead of just reading an article, they are also watching videos, looking at pictures and listening to audio clips, not just as an addition to a story but as a main component. This digital revolution demands urgency and a higher turnover of work because of the speed in which information can be accessed and uploaded – news can be broken round the clock without issues of printing delay.
It is also allowing for the evolution and increase of User Generated Content (UGC) that grants the public a chance to contribute and create their own journalism. Anyone can write a blog, comment on an article or in a forum, write articles for websites, upload a video to Youtube in minutes or email an at-the-scene photograph to a major news company.
With speed, multimedia and competition from the audience being such main elements of these changes, what does this mean for good journalism and what can a journalist do to hold their own in the shake-up?
For many, this revolution has left the industry in crisis. Print sales are falling as cost cuts are made through large scale redundancies, with more to come as Press Gazette has announced this year possible job losses at the Financial Times and New Statesman. Journalists and print are being undercut and arguably undermined by a new generation of multimedia publications and UGC that is faster, with less restrictions and sometimes more knowledge. As the BBC’s Richard Sambrook said:
“Whatever subject we choose to report, someone in our audience – let alone the collective wisdom of the audience – will know more about it than we do.”
However, UGC does come with a new set of problems. ‘Unedited. Unfiltered.’ is the motto of CNN’s ireport through which anyone can publish a news story. In October 2008, a story appeared that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, had had a heart attack. Apple shares dropped, only to rise swiftly again when the story was revealed to be untrue. In his lecture, Journalistic Ethics in The Digital Age, BBC trustee Richard Tait iterates that accuracy, ethical standards and even legality become an issue when the speed and nature of user contribution leaves it unchecked and often untraceable.
Charles Reiss, former political editor of the Evening Standard, said in a Cardiff University lecture that public trust in journalists is even lower than in politicians with only 6% of people surveyed having faith in newspapers. Indeed, misrepresentations such as Cosmopolitan’s recent misquoting in a Scarlett Johansson interview about which the magazine admitted to using inaccurate news agency material, as well as a series of high profile events including the Andrew Gilligan Iraq dossier scandal, have left people sceptical about the media. At such a time, further doubts over journalism accuracy and ethics as a result of the industry’s changing format are the last thing we need. In this sense the digital revolution could not have come at a worse time.
But rumour and scepticism is one thing – is good journalism really at stake here? Nick Brett, Deputy Managing Director of BBC Magazines, doesn’t think so. According to him, some things will never change for a journalist and for creating good journalism – the need for great ideas, an understanding of the audience, good writing, a sense of timing and an obsession with accuracy. Regardless of the medium – computer screen or page – those facts are set in stone.
And journalists already have a head start. ‘One of the most important functions of a great journalism school is to set the tone and standard which encourages its graduates in the sure belief that they must carry with them a set of personal standards of reliability and honesty in their work.” Ian Hargreaves wrote this in The ethics of journalism: a summing up for Lord Hutton. It is a basic principal but one that is important. One of the best ways in which a journalist can continue to produce good journalism is to always remember the value of their training.
This training extends to everything from generating ideas and thinking of the audience to meticulous fact-checking, taking accurate notes and respecting source anonymity.
It also includes an awareness of personal limits. In August 2008 a female journalism student was brutally raped in an illegal migrant camp while investigating a story in Calais. Tragic as this is, she had gone alone and had not notified the appropriate people of her presence including a local charity working in the camp. Training is so vital, as is a knowledge of the scenario you are going into, and encouraging the audience to get close to the fire to take a photograph is taking a risk. Six working journalists around the world have already been killed in 2009 – it is an increasingly dangerous profession as journalists become targets in times of peace as well as war. Rodney Pinder, Director of News Safety Institute, is constantly trying to increase training for journalists in any situation where they may be at risk and to promote accountability on the part of employers. Journalists have the privileged access to these tools that can make them even more effective.
The future
The potential for good journalism is never going to be under threat: the principals are always there. It may be difficult with the increased pressure caused by job cuts and the urgency of the digital medium, but the thing that journalists need to do now is to adhere to the basics and show the invaluable benefits of their training – journalism is a profession after all.
In Killing the Messenger: Report of the Global Inquiry by the International News Safety Institute into the Protection of Journalists, Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, is quoted saying:
“Journalists have to make it clear they matter by raising the standard of their work.”
This is very true in a digital time where the audience is a rival and where the entire necessity of a “journalist” is in question. They are competing for a place in a world they have always been in and this is hard to accept. However, by proving their worth against that of UGC and new technological tools, by harnessing and using these new things instead of being threatened by them, journalists can hold their own in a time of change and start to bring trust back into the industry by doing the best job they can.
A new age of the digital is here and there is no stopping it – journalists should use this as a chance to up their game and make sure good journalism is the only survivor of the revolution.
