The future of journalism

Part 1: Clay Shirky lecture

1) Why does Clay Shirky argue that 'accountability journalism' is so important and what example does he give of this?

One, why it is I think that newspapers’ ability to produce accountability journalism is shrinking, and why I am convinced that those changes are secular, monotonic, and irreversible, rather than being merely cyclic and waiting for the next go around.

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.

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.)?

Media is now created by demand rather than supply — which is to say the next web page is printed when someone wants it to be printed, not printed and stored in a warehouse in advance if someone who may want it. Turned out that when you have an advertising market that balances supply and demand efficiently, the price plummets.

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?

It’s never made any sense, in terms of what the user wants. It’s what — it’s what print is capable of as a bundle. 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?

 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'?

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?

To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein, from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, there was a long hundred years between the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years.

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?

The internet is full of differing opinions and fake news and by having newspapers readers can easily identify real news.

Part 2: MM55 - Media, Publics, Protest and Power

1) What are the three overlapping fields that have an influence on the relationship between media and democracy?

The vital resources for processes of information gathering, deliberation and analysis that enable citizens to participate in political life, and for democracy to function better.

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? 

In the UK, there are an ever-smaller number of global media institutions dominating the media landscape. Just three companies control 71% of UK national newspaper circulation while only five groups control more than 80% of combined online and offline news.

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.

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?

It has given more power to audiences and encourages them to become their own journalists. This may be a threat to corporate giants as this could be the future of consuming news and according to current statistics for younger generation news consumption this looks likely.