RSSOver the past few days, the future of journalism has been the topic of discussion of both a panel at the WaterFront Hall (part of Trans, naturally) and a couple of interesting articles I’ve coincidentally stumbled across. Oddly, from spending almost three years of my life on a path to a career in the media (running a local station, producing and co-presenting a podcast, blogging etc), it’s something I write about very little - so I intend to lay the groundwork with my opinion on the future of journalism and develop from there.
The future of journalism is already among us, or at least the principles are. The journalistic mediums of the future are on-demand, interactive, and personalizable - and thereby inherently digital. Journalistic mediums of the past - ie. newspapers, radio and television - existed as three separate mediums requiring three separate “hardware” investments (however temporary) for consumption, were typically a one-way conversation and allowed little to no immediate feedback or correspondence.
Obviously this transition is already taking place with the increasingly popularity of “online” newspapers (particularly the big nationals), who now syndicate much of their print content to allow for interactivity, as well as relevant additional content in the form of journalist/topic specific blogs, podcasts and streamable video. But it is not the content or distribution that will define the future of journalism - given its comparative ease in publishing compared to print - but rather, how the previously established models will evolve to self-finance as the security of print advertising revenue is removed and online journalism is forced to go it alone.
Pretty much everyone in the media is aware of the graph I’m going to delineate. Currently, print advertising income is falling and online advertising income is rising. Beyond today, no one really knows if this trend is going to continue, but what we can be relatively sure of is that the lines will not eventually cross at break-even for many newspapers - which will leave many severely crippled or even off the radar entirely. The hope is in the eventual security of switching to predominantly online distribution - which should severely cut costs and leaves groups in an excellent position to widen distribution with comparatively less marketing effort - the only problem being that the model or means for independently financing this has yet to be imagined.
“I do think, though, that a bunch of smart people could make a lot of headway in discussing the survival of journalism if they could only leap over these 10 points — leave them at the door, place them off-limits — and get on with a fruitful discussion of how to generate revenues to support the work that must continue.”
The first person to come up with a successful, profitable execution of these ideas will have something very, very interesting on their hands.
What are your thoughts? How do you think you’ll be consuming media in 10 years time?
2 Comments
Too many disjointed thoughts:
I’m not convinced that it’s possible to “leap over these 10 points” just yet, or not all of them at any rate. I’m not sure it’s valid to conflate print, radio and television, which means Mindy’s point 6 gives me problems:
Many people worldwide are not online. I know that. Many people are illiterate and cannot read newspapers. Let’s move on.
Forget worldwide for now and think of Northern Ireland, even Belfast. I suspect that for some time to come (as long as those who currently over, say, 40 years of age are around) television and radio will remain big players.
There are still issues of capacity around accessing online resources for too many people. I get my news fix online, by and large, but my mother doesn’t. Nor does her mother, or her brother. And these are folks who I hope will be consuming media for a long time to come — them and their contemporaries. This means that we can’t gloss over these legacy media without inadvertently disenfranchising a whole lot of people.
Of course this still raises the questions of how legacy media are funded. TV advertising is still big, but the BBC remains a major player in the news space. The TV Licence is another question altogether, but it appears to have broadly worked for a long time so may well endure.
The BBC et al. continue to experiment with this “citizen journalism” thing, but it’s nothing better than a gimmick. Yes, a bystander with a cam-phone can produce compelling images of an event, but day-to-day it’s not worth a whole pile.
All my ideas of generating revenue for news in the online space fall flat. Reliance on advertising revenue is a very old model, but has anyone really come up with anything better? Introduction of some kind of “public service” remit to online news is getting uncomfortably close to over-regulation. Philanthropy is fickle, and we tend to be (often too) suspicious of it. But the money has to come from somewhere, which somebody at some point will have to pay. Who would you rather have?
Producers? What’s in it for them?
Advertisers? It only goes so far, and all the advertising on the web already does my head in.
Consumers? Unlikely, somehow.
Government? It won’t happen without unwelcome regulation.
That’s a big long ramble to come down to “I don’t know.”
I do wonder if I’m (am I alone?) coming close to saturation point for media consumption, anyway.
