The Future of Journalism: Blog tasks

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

Back from January of 2002, when the Boston Globe published a two-part series on the upcoming trial of Father John Geoghan, who was a priest and pedophile who had been employed by the Catholic Church since the 1960s. Three Globe reporters had been working on this story and they had gotten hold of the documents the church had been forced to submit in the upcoming trial. Turned out that Geoghan had raped or fondled over 100 boys in his care, and was able to do this in diocese after diocese because every time the accusations would start, the Catholic Church would take him off to rehabilitation, which was ineffective, then assign him to a new diocese, and he went and moved through several parishes in the area. The reaction to this story as you can imagine was instant and horrified shock on the part of the Catholic laity. Story went worldwide. So many people read it that The New York Times company, the parent company of The Boston Globe, mentioned that story in their investors relations document at the end of that quarter because the size and global scope of the audience was literally unprecedented in the Times Co.’s history

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.)?

He claims that because advertising businesses were overpaid by print newspaper companies, there is a poor relationship between newspapers and ad corporations. " I think the first thing to recognize about the commercial structures of the newspaper industry is that it is not enough for newspapers to run at a profit to reverse the current threat and change. If next year they all started throwing off 30 percent free cash flow again, that would not yet reverse the change, because there were other characteristics of the commercial environment as well.

The first of them was that advertisers were forced to overpay for the services they received, because there weren’t many alternatives for reaching people with display ads — or especially things like coupons. And because they overpaid, the newspapers essentially had the kind of speculative investment capital to do long-range, high-risk work. So it isn’t enough to be commercial; you have to be commercial at a level above what some theoretical market would bare."

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?
A lot of Newspapers go away. Syndication makes no sense in a world of URLs, as the AP is realizing, so they’re saying you can send the traffic to us, instead of us sending the stories to you. So the restructuring that environment, even for those newspapers that survive, will mean that newspapers play a less significant role in accountability journalism in the future then they have the past

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? 
The prevailing story among some parts of the media enterprise now for recovering from the current difficulties in the commercial model of the 20th century is user fees. Either a paywall, micropayments, per-user charges, per-articles charges, what have you. The effect of that would be to make the kind of value that the public got from the Geoghan article illegal — not illegal, uncontractural. A violation of contract to make use of the news.

To me that the ecosystem we’re in now is already different enough from the 20th-century ecosystem that we should be looking at ways of balancing the very expensive and time-consuming production of accountability journalism with the possibility of public reuse of same. Because that public reuse produces a kind of value that doesn’t just come from publication. It comes from republication and reuse.

6) What is a 'social good'? In what way might journalism be a 'social good'?

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. Not public goods, but rather things that are accessible to the public. You can go to the market, and things in the market are created when revenues can reliably exceed expenses. And then you expect some company to set itself up and provision. You can have a public organization that has some source of income other than revenue, whether it is endowment, donations, taxes, whatever. It typically operates in different legal regime. Producing goods because they believe that that is the right use of that money and they are constituted to pursue those goals.

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?
I think, for people to agree about the irreplaceability of newspapers, but to disagree about how serious the change in the media environment is. And the more you are convinced, as I am, that this is a fairly significant revolution in media production, the likelier it is that the irreplaceability of newspapers suggests that the next step needs to be vast and varied experimentation, not the transfer of allegiance from one institution to another. And there I’ll end.

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?

I believe those articles are essential because people use them as a reference when disseminating news; without them, we wouldn't have any reliable news sources

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

Media Magazine 55 has an excellent feature on power and the media. Go to our Media Magazine archive, click on MM55 and scroll to page 38 to read the article Media, Publics, Protest and Power', a summary of Media academic Natalie Fenton’s talk to a previous Media Magazine conference. Answer the following questions:

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

Research points to three areas that have a structural influence on the relationship between

media and democracy: political, economic and journalistic, all of which overlap to a certain extent.

• The political field intervenes when the state powerfully limits or enables the diversity of voices

and views in the press, through its power to regulate, deregulate or subsidise the media.

• The economic field refers to commercial influences that encompass elements such as

concentration of ownership; profit pressures relating to types of ownership; type of funding

(such as advertising or paying audiences); and level and intensity of market competition.

• The journalistic field refers to assumptions that have emerged over time about what

constitutes ‘news’, and about the purpose of journalism; practices of news gathering and

sourcing; norms of objectivity and impartiality– the ethics and practice of journalism

that contribute to the news ecology in anyone place at any one moment in time.

2) What is ‘churnalism’ and what issues are there currently in journalism?

Consequently, more news must now be produced and distributed faster than ever

before. 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. Once you combine the faster and shallower corporate journalism of the digital age with the need to pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons, it is not difficult to see how the traditional rigour of professional journalism is quickly cast aside. And if they are dominated by the same huge corporate players, the explosion of news platforms online does nothing to counter this.

3) What statistics are provided by Fenton to demonstrate the corporate dominance of a small number of conglomerates? 

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. Unchecked media concentration over several decades has allowed some media groups to accumulate vast amounts of revenue, along with social and political influence, which has adverse consequences for independent journalism and democracy. Such market dominance of news media results in an excess of power and unruly political influence that breeds fear.

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. Four successive Prime Ministers admitted to The Leveson Enquiry

that they were ‘too close’ to the big media players because the political stakes were so very high. In

this climate, political parties, the police and other institutions are reluctant to investigate wrong- doing in the news media, hinder the expansion of large media conglomerates, or introduce new regulation of news organisations and journalistic practice. They also avoid certain areas of public policy, for fear either of hostile reporting or media owner conflict, creating an environment where politicians are more likely to discuss populist policies.

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?

Journalists are often too intimidated to stand up to a bullying culture where market- oriented managers place commercial priorities above journalistic responsibility and integrity. But it is not only journalists whose freedom is limited by corporate compliance. Our ability to exercise our own democratic freedom as ordinary members of the public is premised on the basic fact that governments are not distorted by private interest of multi-media conglomerates.