With every click, quality slips through the net

Web news:

By Martin Newland The National, UAE

Media experts gathered in the south of France recently for the 2009 Monaco Media Forum were treated to a set-piece debate that perfectly illustrated the current friction between those who generate media content, such as newspapers, and those who aggregate and disseminate it on the internet for free and without permission, such as Google.

Newspaper companies, which spend millions producing stories and commentary, can only watch as it is repackaged by internet operators better positioned to satisfy the promiscuous and varied consumption trends of the 21st-century reader. As consumers and advertising revenue migrate from newspapers to the Web, the former find themselves in the infuriating position of paying for the raw material that is then exploited by the very websites that prompted this migration in the first place.

The publishing and digital worlds are currently engaged in a sort of Mexican standoff, with global media players such as News Corp's Rupert Murdoch threatening to erect pay walls around the content so painstakingly produced by his many media outlets.

And so it was that Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of the German publishing group Axel Springer, squared up to Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the news website The Huffington Post, in a fiery but mainly good-humoured debate ably moderated by Christine Ockrent, director-general of France 24.

At one point Dopfner likened the activities of aggregators to "stealing", a claim that was greeted icily by the formidable Huffington, who pointed out that her website, while aggregating content from around the world, also carried out its own investigations and generated its own stories.

Underpinning the debate was the issue of what the internet has done to traditional journalism and whether new media trends, including the shift towards blogging and so-called citizen journalism, was leading to a triumph, in the words of Ockrent, of 'opinions' over 'facts'.

I am no digi-genius, but I know a thing or two about what happens to journalism in the converged, digital age. I have gleaned this knowledge through my involvement over the past 10 years in the launch of two national newspapers and the re-launch of another at a time when traditional patterns of news consumption, via newspapers and television, were turned on their head.

I would have to say that the effects have been bad for journalism and by extension bad for proper representation of the public interest. And the fault does not lie principally with the Twin Horsemen of Google and Yahoo. It rests rather with newspaper managers who, when faced with the migration of traditional revenue online, panicked and used the digital age as an excuse to rearrange their cost bases. Rationalization has led in many cases to a devaluation of the only thing publishers have to sell, content.

When I went into journalism it was quite possible for an investigative reporter to disappear from the office completely, returning weeks later with a painstakingly researched scoop. But increasingly reporters have been required to feed a 24-hour content operation through blogs, video streaming and even the rewriting of agency copy.

All these activities are desirable, but they are achieved at the expense of basic journalism.

The newspaper brand is extrapolated throughout the ether and on to other platforms, but in the process also diminished. Newspaper content is disseminated across a wider digital spectrum, but the quality is reduced and the journalism has become shallower.

Such content also tends to be more 'opinion' than 'fact'; polemic travels better across the ether, and newspapers that have embraced the Web have preferred to shut down costly foreign bureaus and fire reporters in favour of the cheaper option of columnists with strident opinions. The right-of-centre press in the UK, for instance, continues to oppose European integration, but this opposition is now based on the opinions of London-based commentators rather than Brussels-based reporters.

The Web has also prompted quality newspapers to try to broaden their appeal by becoming more middle market, adopting a more sensationalistic approach to news and concentrating on the sometimes intriguing but unimportant developments in the celebrity sphere.

The extrapolation of newspaper content, like the dissemination of digital content generally, puts the end user firmly in the driving seat.

I cannot deny that this makes commercial sense: modern media business models should be driven by the desire of an increasingly promiscuous consumer to access ever more personally tailored content via the delivery model of choice, be it laptop, BlackBerry or mobile phone.

But there can be no doubt that this process has reduced the depth and quality of content that only newspapers, with their armies of journalists and editors, used to produce.

Additionally, the potential of the Web to foster interactivity between content providers and consumers is encouraging a reverse takeover of media institutions by "citizen journalists" and bloggers.

This is, of course, essentially a good thing, but it has also meant that a great deal of Web news and comment is no longer generated by professionals, but by armchair commentators with no training in story construction and fact-based reporting, and a predilection towards upset and libel.

The National Post