New media world won't end need for journalists
Bloggers, "crowdsourcing" and computer-generated articles are making
contributions to the news media, but they cannot replace professional
journalists in digging up important news.
That is the message of a major study released this week by Columbia
University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, titled "Post-Industrial
Journalism." The authors of the report said technology has led to an
explosion in the amount of information available, with economic shifts
which are affecting journalism in both negative and positive ways.
But in certain kinds of reporting, professional journalists cannot be
replaced by machines or crowdsourcing, the study said.
It is not journalism's best moment if much key work were taken over
by amateurs, or done by machine, the study said.
"What is of great moment is reporting on important and true stories
that can change society. The reporting on the Catholic Church's
persistent harboring of child rapists, Enron's fraudulent accounting and
the scandal over the Justice Department's Operation Fast and Furious are
all such stories." The role of the journalist "as truth-teller,
sense-maker, explainer -- cannot be reduced to a replaceable input... we
need a cadre of full-time workers who report the things someone
somewhere doesn't want reported," the authors said.
But because of the changes to the media, the report said the
advertising-supported model of newspaper and broadcast journalism may
never be the same, and this means news "has to become cheaper to
produce."
"There is no way to preserve or restore the shape of journalism as it
has been practiced for the past 50 years," said authors C.W. Anderson,
Emily Bell and Clay Shirky.
They said the changes have lead to "a reduction in the quality of
news in the United States," and added: "We are convinced that journalism
in this country will get worse before it gets better, and, in some
places (principally midsize and small cities with no daily paper) it
will get markedly worse." The report argued that social media, blogs and
"crowdsourcing" can have a positive influence by generating content not
available in the past.
The authors note that the first reports on the raid killing Osama bin
Laden came from a Pakistan IT consultant who tweeted what he witnessed,
and that social media provided a more complete view of the Japan 2011
earthquake and tsunami than any individual journalist could provide.
They also conclude that tech startups like Palantir, Kaggle and
Narrative Science which produce news stories from raw data through
algorithms are also useful, and can free up professional journalists for
other tasks.
The study said news reporting has always been "subsidized" in some
manner, usually by advertising, and that a shift to online news with
lower revenues has led to a search for a new model.
"The American public has never paid full freight for the news
gathering done in our name. It has always been underwritten by sources
other than the readers, listeners or viewers," the report said.
To make the economics work, the authors suggest flexibility: "Income
can come from advertisers, sponsors, users, donors, patrons or
philanthropies; cost reductions can come from partnerships, outsourcing,
crowdsourcing or automation. There is no one answer."
One development in the media is the emergence of sites like the
Huffington Post which maintain content from rival news organizations is
"fair use," which can be taken in some form without payment.
"HuffPo management realized that fair use, as applied on the Web,
meant that, in essence, everything is a wire service and that excerpting
and commenting on unique content from The Washington Post or The New
York Times was actually more valuable to readers than contracting with
the AP or Thomson Reuters," the study said.
"The Huffington Post has often been criticized for this stance, but
this is shooting the messenger -- what it did was to understand how
existing law and new technology intersected."
The study concludes that because readers use a variety of sources,
news organizations must therefore find a niche.
"There is a place for careful, detailed analysis... There is a place
for impressionistic, long-form looks at the world far away from the
daily confusion of breaking news. And so on," it said.
"Not many organizations, however can pursue more than a few of these
modes effectively, and none that can do all of them for all subjects its
audience cares about."
AFP |