Can the citizen journalist fill the gap?
If you've come here from the cultsock site, you'll be familiar with successive governments' attempts to ensure media diversity. Diversity continues to be seen as the requirement, in the words of one of the early post-war Royal Commisions on the Press, that
the number and variety of newspapers should be such that the Press as a whole gives an opportunity for all important points of view to be effectively presented in terms of the varying standards of taste, public opinion, and education among the principal groups of the population.With the growth of broadcasting various Acts of Parliament have sought to impose limits on cross-media ownership in order to foster that diversity and have also sought to protect the regional media in order to ensure that local voices are heard aginst the backdrop of the metropolitan media agenda.
Newspapers now, though, appear to be in crisis as their former readers turn to the Web for news and newspapers struggle to monetize their online content. According to Moritz Wuttke, founder of NextMedia Initiative and former CEO of PubliGroupe in Asia,
the gross profit contribution from digital, will contribute 80 percent and print will contribute 20 percent of the total gross profitin newspaper companies which manage to generate 30% to 35% of their revenue from digital, cutting back on the costs of distribution, ink and paper. (source: Million Dollar Strategies for Newspaper Companies). Indeed the example of DMGT's Metro suggests that a profit can still be made from print alone, even at no charge to the reader, by focusing on limited distribution to a very specific demographic. The fact remains, though, that newspapers producing general news seem to be struggling, with the result that the last few years have seen the collapse of local newspapers and the decimation of journalists. A Quick Primer On The US Newspaper Collapse gives the unpleasant facts in some detail, including figures showing that in the UK and Ireland between December 2008 and April 2010 54 newspaper offices closed and a staggering 8,800 jobs were lost.
Roy Greenslade in his Guardian blog, commenting on an article by Lee Bollinger, is even prepared to consider state funding to rescue the conventional press organs, at least during the period of transition to digital media, given that:
Our local and regional papers are withering away. Regional television and radio news is hopelessly inadequate. Many of our national papers are making huge losses that cannot be sustained much longer. We are in danger of the BBC becoming the sole news provider in Britain, and even the BBC recognises that to be bad for democracy.
Meanwhile, the internet-based media in Britain has not developed to anything like the strength necessary to act as a competent watchdog.
But does any of this matter? Well, clearly it matters to the unfortunates who lost their jobs, but it's not immediately obvious why it should be a cause for great concern in this era of the 'citizen journalist' who can readily maintain an individual blog like this (well, better than this) or produce one jointly with others for very little expense. Moreover, given how easy it is to allow joe public to respond online, either through simple comments or through an extended social network on, say, Facebook, it ought to be possible for such digital media to gather and respond to local issues in a way that a few print journalists could never have hoped to. Jürgen Habermas has argued that the free press which was so crucial to the development of the 'bourgeois public sphere' in the eighteenth century became instrumental in the 'refeudalization of the public sphere', as state, industrial conglomerates and the media underwent a process of fusion. The media became the manipulators of public opinion, conditioning the public into the rôle of passive onlookers and consumers. Surely, then, the collapse of the newspaper industry combined with the rise of a multiplicity of voices on the Web can only contribute to a more open public sphere, indeed more than fulfilling the requirements of the Royal Commission quoted above.
The study Citizen Journalism Websites Complement Newspapers from the Spring 2010 Newspaper Research Journal comments interestingly that news on citizen-run sites was far less timely than on those run by newspapers. Interestingly, however, the study also observed that there were far more links from the citizen news sites to other sites, in particular to local sites, the professional sites being unable to focus on issues of importance to a specific locality. The study also notes that there was a wider range of technological distribution systems (RSS feeds, podcasts etc.) in the commercial sites, which was attributed to their more extensive resources, concluding that:
This difference in resources will likely perpetuate the inability of citizen news sites to become substitutes for daily newspaper sites, even though resources continue to decline at commercial newspapers.a conclusion which seems to me highly questionable given the ease with which any blogger can insert an RSS feed or podcast with next to no technical knowledge and especially in view of the rapid take-up of social networking software (Facebook, Elgg, Ning etc.) which requires only a couple of people with technical know-how to set up a community site. Overall the study concluded that citizen-generated content can serve as a complement to daily professional sites and as a substitute for professional weeklies. It seems to me that will change very rapidly.
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