I followed a lot of news for free this week. I feel bad every time this happens. I believe in paying for journalism. I believe in it strongly. But it’s actually hard to avoid consuming it for free now. I used to utter a satisfied “aha!” if someone left behind an intact newspaper in a coffee shop. Now news and opinions are all around me, from all variety of sources, completely shareable in Twitter links, on Facebook feeds, in email alerts and newsletters.
My smartphone is a 24-hour news feed — a newspaper, magazine, computer, radio, TV and town square in a single mobile device.
A click at a time, I’ve joined millions of others in advancing a revolution.
“Media disruption” is the term often used to describe the situation that technology and our rapidly shifting habits and attitudes have produced in the news industry. But “revolution” has also been used, and it’s a better description for a social change that is so wide, so deep, and so irreversible.
There is no part of the news industry that has not been radically affected — from creation to production, through to distribution and revenue. But the audience — you, me, all the readers and viewers — has also been completely altered.
It may be a cliché to say the Internet gave everyone the ability to be a publisher, but it is repeated so often only because it is so true, and is such an extreme change. Just 20 years ago, the news industry was the gatekeeper of information and opinion, deciding what and who would be covered, and in what manner; choosing whose views would be aired. Readers and viewers were the recipients of those decisions. There was a clear and firm division between the creators and the audience.
Now the news may come from a traditional source, or it may be a citizen’s video. It could be an original story, or it might be a mashup with added material. It could be something you’ve altered in a way by adding your comments as you share it on Facebook or Twitter.
It doesn’t make us all journalists, but it changes everything about the news — no longer an industry, now an ecosystem.
As with all revolutions, there are exciting gains and troubling losses. On the plus side: a democratization of news and information. The power not only to express ourselves but to publish those opinions. Countless witnesses to big events, backed up by their smartphone audio and video. Diversity.
On the down side, we hear about the decline of media companies and loss of journalism jobs — another segment of the economy falling victim to digital change. But the news stories that focus on the failing business model — plummeting print advertising, digital ads bringing in pennies rather than dollars, falling profits, rising debts, dwindling readers and viewers — mask the real loss.
The big loss is the decline and weakening of quality journalism itself, particularly at the community level, and it affects all of us, whether we think of ourselves as news consumers or not.
A report last week on the state of the news media in Canada, produced by the Public Policy Forum, says that “the news media’s march to the precipice appears to be picking up speed,” and poses the question: “Are we merely passing through a turbulent transition to a more open and diverse future, or witnessing something that could inflict lasting damage on democracy?”
It may seem that we are all swimming in information, and in a sense we have never had it so good. But there’s a difference between information and journalism. A lot of what we see on the Internet is raw — unverified, possibly incomplete or inaccurate, perhaps easily misinterpreted. And there are increasing worries about the kind of deliberate misinformation and fake news we’ve seen in the United States during and since last year’s election campaign. On the Internet, it’s as easy to publish lies as truth.
Journalists are traditionally the people who make sense of raw information: who dig further, ask questions, verify assertions, test explanations, balance viewpoints, explain complex issues. In this way, they connect us to each other, to our societies and to our governments. They also do more than any other social institution to hold governments and other powerful interests accountable; just their existence can discourage malfeasance through the fear of exposure.
Yet we’ve lost at least a third of Canada’s journalists over the last six years alone, according to a Public Policy Forum finding, as newspapers in particular but also broadcasters and even new-world online companies cut back.
Some newsrooms have been harder hit, going from perhaps 120 newsroom employees (editors, reporters, photographers, designers, librarians) six years ago to 50 or 60 today. Some smaller newsrooms have closed altogether. This paper, the Toronto Star, had around 400 journalists a decade ago and has about half of that today.
Consider how many fewer stories are being produced, how much less we know of what’s going on, in city after city across the country.
It’s an odd product, journalism. Not everyone consumes it. Relatively few people pay for it. But it’s what economists call a public good — a commodity that benefits everyone. If careful news monitoring of city hall prevents corruption in the awarding of contracts, it benefits you, whether you read the story or not. If beat reporting makes your local school better, there’s a social benefit, even if you didn’t see the stories. It provides the common starting point for a more informed discussion that anyone can join.
The amount of news doesn’t shrink just because advertising revenue does. The world doesn’t become less complex.
But is a business model the only answer? Or — thinking of the social changes that have come with the digital revolution — is a social model part of the solution?
This is the focus of this year’s Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy, funded by the Atkinson Foundation. What elements of journalism can we find outside the news industry? Who in our communities can sift through data, explain complex issues, look beyond the surface of an event or document? Who can keep enough of an eye on neighbourhoods or councils to serve as an early warning signal of things not working as they should? Who can encourage discussion on key social issues?
Could universities, for example — with their wealth of expertise and a scholarly tradition of research and verification — play a role, shifting some of their efforts to focus on the broader public? Can citizens, as individuals and in interest groups, be effective and sustainable sources of information?
Can newsrooms and non-journalists collaborate in various ways to try to ensure we’re paying attention to the key elements of civic society?
This is what I’ll be reporting on over the next few months: what we mean now when we talk about journalism, and the roles we might play. As part of the fellowship project, I’ll work with some newsrooms, universities, citizens and interest groups on partnership experiments, and I’ll report on those discussions, too.
Would participants like these replace the need for professional journalists? No. Journalists practise a specific craft with specific qualities and standards. They are not only informers, explainers, analysts and investigators; they are storytellers, narrators, creating that first rough draft of history in a way that defines our society.
Some will say that experiments involving non-journalists have been tried in the past, and failed. But everything is different now. The digital revolution is so radical and swift, this year is different from last; today is different from yesterday.
A spectrum of journalism — or journalism-type information — already exists, thanks to the shift in publishing power from an industry to an ecosystem, and it’s evolving. At one end are the professional journalists working for a variety of news organizations, both traditional and new; at the other are citizens with smartphones who happen to be standing on the sidewalk when news breaks out.
The middle ground is less clear. It has the potential to be exciting, democratizing and more informative than the news industry ever could be. It also has the potential to be inaccurate, malicious and deliberately narrow. The new lexicon that spread from the U.S. election and its aftermath, including “fake news” and “alternative facts,” are a warning signal to all of us of the ease with which digital space can be filled by information we have no reason to trust: at best unverified, at worst unscrupulous.
It’s true that not everyone cares about news. One in 8 Canadians apparently don’t need it at all. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, based at the University of Oxford, compiled an international digital news survey for 2016 — its fifth annual survey but the first to include Canada — and it found that 12 per cent of the Canadians it reached while setting up an online polling sample said they had consumed no news at all in the previous month.
And who’s paying for it? Not many people. Of the 2,011 Canadian news consumers who were surveyed, only 9 per cent said they had paid for online news in the previous year, either in a subscription or in one-time payments.
Still, news and information is “one of the pillars of a strong and healthy democracy,” in the words of the House of Commons Heritage Committee, which is holding hearings into the state of the media, especially as it affects local communities. When the U.S. Federal Communications Commission did something similar several years ago, it concluded that a growing loss of what it called local accountability reporting — the kind that monitors governments and other key institutions — is a major concern.
“This is likely to lead to more government waste, more local corruption, worse schools, a less-informed electorate, and other serious problems in communities,” said the report, “The Information Needs of Communities.”
It focused particularly on the loss of newspaper journalism, noting that over the years newspapers have been the main source in the information food chain. They’ve generally had more reporters than TV or radio, and employed more of them on steady beats, with day-in and day-out coverage of civic topics.
Ryerson University journalism associate professor April Lindgren also noted the “keystone role” newspapers play in a local news system when she spoke before the Heritage Committee in October.
“They’re providing that sort of base record of what’s happened in the community,” she told the members of Parliament. “They’re not major players in terms of circulation, but they are players in terms of influencing what’s happening and the vibrancy of the local news coverage in that area.”
Lindgren is working with University of British Columbia researcher Jon Corbett on a crowdsourced map of changes in Canada’s local media — cutbacks in frequency, shutdowns, and startups. Most shutdowns — Lindgren counted 169 on the map between 2008 and 2016 — are of smaller community papers, those publishing fewer than five times a week.
The map illustrates how revenue losses translate directly into a loss of journalism. It’s a way of visualizing what Lindgren calls local news poverty — communities that don’t have access to basic critical information — and then trying to trace why some areas are well served in news and some do badly.
One of the more entertaining comments about the role of newspapers in a healthy city is still that of David Simon, creator of the television series The Wire, when he spoke to a U.S. Senate committee hearing in 2009 to lament the loss of beat reporting:
“That means that all of a sudden there’s nobody covering the cop shop, nobody covering the zoning board. The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we’ve actually reached some sort of equilibrium (between old and new media).
“The next 10 or 15 years in this country is going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption,” he said. “It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician. I really envy them, I really do.”
Simon was pointing out not just the value of beat reporting, but the fact that new online news organizations like the Huffington Post are not filling the reporting gap that has grown as traditional newspapers decline. Early assumptions that new players would step into the breach as old players became smaller, or vanished, have not yet been realized.
This is especially true at the local level. Startup media organizations are more likely to be able to find the audience and revenue to keep operating by focusing on either niche or national topics. A deep niche product is more likely to be able to apply a subscription-only policy; a national focus is more likely to draw more viewers, useful in crowdfunding or in seeking advertising or sponsorship partners.
Meeting the needs of a broad local audience is part of the old business model that is proving economically unsustainable.
“No one in Canada has yet figured out a digital-only online business model that easily supports a large number of full-time, paid professional journalists,” Robyn Smith, editor-in-chief of British Columbia-based online magazine The Tyee, told the Heritage Committee in September. “None of the local digital outlets have the size and scale that legacy media outlets once had. We worry that there’s a dangerous chasm that’s opened up as legacy media fails, and digital media isn’t catching up fast enough to bridge the gap and cover what’s lost.”
The Internet was an instrument of such upheaval that nothing can bring back the old news revenue model, or the society that enabled it, say the three authors of “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” an essay published in 2012 through Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
But their first core belief is, in their words: “Journalism matters.” And the three — C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky — are worried about some of the elements we’re at risk of losing along with the traditional model.
Continuity is one. That’s the ability to cover a story, a beat or a section of society “persistently and over the long term,” even if reporters come and go. Continuity is what enables the “watchdog” and “scarecrow” functions.
“Both a watchdog and a scarecrow stand guard. But the fact that only a watchdog actively barks and the scarecrow does not bark does not always matter,” they said. “Though the scarecrow ‘does nothing,’ its very existence, the very fact that the crows know it is out there, ‘watching,’ is often enough to constrain bad crow-like behaviour.”
Most discussion about the media is focusing on the watchdog function, they say — “the fact that fewer stories will be covered than before and that the watchdog will bark less. We think the real institutional function at risk in this case, however, is the scarecrow function.”
They also note the lack of staffing “slack” in new digital players, which live “permanently close to the bone.” Traditional organizations had the staff capacity to perform three distinct roles, all at the same time: report on news, manage beat coverage, and mount time-consuming special investigations.
“We simply want to point out that the removal of excess slack from the arsenal of news institutions is a genuinely new development, one whose full implications remain unclear.”
It’s an uncertain world, as the essay’s authors say, where what doesn’t work is clearer than what does. The importance of news isn’t going away. The importance of dedicated professionals isn’t going away. “What’s going away is a world where the news was made only by professionals, and consumed only by amateurs.”
No longer an industry; now an ecosystem.
That means that democratic accountability, too, now falls not only to professionals but to amateurs. There’s room for a whole host of players, from trained journalists to the committed blogger at every city hall meeting; from concerned parents to impassioned activists; from professional researchers to eyewitnesses.
Let’s see who steps up.
About the series
The Atkinson Fellowship awards a seasoned Canadian journalist with the opportunity to pursue a yearlong investigation into a current policy issue. This award is a project funded by the Atkinson Foundation, the Honderich family and the Toronto Star.
Catherine Wallace is exploring the future of journalism at a time when the news industry is in a financial crisis. Canada has lost a third of its journalists in the last six years. What role can the community play in helping to fill the gap in information and storytelling? Wallace is a former Montreal Gazette managing editor who has also worked at the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. Her stories will run periodically.
wallace.mtl@gmail.com
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