Breaking News – the remaking of journalism and why it matters now

The media used to be described as one of the key features of democracy – for its ability to hold power to scrutiny. So much so it was actually called The Fourth Estate – with the Church, nobility and commoners being the first three and the earliest use of the term in a book by Thomas Carlyle in 1787: 

"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all." 

How quickly things have changed – with the mainstream media now dismissed as “fake news” - and social media being most people's first "go to" source of news.

I’ve just put down a superbly-written story of the challenges faced by Alan Rusbridger as editor ofthe UK’s most honourable newspaper - The Guardian - during his stint at the helm from 1995 to 2015. It’s in a 2018 book whose title I've reproduced to head this post. 

The challenges it explores include - 

- Dramatically declining advertising revenues – as experienced by all print media

- A more demanding and interactive readership

- of not only global digital and print editions but of a weekend title, The Observer – requiring three separate teams

- law suits, the most famous of which was conducted by a Minister of the Crown. Jonathan Aitken

- government pressures (the Britain media enjoys no protection such as the US Second Amendment)

- the infamous phone hacking perpetrated on both the public and major political figures by the Murdoch Empire and other “Tabloids” who pour their poison on British society

- the Wikipedia leaks in which The Guardian played a central part (with Der Spiegel and the New York Post)

- the Snowden revelations 

It reads like a political thriller - and should be read by everyone these days

I hadn’t realized, for example, that The Guardian was one of the first English-speaking newspapers to experiment, in the early years of the internet, with more interactive methods of reaching readers. Nor that it had received global awards for its various innovations…

The book gives a very strong sense of what it was like to live during this period of powerful technical change. 

Too many of the books we read are written in confident tones as if the future was knowable. Uncertainty is the name of the game – with experiments being one of the most useful ways of proceeding……This is how Rusbridger describes the situation as he felt it 15 years ago -

So this was what we thought we knew around the middle of 2006.

·         Newspapers were going to find their traditional revenues – particularly in classified advertising and, probably, in cover price – eaten into over coming years.

·         Many newspaper managements would naturally respond by cutting costs. At the same time they would need to invest significantly in the digital future against the day when new technologies might determine future reading habits; and when significant amounts of advertising might well migrate to the internet.

·         None of this would happen smoothly. There would be profound jolts along the way. We – and others – could expect to lose lots of money in the coming • • • • • years if we had any chance of making the transition.

·         In a rapidly converged world, newspapers would have to ask themselves whether they remained a purely text medium. And they were going to have to face the fact that younger readers, especially, were questioning previously accepted notions of journalistic authority.

·         We would have to get used to the idea that audiences were fragmenting and that many people were increasingly finding non-conventional news sources a valuable addition, if not a ready substitute, for mainstream media.

·         Newspapers had to decide how much they embraced these new forms of discourse and dissemination or whether they stood apart from them. Should we be of the web, or simply on it?

·         Thousands of websites would aggregate what we do, syndicate it, link it, comment on it, sneer at it, mash it up, trash it, monetise it, praise it and attempt to discredit it – in some cases all at once. We were going to have to be more transparent about what we did and earn trust in this new world.

·         But it was hard to see that many would actually go to the risk and the expense of setting up a global network of people whose only aim was to find things out, establish if they’re true, and write about them quickly, accurately and comprehensibly. The blogo-sphere, which was frequently parasitical on the mainstream media it so remorselessly critiqued, couldn’t ever hope to replicate that. That – assuming people remained interested in serious news – should give us a huge advantage. • • • • • •

·         Against that, the digital world could do many things much better than we could currently do – including niche fragmentation, multimedia, voice, diversity, connectivity, range, scale, speed, responsiveness and community.

·         Our cost base was simultaneously our best protection and a mill stone around our necks. Between them the Guardian, Observer and Guardian Unlimited employed well over 600 journalists, more than two dozen of them based around the world. That was half the size of the NYT and a tenth the size of the BBC, but still a significant investment in serious journalism. We could be sunk by our cost base, or it could make what we did difficult for others to replicate.

·         No internet start-up on earth would ever contemplate such an investment in expensive, noncommercially productive people. The Yahoos and Googles of this world were explicit: they had no interest in creating content. They did, however, want to do interesting things with other people’s content. That could be good for us. Or it might not. Google could be our friend or our enemy. Or both.

·         We could not survive into a newspaperless future as a UK-only news company. The audience simply wasn’t rich enough or large enough to support us – and an advertising-supported operation could only work if we could deliver much larger numbers.

·         That meant taking our non-British readers more seriously We would, in particular, have to expand our North American operation. There could be no hope of trying to build a US audience with a paywall.

One of the many things I admired in the book was Rusbridger’s generosity of spirit – evident in his tributes to the support foreign journalists and editors gave in his times of need (in stark contrast to British colleagues); his appreciation of readers’ feedback and loyalty;  and his frequent references to those books and surveys he found helpful.