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.
