The Economist...
A
special report on the news industry
Bulletins from the future
7/7/2011
The
internet has turned the news
industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and
partisan—as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says
Tom
Standage
EVEN
IF YOU are not a news junkie, you
will have noticed that your daily news has undergone a transformation.
Television newscasts now include amateur videos, taken from
video-sharing
websites such as YouTube, covering events like the Arab spring or the
Japanese
tsunami. Such videos, with their shaky cameras and people’s unguarded
reactions,
have much greater immediacy than professional footage. Messages posted
on
Twitter, the microblogging service, have been woven into coverage of
these
events and many others. “You have these really intimate
man-in-the-street
accounts, and you can craft a narrative around them,” says Jack Dorsey,
co-founder of Twitter. A computer consultant in Pakistan unwittingly
described
the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in a series of tweets. The
terrorist
attacks in Mumbai in 2008, too, were reported on Twitter in real time
by people
who were there.
The
past year has also seen the rise
to fame of WikiLeaks, an organisation that publishes leaked documents
supplied
to it anonymously. WikiLeaks and its media partners have published
detailed
records of the Afghan and Iraq wars, hundreds of classified American
diplomatic
cables and records from the Guantánamo Bay detention centre. “We
believe that
true information does good,” says Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder.
“Our goal
is not just to have people reading documents, but to achieve political
reforms
through the release of information.”
In
January this year Al Jazeera, a
news organisation based in Qatar, published its own cache of leaked
documents,
known as the Palestine Papers, which lifted the lid on more than a
decade of
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And by broadcasting amateur videos of
the
Tunisian uprising to its millions of satellite viewers across the Arab
world,
the channel played an active role in spreading the protests across the
region.
Among television news organisations it has led the way in integrating
social
media (such as tweets, Facebook posts and amateur online video) into
its
operations in order to engage with its increasingly wired audience.
“The way we
operate has changed because the landscape has changed dramatically,”
says Moeed
Ahmad, the firm’s head of new media.
Clearly
something dramatic has
happened to the news business. That something is, of course, the
internet,
which has disrupted this industry just as it has disrupted so many
others. By
undermining advertising revenue, making news reports a commodity and
blurring
the boundaries between previously distinct news organisations, the
internet has
upended newspapers’ traditional business model. But as well as
demolishing old
ways of doing things, it has also made new ones possible. As patterns
of news
consumption shift, much experimentation is under way. The internet may
have
hurt some newspapers financially, but it has stimulated innovation in
journalism.
Reporters
all
For
consumers, the internet has made
the news a far more participatory and social experience.
Non-journalists are
acting as sources for a growing number of news organisations, either by
volunteering information directly or by posting comments, pictures or
video
that can be picked up and republished. Journalists initially saw this
as a
threat but are coming to appreciate its benefits, though not without
much
heart-searching. Some organisations have enlisted volunteers to gather
or sift
data, creating new kinds of “crowdsourced” journalism. Readers can also
share
stories with their friends, and the most popular stories cause a flood
of
traffic as recommendations ripple across social networks. Referrals
from social
networks are now the fastest-growing source of traffic for many news
websites.
Readers are being woven into the increasingly complex news ecosystem as
sources, participants and distributors. “They don’t just consume news,
they
share it, develop it, add to it—it’s a very dynamic relationship with
news,”
says Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, a news
website in
the vanguard of integrating news with social media.
As
well as making Twitter, Facebook
and Google part of the news ecosystem, the internet has also made
possible
entirely new kinds of specialist news organisations. It has allowed
WikiLeaks,
for example, to accept documents anonymously and publish them to a
global
audience, while floating in cyberspace above national jurisdictions,
operated
by a small, nomadic team. Other newcomers include a host of
not-for-profit news
organisations that rely on philanthropic funding and specialise in
particular
kinds of journalism. Many of these new outfits collaborate with
traditional
news organisations, taking advantage of their broad reach and trusted,
established
brands.
All
these new inhabitants of the news
ecosystem have brought an unprecedented breadth and diversity of news
and
opinion to the business. This has cast new light on a long-running
debate about
the politics of journalism: when there are so many sources, does
political
objectivity become less important?
This
special report will consider all
these trends in turn, starting with a look at the state of the industry
and the
new business models that are emerging. It will argue that as news
becomes more
social, participatory, diverse and partisan, it is in many ways
returning to
the more chaotic, freewheeling and politically charged environment of
the era
before the emergence of mass media in the 19th century. And although
the
internet has proved hugely disruptive to journalists, for consumers—who
now
have a wider choice than ever of news sources and ways of accessing
them—it has
proved an almost unqualified blessing.
Read
it with a graph at the Economist
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