Reports suggest news organisations are in for a bumpy ride (OMG)
There have been a couple of interesting reports out the last few days pertaining to the state of the news media that I thought were worth pointing out:
The State of the News Media 2009 by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism delivers a fairly hard hitting view on the future of news, focusing on the US. From the overview:
Some of the numbers are chilling.
Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.
…
Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.
The report also had a look into citizen media, which had some insightful findings:
- Citizen news sites remain relatively rare. Among those that do exist, the range of topics is narrower and the sourcing somewhat thinner than on legacy news sites, and the content is generally not updated, even on a daily basis. But they offer richer content than citizen blogs. These are among the key findings of a new multi-university study of new and old media in 46 markets that builds on a pilot study we presented last year.
- Social networking and citizen video sharing broadened in important ways as a means of distributing news, not just for social interaction and entertainment
- Citizens also continued to engage more in aggregating news for themselves and creating sites built around user-generated news agendas, particularly at sites like Reddit, Digg and Topix.
- In legacy media, news organizations continued to experiment in various ways with citizen contributions, but most seemed to be leaning toward citizens as sources rather than as journalists, and some large experiments with citizen reporting failed.
- A growing array of alternative news sites run largely by professional journalists also emerged during the year. That is covered in another special report entitled New Ventures.
The other report is by Australia’s Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which launched Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism.
While a lot in the report in not particularly new to many working in online media and focuses heavily on the union’s role in the future news industry, it’s good to finally see some analysis of the media scene here in Australia. I still feel like the Alliance needs to learn to move a little faster (remind me, but I’m sure this report was due out earlier this year.) Its hesitation might come from the fact that it’s seen its role for too long as protecting current jobs in the traditional news organisation set-up, which consequently have very little hope of existing in the future. I can empathise with its position, but it’s good to see some wake-up calls for both the MEAA and the Australian media industry in the report:
The key concern for Alliance members is how the worsening global – and sector – forecasts will affect jobs. We are hostage, to an extent, to anecdote. The number of full-time Australian journalists has, by Alliance estimates, fallen 13 per cent since 2001, from just under 8500 across all media to around 7,500. It must be stressed this is an estimate, based on data and estimates reported by Alliance staff and activists. There is little doubt the sector will continue to shrink, at least in the shortterm.
Fairfax Media has held four redundancy rounds at its Sydney and Melbourne mastheads, the most recent in August 2008 when Kirk announced 120 journalists would be offered redundancies, mostly in production. Various sections would be outsourced to Pagemasters, while “operational efficiencies” would lead to retrenchments in several areas. This was based on the argument that a multitiered production process was outdated and new tools would obviate the need for many sub-editors. Increasing errors in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age print editions indicates that culling dedicated production staff will inevitably erode quality.
There’s not that much in the way of solutions for the industry. There is some hope in it’s conculsions of its own role in the future, but I feel a real failure to look beyond that:
Understanding how to use new opportunities for journalism is central. Employers, The Alliance and individuals have a responsibility to ensure the media community has the training necessary to deal with the changes. As a union, we have to demand employers provide adequate and appropriate training, and include these demands in collective bargaining and other negotiations.
We need to develop and implement the training working journalists need. If we don’t, noone else will. Members must embrace training opportunities and be eager to apply the skills in their daily work. Work intensification: Employers cannot continue to expect working journalists to carry the load of change by working harder and doing more with less. Inevitably, we will end up doing less with less.
The Alliance has the responsibility for campaigning to end this imposition. And members must learn when to say yes or no: yes to embracing the opportunities but no to overwork and the damage it does. Freelancers and contingent work: The Alliance recognises the changes have a major impact on the structure of work and particularly affect people working freelance, casual and on fixed contracts. Many of these changes are positive – they provide openings for more creative use of our craft and ways to communicate directly with our communities.
I don’t want to be too harsh as there are some good intentions and the Alliance has also set up a facebook group The Future of Journalism Project that “aims for the culmination of industry research and regular events involving executives, journalists, academics and commentators, and aims to build an accurate picture of the extent and pace of industry change, to manage that change for the benefit of the whole industry and journalists in particular.”