The Future of Journalism: Blog tasks

 Part 1: Clay Shirky lecture

Go to the Nieman Lab webpage (part of Harvard university) and watch the video of Clay Shirky presenting to Harvard students. The video is also available on YouTube below but the Nieman Lab website has a written transcript of everything Shirky says. 

Play the clip AND read along with the transcript below to ensure you are following the argument. You need to watch from the beginning to 29.35 (the end of Shirky's presentation). Once you've watched and read the presentation and made notes (you may want to copy and paste key quotes from the transcript which is absolutely fine), answer the questions below:

1) Why does Clay Shirky argue that 'accountability journalism' is so important and what example does he give of this?

Accountability journalism prevents, or reveals, civic corruption, which is necessary for a functioning democracy. It  also acts as a mechanism to "discipline elites" by keeping them in check. 

Shirky uses  the story of John Geohgan  who was a priest and pedophile who had been employed by the Catholic Church since the 1960s.

2) What does Shirky say about the relationship between newspapers and advertisers? Which websites does he mention as having replaced major revenue-generators for newspapers (e.g. jobs, personal ads etc.)? 

we had commercial entities producing critical public goods. We had ad-supported newspapers producing accountability journalism.

Now, it’s unusual to have that degree of focus on essentially both missions  both making a profit and producing this kind of public value. But that was the historic circumstance, and it lasted for decades. But it was an accident. There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths  the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. 

Xerox is an example of an institution that wrongly believed it was a monopoly and was willing to fund the invention of Ethernet and laptops and the graphic user interface and all the rest of it that we take for granted now. IBM, AT&T — the list of commercial entities that believed that they were monopolies, and during the time that they were monopolies could take this philosophy of overinvesting in speculative work is large. But when the commercial inputs to that kind of R&D work, the R&D work ends as well.

 You go to the place that’s good for listing jobs and selling bikes.  

This is Bob Garfield‘s thesis from The Chaos Scenario, which is — it’s not just that advertisement is moving from the analog world to the digital world, but that advertising in the digital world is not inherently connected to other kinds of media. Advertising can be media in ways that improve both the advertiser’s outlook and the public’s. So the ability to tell the advertiser, you have to keep advertising with us even though we’re covering your industry is going. That protection’s going.

3) Shirky talks about the 'unbundling of content'. This means people are reading newspapers in a different way. How does he suggest audiences are consuming news stories in the digital age?

news sources has gone from being a server-side to a client-side operation — which is to say, the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not at the level — and not by the producer. 

because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.

4) Shirky also talks about the power of shareable media. How does he suggest the child abuse scandal with the Catholic Church may have been different if the internet had been widespread in 1992?

 The power of "shareable media" would have made it difficult for the Church to conceal abuse, as victims could have immediately shared their stories and coordinated, potentially forcing accountability years earlier.

5) Why does Shirky argue against paywalls? 

he effect of that would be to make the kind of value that the public got from the Geoghan article illegal — not illegal, uncontractural. A violation of contract to make use of the news. 

And you have to prevent the audience’s ability to act as a publisher in order for that business model to work

6) What is a 'social good'? In what way might journalism be a 'social good'?

A "social good" is an action, service, or initiative that promotes the well-being, equity, and, or, prosperity of a community or society at large, by fostering democratic engagement, holding leaders accountable, providing essential information to the public, and giving a voice to underrepresented communities 

The reason why Investigative journalism exposes corruption and holds power accountable, which is crucial for a healthy democracy.

7) Shirky says newspapers are in terminal decline. How does he suggest we can replace the important role in society newspapers play? What is the short-term danger to this solution that he describes?

We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That’s the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers, because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role, right?

It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability.

8) Look at the first question and answer regarding institutional power. Give us your own opinion: how important is it that major media brands such as the New York Times or the Guardian continue to stay in business and provide news?

I don't think that it's that important this is because while  Major news brands act as watchdogs, investigating government, corporate, and social institutions. They also do have personal agendas of their own  some good and some bad  so I think that it's important just to get your news form multiple sources not one source. for example the News did expose what were happening in catholic churches with certain priests  their are many other things they didn't expose  or didn't reflect accurately  in their stories as it didn't reflect their agenda or ideology's. 

Part 2: MM55 - Media, Publics, Protest and Power

Media Magazine 55 has an excellent feature on power and the media. Go to our Media Magazine archive, click on MM55 and scroll to page 38 to read the article Media, Publics, Protest and Power', a summary of Media academic Natalie Fenton’s talk to a previous Media Magazine conference. Answer the following questions:

1) What are the three overlapping fields that have an influence on the relationship between media and democracy?

The political field intervenes when the state powerfully limits or enables the diversity of voices and views in the press, through its power to regulate, deregulate or subsidise the media.

• The economic field refers to commercial influences that encompass elements such as concentration of ownership; profit pressures relating to types of ownership; type of funding (such as advertising or paying audiences); and level and intensity of market competition. 

The journalistic field refers to assumptions that have emerged over time about what constitutes ‘news’, and about the purpose of journalism; practices of news gathering and sourcing; norms of objectivity and impartiality – the ethics and practice of journalism that contribute to the news ecology in any one place at any one moment in time.

2) What is ‘churnalism’ and what issues are there currently in journalism?

Yet the business model for newspapers has struggled to adapt. In a corporate news world it is now difficult to maintain profit margins and shareholder returns unless you employ fewer journalists. This means not only insecure, short term contracts, but also fewer journalists with more space to fill in less time. And this often leads to a greater use of unattributed rewrites of press agency or public relations material, and the cut-and-paste practice now known as churnalism.

3) What statistics are provided by Fenton to demonstrate the corporate dominance of a small number of conglomerates? 

 Just three companies control 71% of UK national newspaper circulation while only five groups control more than 80% of combined online and offline news. Unchecked media concentration over several decades has allowed some media groups to accumulate vast amounts of revenue, along with social and political influence, which has adverse consequences for independent journalism and democracy. Such market dominance of news media results in an excess of power and unruly political influence that breeds fear.

4) What is the 'climate of fear' that Fenton writes about in terms of politics and the media? 

The Leveson Enquiry that they were ‘too close’ to the big media players because the political stakes were so very high. In this climate, political parties, the police and other institutions are reluctant to investigate wrong doing in the news media, hinder the expansion of large media conglomerates, or introduce new regulation of news organizations and journalistic practice. They also avoid certain areas of public policy, for fear either of hostile reporting or media owner conflict, creating an environment where politicians are more likely to discuss populist policies. Journalists are often too intimidated to stand up to a bullying culture where market- oriented managers place commercial priorities

5) Fenton finishes her article by discussing pluralism, the internet and power. What is your opinion on this crucial debate - has the internet empowered audiences and encouraged democracy or is power even more concentrated in the hands of a few corporate giants?

Natalie Fenton’s work, particularly in Digital, Political, Radical and her discussions on media reform, highlights a critical, nuanced perspective on this debate. Rather than seeing the internet as purely liberating or purely oppressive, she often positions it as a site of intense struggle where power is paradoxically more concentrated and more contested simultaneously