Journalists; the heroes that we support in films like ‘Spotlight’ and ‘The Great Muppet Caper’. While ‘The Great Muppet Caper’ provides audiences with an hour of entertainment, ‘Spotlight’ underlines a crisis that newspapers are undergoing: extinction.
In 2012, Rupert Murdoch predicted that newspapers could be obsolete in 10 years (5 years from now) because of the competition from the internet. It is true that he made this argument to then urge the government not to over-regulate them, furthering his argument to deregulate the UK’s press, but that doesn’t make the argument less invalid. Newspapers are dying out. They are losing readers and revenue despite many of their efforts and, while this may not be a concern for many, it should.
The digital technology that emerged in the late 90s and early 2000s is sweeping through every aspect of traditional journalism. Because of this, as ratings and readers declined, shareholders pressured media organisations to find a way to make a profit, leading to ‘if you can’t defeat it, join it’ and, while the digital culture allows us to enlarge our information possibilities, it also has a more trivial environment full of cat videos, attention seeking pranks and ‘listicles’, leading to a temptation for more clicks.
“It is clearly smart for newspapers to expand online but the danger of doing that is the temptation to gravitate toward whatever gets the most clicks”. (John Oliver, 2016)
This can lead newspapers to resort to the so-called click bait. “My attitude on journalism is very simple. I want to make enough money so I can afford you” said Sam Zell (2009), former owner of the Orlando Sentinel. However, while it can lead to finding hundreds of ‘18 Times Facebook Was The Gift That Keeps On Giving’, it can also lead to more concerning issues: like lack of will to take governments into account. David Simon (2009), former Baltimore Sun reporter but best known for the creation of the award-winning HBO series ‘The Wire’, said in a hearing on the future of Journalism “it is going to be a great time to be a corrupt politician”. He argued that high-end journalism is dying in America and unless we establish a new economic model, it will not be reborn online.
It is true that on the one hand ‘New Media’ does allow more demand for accountability, but this accountability is then usually carried out in the blogosphere and, while bloggers can also have a political influence, they may mix their political views by assuming a political stance (Siapera, 2011). Sooner or later, either we pay for journalism or there will be consequences that will affect all of us. Books like ‘The 13 Unwanted Reports’, by Günter Wallraff (1969) who uncovered the secret police regarding neo-Nazis and unmasked secret government business, may not be written again because there will either be a lack of will by the editors, or because journalists won’t have the time (nor willingness) to do the research as they have to be the journalist, producer and director at the same time.
We can argue that journalism is changing, but into what? One of the first codes in journalism is to seek truth and report on it, but now it seems like that code has changed to ‘don’t let the truth get in the way of a lucrative story’.
Democracy Now! Archives (2009).David Simon testifying about the future of Newspapers. [YouTube] available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Llnbzq7b4Ww [Accessed 23rd Mar 2017]
Dvorkin, J. (2016). Column: Why click-bait will be the death of journalism. [online] PBS NewsHour. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/what-you-dont-know-about-click-bait-journalism-could-kill-you/ [Accessed 22 Mar. 2017].
LastWeekTonight (2016). Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). [YouTube] available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ&t=927s [Accessed 22nd Mar 2017]
Siapera, E. (2011). Understanding new media, London: Sage.
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