http://www.cbc.ca/news/petermansbridge/2013/03/the-future-of-news-looks-scary.html
The future of news looks scary
By Peter Mansbridge on March 27, 2013 2:46 PM //
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/petermansbridge/2013/03/the-future-of-news-looks-scary.html#socialcomments>
By Mark Bulgutch and Peter Mansbridge
Once upon a time there was Chicken Little. His is the amusing tale of
over-reacting and jumping to hasty conclusions. It's a reminder that no
matter how bad things seem to be, the sky isn't really falling. So why
am I so worried about the future of journalism? Maybe it's because I
read too much.
I've recently read two things that scare the heck out of me.
The first is a book called /Digital Disconnect/. It's written by a
professor of communications at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Robert W. McChesney. It's about the efforts newspapers
have made to find commercial success on the Internet. Almost without
exception those efforts have failed. Pay walls have worked at the New
York Times and the Wall Street Journal because they are deeply
entrenched American institutions. But a study of more than 35 other
newspapers found that only 1per cent of print readers opted to pay for
an electronic version. For every $7 of print advertising that's been
lost in recent years, there is only $1 of Internet ad revenue.
Publishers are desperate for content that people will pay for. And the
book says they've discovered that it's inevitably soft news that
succeeds. That has led to content farms, companies that hire freelance
writers to produce articles in an instant to respond to popular search
terms. Then they sell ads to appear next to the articles. The ads drive
the entire process. One company pays writers 35 or 40 cents for every
story they write. Some of the writers are in the Philippines, using
phony American sounding names for their bylines. Most of the stories are
based on news releases from corporations.
According to /Digital Disconnect /there's a company out there that
manages to produce articles using no people at all. It uses algorithms
to turn numerical data into stories for sports and real estate web sites.
This is all happening in print media, and I'm a TV guy. But that's no
reason to feel comfortable. Because something else I read says TV is
following print into a dark future. It's the Pew Research Center's
annual report on the state of the news media. Last week I tweeted about
the New York Times report on the study. And I got quite a bit of
reaction. That prompted me to write more because the Times focused on
just one aspect of the Pew study. There's much more.
It says that TV stations are cutting staff almost as rapidly as
newspapers did. (At American papers, reporting staff is down 30 per cent
since 2000. There are fewer reporters and editors today than there were
in 1978.) That means stations are forced to find easy ways to fill their
newscasts. Local news now spends 40% of its time on sports, weather, and
traffic. Covering politics and government counts for just 7% of airtime.
There's twice as much coverage of what Pew calls, "accidents, bizarre
events, and disasters."
Even at the big news networks there's more sizzle than steak. According
to Pew, at CNN reporter stories are down 30 per cent since 2007.
Interview segments are up 30 per cent. MSNBC spends an astonishing 85
per cent of its time broadcasting opinion, just 15% of its time
broadcasting news.
When Pew looked at all the trends it concluded, "This adds up to a news
industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig
deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands."
No wonder I'm scared.
It's true that all this gloom is specifically about American newspapers
and American television news. But if you've been reading and watching
the media here, it's hard to miss the fact that many papers and
broadcast outlets seem to be headed down the same path.
Maybe the sky isn't falling. But if you believe the media should be
delivering serious news for thoughtful citizens in a thriving democracy,
it's hard to see the story ending happily ever after.
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