And maybe, just maybe, Mansbridge may have to step down from a sinking ship one day. And that must really scare him.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of D & N Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 1:29 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] 85% of news is opinion? http://www.cbc.ca/news/petermansbridge/2013/03/the-future-of-news-looks-scar y.html The future of news looks scary By Peter Mansbridge on March 27, 2013 2:46 PM 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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