Social media's effect on journalism is greater than shift from print to digital
cjr.org
cjr.org
In agregate, there was no past where print media were know for reporting facts, where people and organisations didn't allow their biases to come through.
The only thing different now is the scale.
But it's not just scale: Online has massively lowered the barrier of entry for the technical prerequisites of reaching people, but the barriers of entry for actually getting attention were still basically the same as before. Until social came along and added that skewed lottery of "viral" on top.
I'm not sure I've seen the word virulence used in reference to the internet term viral, but it sure does seem fitting.
It certainly does seem that with every new technological advance we create new ways to do amazing things both good and bad.
Erm, no, Journalism has been stuck in delivering biased information/junk facts for a long, long time, well before the Internet.
In fact, when reporting on a local story don't national news papers and stations usually defer to the AP or reporters from a local affiliate? Whenever something in my town makes national news, NPR generally has a reporter from our local affiliate on to talk about the issue. I think most of the local/regional news coverage is handled by reporters actually on the ground who live in the areas. I just don't see how local/regional news organizations would be any more or less objective than a national organization by being based in the area.
There never was a time where newspapers printed "just the facts". That wish stems from a misunderstanding both of the concept of "fact" as well as the role of journalism in a democracy.
Firstly, it's impossible on its face to print "just the facts" because the decision of what warrants news coverage itself is already a judgement call. Otherwise, the phone book would have been the pinnacle of journalism.
Secondly, journalists were never in the past expected to be the soulless automata people seem to idolise now. They were and are expected to be arbitrators of the political process, and they were and are allowed use their experience in that process.
In addition, your mechanism of "because of more page views -> more money, quality deteriorates" is just wrong on its face. Newspapers' income was always dependent on "page views" in that sense, yet that never meant that sensationalism was the only strategy. Maybe pressure increased somewhat because it can now be measured on a per-article basis, but good publishers are actually pushing back against that very idea with all their might. That's why they are unwilling to implement what people are now relentlessly asking for: single-article micro payments.
I think much of the argument over bias could be settled by "journalists" having to disclose their political contributions and voting record for the last N years. When people see that a person contributes time, money, and effort to a particular candidate, glowing reviews of that candidate can be taken with a grain of salt.
For voting, I don't really see how you do it officially (what do they get in return for their votes being published), so you just reward liars and punish truth tellers.
That is: they operate within the current system, meaning there are certain assumptions underlying their work. These assumptions (or heuristics, if you will) were traditionally shared by their readers, and therefore were neither mentioned, nor attacked, nor defended.
One example may be their trust in certain institutions. Before 2016, the data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reported without questioning its truth. That didn't mean the data wasn't criticised: the common critique that the statistics are collected with certain definitions that under- or overestimate unemployment go back a long time. But that criticism is very much "inside the system" because it's just a reflection of an argument playing out in academia and within the bureaucracy for a long time.
What's new is this reporting being consumed by people with a very different set of assumptions, or an incomplete understanding of these assumptions. Or, rather, what's new is everyone getting to watch this interaction.
Now, you get people reading an article about unemployment rising/falling and they'll say "These statistics are completely made up! My uncle Jim just got fired! Why isn't this journalist verifying this information before regurgitating it? They are just in bed with big government! Literally!".
The best possible interpretation here is that this person just doesn't know about the heuristics being used. They want journalism to work without any of them, meaning that, when my just-invented "Journal of alternative employment statistics" sends out a press release, it's put on the same queue as the "traditional" data reports and, when someone gets around to either of them, they audit the data and report their findings.
That is, obviously, completely removed from reality and would never work. We need a certain trust in "the system" for functioning in the same way that your family would probably break down if, any time you saw your father or brother, you demanded that they go through genetic testing to prove their relationship with you.
Note that doesn't mean that somebody could cook those statistics without any fear of discovery: if some whistleblower sends a journalist a thousand pages of proof, they'll look into it, and try to verify or falsify it. It just means that long-standing institutions with a track record get a certain benefit vs unknown, new entities.
In contrast the modern web of news sites are all chasing the same ad dollars and the barriers to entry are orders of magnitude lower. They get paid by the page view and don't need to be in a specific area, so the old check of needing to keep subscribers is gone and there's even a profit motive for running more outlandish claims. If someone were motivated to sue, it'd be an expensive and often international slog and the likely outcome even if successful is that a nearly asset-free company would fold before inevitably being replaced.
But what I was trying to dispel was the myth that previously well-regarded institutions like the WSJ and NYT changed for the worse.
I'm pretty sure the Blair scandal (someone completely making up interviews etc.) would play out very much the same today as it did in 2003. I also cannot agree with the idea that these specific institutions are "publishing outlandish claims" any more than they previously did.
Note that these newspapers' finances are still very much structured as they ever were. The NYT makes 70% of its income from subscriptions ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/media/new-york-t...) and the number is probably higher for the WSJ, which started its paywall much earlier and is more stringent in its application. Digital advertisement makes up only 10% of its income.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pris...
Infowars is amusing though. I wouldn't have necessarily predicted their alignment with Trump 10 years or so ago when I first became aware of Alex Jones. The old Alex Jones even had some liberal tendencies, at times.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some cringe-worthy publications on the left as well, but it's certainly more common on the right.
and Mother Jones is nowhere even on that axis. it's a higher quality publication with a deliberate (and publicly announced) editorial bias.
>I don't know of a single one of them that is even halfway as far off the deep end of "motherfuckin lizard
And there are various niche publications that have some combination of loyal subscribers and wealthy backers. (I don't mean the last point as a dig; lots of smallish publications are someone's labor of love.)
What's become much tougher is maintaining serious investigative journalism or even covering all the boring city council meetings in all the markets that don't have a New York Times or Washington Post. This is especially true because journalism looks like an increasingly precarious career choice. There may very well not be a job at the end of the tunnel for the budding reporter who would previously have paid his dues for a few years getting paid peanuts.
You can present things in a relatively objective way, even if you have a bit of a bias. You can do it by treating the other side fairly, and with compassion/understanding.
That is not what happens anymore, people have carved out their audiences and play TO those audiences, and they craft their narrative based upon what that audience wants, rather than a compassionate treatment of the other side.
The "penny press" -- starting in the 1830s -- offered low-cost newspapers, basically at a loss, which were then subsidized with advertising. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press) A similar business model was then used for most newspapers, radio, network television stations, national magazines, cable news/TV subscriptions and on, and on. At each stage, the level of demographic and geographic targeting became more sophisticated. The modern web-based media is basically the logical conclusion of this two-century evolution.
What's more, profitable subscriptions for media are at an all-time high. The issue is that the spoils go to only a few winners, like Amazon, Netflix, SirusXM, Spotify, Comcast/TimeWarner, etc. A real issue is that people are more willing to pay subscriptions for music & entertainment than for news & analysis. But that's changing.
NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ have large-scale digital subscriber programs, and mid-market publishers are following suit. But, it's never going to have as much scale as ad/attention-based monetization.
I tend to agree with the sentiment embedded in your statement -- that if media are subscriber-based, they tend to be better aligned with those readers. But people are definitely accustomed to free on the web.
I recommend you check out "The Attention Merchants" to learn a bit about how news and information has been paid for over time. You shouldn't blame measurement; you should, if anything, blame the media industry's unit economics: http://amzn.to/2osFiNz
Any recommendations written by a historian instead of the author?
> The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal
Uh huh... yeah. 1890. I think this sort of crap has been going on for centuries.
Their ecosystem has always believed they are more important than they are. A person can earn a living within their ecosystem and never leave it.
This report is an example of how their ecosystem thrives on talking about their ecosystem.
Yet I remain even more certain we are much better off now than the Cronkite days when it was 3 networks, a few newspapers and national enquirer.
If I am a peraon who writes words that get published, at the daily news or NYT for example, I get paid, right? How much? 50k a year?
Or are some of the words published written by someone else not in their payroll.
There are a lot of people willing to write for cash. A permanent position as a writer is highly coveted and extremely competitive, which means that not only is it really hard to get such a job, but they don't have to pay much.
Most "journalists" today are starving artist types.
I would argue that "journalism" as a profession is dying. With the internet, we all have direct access to the news. We're no longer dependent on someone's reporter to come back and tell us what happened, and we don't need people in an ivory tower to attempt to interpret or even collate it; we do that ourselves with aggregation platforms.
The future does not look good for people who want this to remain a viable career.
Suppose Facebook embraces the fact that editorial power is political power. Could they develop this without splitting into Blue Facebook and Red Facebook like the television news networks?
[0] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-... [1] https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
This is important for community admins to understand. This is not a dialogue problem. People are given a tribe to belong to or oppose, and these affiliations are used by strategists and propagandists to affect popular anger/resentment.
That means that users don't want to see a balanced feed. They want to see things that make them feel good things, and not bad things. And the other side is "bad things".
If they have editorial power then it's time to do away with the Digital Safe Harbors and time to consider antitrust.
Facebook has a market cap that dwarfs what it cost to put the Philae lander on comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
Print journalism was (relatively) one to many.
Social media is many to many.
It's people's wants and preferences that are the problem. Everybody likes their echo chamber.
It delivers bullshit because that's what people want the most.
Inexorably, you get what you select for.
I mean, there were once poll taxes and literacy tests, which were discriminatory. But how would one test for skeptical rationality? And how would that ever get implemented in a populist democracy?
Edit: typo
For example, suppose that a correlation exists with short-term greediness. In that case, you could alter the voting process such that the voter can choose between a small reward or voting.
This could also be justified by saying that politics should not lean towards short-term policies, and hence people who are prone to such thinking should not participate in the voting process.
National unification is incredibly hard work, but worth trying.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills" -- Kennedy
(this applies very much to the UK as well, but I'm targeting a primarily American audience here)
The important things about both democracy and the rule of law is that people are willing to acquiesce to decisions not in their favour because they recognise the fairness of the process and have a voice in it.
I could have said "fnords", but that's become rather dated.
It's everyone's preference to want cocaine. Heck cocaine is designed to be everyone's preference.
That doesn't mean that a race to the journalistic or hedonistic bottom is valuable or unstoppable.
These are social hygiene and security issues that need to be handled.
People used to believe that journalism was about reporing facts and objective accounts of what was going on.
In reality the newspapers who used to position themselves as objective never where, they were however mainstream.
Thanks to the internet people are now seeing the reality of journalism which is that there are many different perspectives on any subject or put another way. The post-modernists were right all along.
Journalism has never been as factual as it is today it's just that people are uneasy about the reality that different facts can be used to create different angels to the same story.
The only piece of objectivity there is in any story is the event itself. "Plane went down", "Man committed of murder", "Trump won the presidency" once you step outside of these basic facts it's mostly up to interpretation. The whys, the hows, all based on interpretation.
Thanks to social media and then fact that you can't just get away with claiming one interpretation when there are more is what make social media disruptive, not to journalism but to the way we understand journalism.