Fortress Journalism Under Siege By The Web

July 20, 2009 - PRLog -- For so long now, Web 2.0 has been working in the background to subtly but unwittingly undermine the mainstream media, especially in America where, for example, RSS is understood and used far more readily. RSS feeds allow you to say choose the BBC for video news, the New York Times for international news, the Guardian for ecological reports and ESPN for sports — so storming the gates of fortress journalism has become a very easy task.

The main problem for the newspaper industry is that journalists have been very slow in recognising the changes that have been happening under their noses, and whilst the major players have all installed news feeds on their websites, they still continue with the assumption that their news product provides a complete set of news requirements for their readers. However, in the world of the internet, the choices available for a total news information set is not as proprietary as they would like to think.

Jeff Jarvis, Professor of Interactive Journalism at the City University of New York, described it as: “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.”  As witness to this, one of Thailand’s main national daily newspapers has now cut its print edition to just eight pages and the other provides mainly syndicated news. In the US, the newspaper industry, bloated with profits throughout the ‘80s, finds itself with a recession and the web, leaving newsrooms decimated.

Not only RSS, but the immediacy of Twitter alerts are now what news consumers are tuning in to. In a recent article by the Economist, Twitter 1, CNN 0, on the protests in Iran, 10.5m American TV-viewers turned to CNN, but instead of protests many of them saw a repeat of Larry King interviewing “burly motorcycle-builders”. The article went on to illustrate a typical post: 'Iran went to hell. Media went to bed'.”

This realisation is already transforming the face of journalism, which means building public participation in generating user content and making a paradigm shift from a “manufacturing industry” to a service industry. But this too has its drawbacks as, without moderation, blog commenting can often descend into a low common denominator that is sometimes determined by tasteless or hateful comments. In one such instance, a group of aboriginal leaders from Canada requested that hate charges be laid against CBC because of some poorly-moderated user comments which escaped into the public domain.

The other worrying descent of traditional media is to outsource their headlines and copy overseas. According to Business Week, a company 15 miles from New Delhi, Mindworks, has many overseas clients and is “mounting a big effort to go after more US publications”. This is a company to which media groups in the US, Europe and Asia — including the Miami Herald and South China Morning Post — outsource work that journalists and copyeditors used to do. And Thomson Reuters (TRI), moved basic Wall Street reporting on US, European and Gulf equities to a new bureau in Bangalore.

However, it is all too easy to sit back and mock these fortresses but they “protected good journalism and have sheltered brave and risky journalists”. They also gave legal protection and resources to journalists and their organisations, so simply replacing these fortresses is not the right path to take.

As modern society becomes even more highly networked, these fortresses, that are being seen to be abandoned, are opening up and have lowered the drawbridge to allow the public inside their walls, such as the BBC.

The BBC’s Peter Horrocks: “Reducing effort in any journalistic section is anathema to the old fortress mindset. Even more disturbingly, it might also mean co-operating explicitly. If the BBC is best in news video and the Telegraph best in text sports reports, why shouldn't they syndicate that content to each other and save effort?

“That linked approach requires a new kind of journalism, the opposite of fortress journalism. It is well described as “networked journalism”, a coinage popularised by Charlie Beckett at the LSE/Polis. And it requires organisations to be much better connected, both internally and externally. That kind of networking can be unnatural for the journalist or executive brought up in the fortress mentality.”

By better understanding the medium of this change, journalists have their role to play: whilst the public still demand diversity, they also want “the editing, filtering and packaging functions that journalism performs”. We cannot do away with investigative reporting and analysis that journalists facilitate. Alongside that, journalism must move into social networks such as Facebook.

Today, nearly a quarter of the world's population use the internet. According to Google, the internet is the fastest growing communications medium in history. When the internet went public in 1983 there were 400 servers. Today there are well over 600 million. So, news organisations need to invest their talent intelligently in web platforms, or they risk being ignored by an ever-growing number of young people for whom television is an irrelevant medium.

Peter Horrocks continues; “But the cultural impact on what the audience wants from journalism is as big a factor as the economics. In the fortress world the consumption of journalism was through clearly defined products and platforms – a TV or radio programme, a magazine or a newspaper. But in the blended world of internet journalism all those products are available within a single platform and mental space. The user can now click and flit between each set of news. Or they can use an aggregator to pull together all the information they require. The reader may never be aware from which fortress (or brand) the information has come.”

So journalism is changing: it is now permeable, interactive, 24/7, multi-platform, disaggregated and converged. And in my business of web design and website promotions, we have all had to adapt to this changing world and become, ourselves, amateur journalists. Of a sort.

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V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.