Research shows that nearly 60 per cent of people now use Facebook as a primary news source, while many magazines and newspapers are struggling to distribute print copies. This indicates that following the shift in journalism from print media to online, there is the possibility of an additional shift from professional journalism to citizen journalism.

The rise of citizens being able to act as journalists simply by taking a photo and uploading it, is seen as advantageous to society. Tight controls on whose voices can be heard across the world, have finally been broken down.

But the control mechanisms for separating fact from fiction, verifiable information from mere hearsay, have broken down also – at least in part. The recent uproar around London nightclub DSTRKT exemplifies what can readily go wrong in the new media landscape.

It all began when a clubber posted various messages from a man she claimed was a promoter for the nightclub. The messages contained racist statements, explaining that only girls of a lighter skin-colour would be able to enter the club. There were further messages which went on to suggest that overweight girls would also be barred because they were not in keeping with the club’s  image.

Following the messages that the clubber uploaded on Twitter, which were viewed and shared by thousands of users, the club received extremely bad press. Celebrities such as Tinchy Stryder and Karrueche Tran voiced their disappointment in the venue.

Furthermore, as the simple tweet from the clubber on Twitter circulated further, a protest was held outside the venue with the slogan ‘Do I Look DSTRKT?’

But discrimination on these grounds was never club policy – only the views of a single promoter only loosely connected to the club.

Although the clubber has since deleted all content she posted concerning these allegations, the impression given continues to harm the reputation of the club. This is a clear instance of how the values and habits associated with professional journalism, i.e. looking for corroboration, aiming for verification, are sorely missed in the turn towards citizens doing it all for themselves.

To sum up, although citizen journalism may allow members of the community to be involved in the process of producing professional journalism, on its own it is no substitute for the painstaking work of the professionals.

Superb Birds of Paradise perform Strictly-worthy courtship dances to secure their mates, and male Bowerbirds build large, elaborate structures out of twigs and decorate them with flowers, feathers and even rubbish, all in the name of love.

And clickbait, well, clickbait is the peacock. You can’t miss it. It’s sensational and in your face, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty you’ll find it’s simply just another bird. The crux of the matter is that journalists have been fine-tuning techniques to reach the masses for hundreds of years, and this decade it’s all about the bait and click.

It’s a simple yet psychologically intelligent approach of inspiring curiosity across newsfeeds all over the world. It works, but it has certainly had its fair share of haters, and this, hopefully, is my chance to riposte.

I recently stumbled across a rather peculiar article in Elle, in which the writer publicly disowned her entire journalistic works from 2009 to 2011. The headline : ‘My private shame: you’ve fallen for my clickbait headlines’. She described her work as ‘shameful’, ‘embarrassing’ and in opposition to what she believes good writing is. But she was good at it. She made a decent living. And she had a job.

As far as I was aware, writing intuitive and punchy headlines that persuade readers to buy into your content is the epitome of great journalism. One of the greatest headline writers of all time, Vinnie Musetto, has been hailed as the ‘Godfather of clickbait’ in the New York Post and congratulated by the Times and the Guardian for his ‘flawless’ lead: ‘Headless body in topless bar’. A story narrating the scene of a 1983 murder, where a man killed the owner of a strip club, and then proceeded to force a patron to remove the victim’s head. Vinnie’s other works include the just as dramatic: ‘500Lb sex maniac goes free’ and the more sensational: ‘I slept with a trumpet’. And this was nearly 30 years ago.

Which is why, the often-foremost dig at the technique is that it’s degrading to the most ancient public service that is journalism. A colleague and fellow writer for Proof Reading accuses clickbait of prioritising the fast and loose approach, while benching ‘informative’ and ‘comprehensive’ to the reserve squad.

But when exactly has the latter been compromised by clickbait? It’s not as though the media is now ruled by ’10 amazing ways to shave inches off your waist’, is it? I like to think that every publication should have its time and place to pursue readership, and it’s up to the readership to pursue the publication. In all honestly, if you were to analyse your Facebook newsfeed and discover that you now know more about The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and crazy things girls do at parties, it’s because that is exactly what you subscribe to. It is the public’s own disengagement and personal disinterests that block political discussion and involvement.

A second notion (which I like to think is most often to be found in the Reuters office) is that only moronic publications utilise clickbait. My thoughts? Only a moron would utilise clickbait and do it wrong. Who’s to say that clickbait isn’t a rock-solid 21^st century investment into journalism? A well-rounded, curiosity-inspiring headline will often lead to a click, and, if the content is sound and non-deceiving, a click could turn into a subscription. If, however, the publication gets it grossly wrong, the very same click turns into an unsatisfied reader, which will rarely, if ever, visit the page again.

Buzzfeed is the perfect example of how a heretic company can utilise the clickbait framework to its full potential. The website sees upwards of 150 million users through its doors everyday and is valued at $850 million dollars. Certainly not a number to scoff at when the Times and the Guardian have been on their knees for years.

In 2014, Buzzfeed released a statement aimed directly at their critics in an attempt to educate the world on clickbait. Editor-in-chief Ben Smith tells us that Buzzfeed’s business thesis is ‘to deliver the reader something so new, funny, revelatory, or delightful that they feel compelled to share it’ – and they’re doing it well. A quick scan of their Facebook newsfeed presents the evidence. ’19 Things You Only Get If You’re A Lazy Girl Who Hates Getting Ready’. 1285 shares. ’27 Art History Photos That Are Too Funny For Their Own Good’. 4618 shares. And my personal favourite: ’23 Things All People With long, Lustrous Hair Will Understand’. 5003 shares.

‘The best way to ensure your readers won’t choose to share a story or a post is to trick them,’ he continues, then goes on to offer a vivid description of misleading clickbait as ‘pollution’ of the newsfeed.

In fact, Buzzfeed doesn’t actually charge its advertisers per click. They have introduced a sustainable and workable economic environment into journalism for the masses, which doesn’t conflict with the core values of the pioneers. This is the future of journalism, whether you turn your nose up or not.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/09/vincent-musetto-new-york-post-headline

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-godfather-of-clickbait

http://www.elle.com/life-love/a29603/my-private-shame-hating-what-i-wrote/

https://www.facebook.com/BuzzFeed?fref=ts

https://proof-reading.org/sharing-the-spectacle-of-the-self/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clickbait#.pd3gDDJw8

Ideas Matter To The Making Of Film

Katy Sharp-Watson  

Back in 2008, film magazine Sight and Sound ran a front cover emblazoned with the words: ‘Who needs critics?’ The answer: they do, clearly; but not everyone feels the same way. The job losses of critics have been a symptom of steadily declining print sales. Since the digital revolution no group of people has been as desperate to defend and define their profession as film critics. A great deal of debate has since taken place that discusses the future of film criticism and what the critics can do to keep their profession alive. But how did we get to this point? Why do the public need critics? Why do films need critics? How successfully has film journalism migrated to the web? And fundamentally, how can film criticism sustain a vibrant future?

I want to address the current controversies that engulf film criticism and put my case for its future role.

A History of Crisis

Firstly, it’s wrong to assume that the crisis of film criticism corresponds to the rise in use of the Internet. Film critics have long endured allegations of elitism and snobbery that they have been unable to shake. If opinions are just mere opinions then how can a small select group of people hold an opinion of more worth over the everyday consumer of film? Rather, the Internet has enabled a backlash which had been quietly brewing for some time. By looking at publications from the 1980s and 1990s, we can see how critics have long been paranoid about the fragile state of their profession. For example, Terry Eagleton’s The Function of Criticism from 1984 argues that the public sphere is disintegrating and critics must take urgent action to re-assess their role.

It is also no co-incidence that the same year in which Sight and Sound published the ‘Who needs critics?’ cover, the world economy was undergoing a financial crisis that would result in major loss of earnings and job losses across most industries and professions. Film critics were not immune to this trend. Match this with the rise of the Internet and its sudden provision of an abundance of amateur film enthusiasts and bloggers prepared to undertake the job of the critic for free, and it is clear how and why professional film critics’ jobs were at high risk.

A number of high profile film critics have reflected on significant changes in their profession in recent years – changes that have resulted in fear and tension amongst their ranks. Mark Kermode’s Hatchet Job published in 2013, identified a trend that saw film marketers moving away from using the opinion of the critic to promote their film, and utilising the paying public instead. Taking the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s promotional campaign as an example, he notes how the film’s distributors chose to cover the film’s poster with quotes from random people on Twitter instead of respected national critics. Chief film critic of The Telegraph, Robbie Collin lashed out against this practice when The Impossible was released in 2012 – a film that had gained high critical acclaim and was not short of five stars and glowing quotes.  Kermode also draws attention to other indications that suggest the end may be nigh for film critics, such as the tendency for distributors not to hold a national press screening for a film, seemingly deeming the critic’s role as redundant. Pairing this with the rise of sites such as IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Amazon, all of which offer users an opportunity to write their own reviews, the status of the traditional critic has been further undermined. It is not just keen amateur bloggers that pose a threat to the status quo, but the ordinary film viewing public, or ‘citizen journalists’.

Why does the public need critics and why do films need critics?

There is no question that critics are in trouble; but the question remains – do we need them, anyway? And who cares if their profession is over? Before jumping to the conclusion that the only people to lose out are critics themselves, please consider the following.

Firstly, the professional film critic has gained that position purely based on their life-long dedication to watching and writing about cinema. This may seem obvious, but it is too-often forgotten. The best critics are those who take their jobs immensely seriously and watch all films from all genres and countries. This dedication places them in a far better position from which to engage in criticism and their opinion ought to be thoroughly considered, drawing on comparisons from a wide history of film knowledge. A good film critic will also know his readership as people turn to a certain critic because they trust his opinion over another. A critic should do his best not to pre-judge a film, and begin the viewing process with an open mind, free from bias.

Once in a long while, a film will appear that makes a strong impact upon the viewer, prompting a sense of bewilderment and confusion but also a desire to keep thinking and keep searching for answers. Film criticism provides a way to look further and make sense of what you have seen. Decent film critics will have devoted their lives to seeking out these answers.

As mentioned previously, there is a growing trend for film promoters to bypass press screenings, not because they know the film is so bad that no review is better than a damning review, but because the critics’ input is simply arbitrary and will make no convincing impact on the film’s success. High profile critics such as Kermode have also suggested that their opinions have no bearing on the box office of a film. This can imply that film critics have the freedom to write as they please, for no bad review has the ability to cause a crushingly negative affect. But this standpoint ignores the needs of smaller independent films that lack the vast marketing budgets enjoyed by Hollywood studio productions. For many low-budget films, the review written by a high profile critic in a national newspaper or large-circulation magazine is a lifeline to at least some level of promotion. For these films, the critic’s role is vital. But critics are not there only for promotional purposes; film criticism has done more for cinema than many filmmakers would care to imagine.

In the 1950s, French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema changed the way we think about film. Founded by respected scholar Andre Bazin, the magazine sought to establish film as a legitimate art form, with close analysis of a film’s mise-en-scene – now a regular part of academic film studies, but also built into the fabric of how we all look at film, whether or not we are aware of it. Furthermore, Cahiers championed the ‘auteur’ theory – the idea that the director is not just a journeyman but an author exercising full artistic control over his film. By establishing the director in such high esteem, and by advocating filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Jean Renoir, Cahiers du Cinema re-invented quality cinema for the better. The concept of director-as-artistic-creator is now so commonplace in cinema that it is hard to imagine how it could ever have been any other way.  As demonstrated by Cahiers, quality criticism, discussion and debates together create an environment in which serious film making is encouraged to flourish. Conversely, to give up on criticism is to give up on film itself.

Film criticism in the digital age

There is the familiar notion of the Internet acting as a platform of democracy, a revolution that can be deemed positive or negative, depending on which side you choose to take. Mattias Frey calls this into question by taking Rotten Tomatoes, (one of the major Internet film review site successes) as a case study. He suggests that far from democratising opinion, Rotten Tomatoes actually re-enforces the critic’s dominant position:

‘Rotten Tomatoes is a celebration of criticism and actually validates the basic tenet of the critical project: that critics’ judgement can and should matter to the reception and consumption of film and other cultural products’ (Frey, 2015: 86).

It does this by installing algorithms that favour ‘top critics’ first and foremost, down to bloggers and finally, audiences last. The criteria for a ‘top critic’ is strict and only those at major publications with a wealth of experience are included. Rotten Tomatoes acts as a useful tool in which to compare the opinions of the most renowned critics, and dip into the views of the public to see if they follow the general consensus.

Not all critics are worried about their profession, however. Filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins has stressed that the so-called film criticism revolution has been widely over-stated. He notes: ‘the Internet doesn’t lead dreams, fear, invention, poetry or protest. It follows them. It serves them’. For Cousins, the Internet is simply the medium and not the message. He also stresses how the art of criticism is not exclusive to the written word, as demonstrated through his documentaries that examine films which have been forgotten or overlooked. But does Cousins’ understanding of criticism differ from the common perception? Defining the role of the critic, Cousins states: ‘the critic looks at the text, compares it to the world and then, out of this comparison, makes the criticism. She says the text is a good one because it relates to the world well and is also somehow – because of its wit, or speed, or slowness or interiority, or surprise or sorrow – beautiful in itself.’

But does this definition really describe what critics do? A common misconception of the job of the critic is that she is simply a guide to whether a film is ‘good’ or ‘bad’; in other words – a reviewer. Many publications perpetuate this mistake by including a star system guide that enables readers to bypass the written review altogether, and choose a film based on a simplistic out-of-five basis. But there is a clear difference between reviewer and critic.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, the growth of cultural products on offer to the public has resulted in the need for consumer guides. This is what film critics have come to provide, especially in the national press and in lifestyle magazines. We often ask ourselves, ‘will this film be worth my time, and worth my money?’ Reasonable questions requiring a decent answer – but that’s not the same as the work of a critic.

Cultural criticism, rather, is in-depth analysis and exploration. It digs deep beneath the surface of a film; it seeks to expose its influences, its codes and its beauty. This type of criticism is likely to be of interest to those who have seen the film that is being discussed – the kind of writing which is better read after viewing, in order to illuminate the film. As Sight and Sound editor Nick James wrote this March in an editorial, this sort of film analysis and discussion will inevitably lead to spoilers, but it’s a price worth paying for quality film journalism.

Onto the Future…

It is by making this important distinction between review and critique that we can begin to see how film criticism may survive in the digital age. Far from signalling the demise of quality criticism, the Internet actually provides the ideal platform for active debate and discussion. The relationship between critic and public has changed enormously, but this should not signal the end of critical integrity. Those that have acknowledged the distinction have been the most successful in the transition from print to online. The late, highly respected film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times has been a prime example: instead of fearing the Internet, Ebert embraced the change. He identified the need for film analysis to become a conversation and so actively blogged on his website and encouraged comments and discussion from his users. People visited his website because they trusted him and respected him, but they stayed because they felt included in the debate. After his death in 2013, Ebert’s site lives on and its content is now produced by an array of amateur film bloggers following in his giant footsteps.

Proclaiming that a film is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ can be undertaken by anyone. Whilst we may still wish to turn to a critic for a round up of the week’s releases, we are just as likely to take viewing tips from friends, family, Twitter, Facebook and IMDB. But the Internet has demonstrated that the appetite for thorough, critical discussion is larger than ever. Message boards, forums, below the line comments and blogs should not indicate the end of criticism – rather they highlight the desire for discussion. Possibilities for discussion have been opened up by the digital revolution, and such possibilities are not limited to the written word. Podcasts and radio shows, for example, have proven how popular critical discussions on new forms of media really are.

Taking Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode’s weekly Radio 5 Live film review show as an example, we can see how this is true. Since its inception in 2001, the show has grown enormously in popularity, and the extended podcast version has been downloaded over 50 million times since 2005. Its success is based on a combination of accessibility and inclusivity with a high level of knowledge and understanding. Whilst the debate and critique of films is thorough and considered, it has a light-hearted tone and speaks to its audience by not talking down to them. Listeners are encouraged to Tweet and email the show, and much of the airtime is dedicated to reading these messages. Furthermore, its listeners are not the die-hard cinephiles that make up Sight and Sound’s readership, but everyday consumers of film and those who just appreciate good discussion. This model of film criticism on a digital platform is leading the way for film journalism in the twenty-first century.

There is a place for well-educated film critics in the digital future, but they will only continue to exist if they adapt to the changing landscape of film journalism. There is a clear disparity between what the public and the critics deem ‘quality cinema’. Sight and Sound’s best films of all time list – chosen by critics – does not match that of IMDB’s top 250 films, chosen by its users. But this does not mean that critics are out of touch. The films that make up the list on IMDB are all commercially successful and Hollywood studio-backed: they are the films that the masses watch; just as their makers intended. But quality should never be defined by commerciality. Critics are important because without them, what other basis do we have to define quality? Without them, there is no voice to champion independent cinema, for example.

On the other hand, film is too important for be left to the elitists. The critics’ verdict must never be the be all and end all; there must be a platform for response. We should be striving for high-quality debate and analysis whilst simultaneously creating spaces for an inclusive discussion with wide-appeal.

Rescue The Review….And The Reviewer

Chiino Stoppard

Introduction: what’s wrong with the music industry and music journalism?

The steep decline of newspaper and physical album sales happened almost in tandem. The UK’s top 11 paid-for daily newspapers had a collective circulation of around 12.8 million in 2004, according to The Guardian (2004, using ABC data). In 2012, even with the addition of i, the UK’s 12 top paid-for dailies had a circulation closer to 7.7 million (Guardian, 2014). In more dramatic fashion, according to BPI (2014), the UK music industry’s income from album sales in 2003 was £1.1 billion (from an industry generating £1.2 billion). In 2013, it was £3.4 million (from a sector that made £0.7 billion).

More comparisons can be made concerning corporate restructuring. News media ownership has been further concentrated over this time period, in the same way that major labels have gone from the ‘Big Six’ in 1999 to the ‘Big Three’ from 2012 onwards.

In response to the changing landscape and the decline in traditional UK music sales, the Official Charts Company now counts online album streaming as paid-for consumption. This is similar to the way that subscriptions to tablet-optimised digital versions of newspapers are now tracked.

The changes have been so significant that the two fields have lost their once-tight bond. The established media’s ability to inform the public of the merits of music has been diminished. The reasons for this (in various degrees, at differing levels) include: decreasing need to purchase music, lessened authority for traditional publications as ‘gatekeepers’, and the rise of ‘surprise’ albums being released without prior promotion (Forbes, 2015).

Why buy, when you can get it for free? For the price of a single LP, music fans can stream any album they want for a month on Spotify. Many know how to download songs without paying too. On release, most albums are streamable on SoundCloud, VEVO or a number of other platforms, fee-free. Fewer physical sales on new music mean a decreased demand for any CD or vinyl versions. This shortens the time between post-production and release. Physical versions may actually come some time after the digital version. Collectively, these elements paint a picture of music sales that is a world away from what it was 15 years ago.

As a result of these tech-led advancements in the music industry, the perception of professional album reviews has changed. Once viewed with prestige and honour, the value of these has been on the decline. They simply are not viewed as important any more. The once-standard three-month advances on albums for publications have gone. Album reviews, as an element of music journalism, are losing their curating role to consumers. The audience now has the Internet to do it for them. Does an album review have a place, in a time like this?

Where is the Authority?

Assuming the answer is ‘no’ means failing to appreciate that reviews do not just act as a way for consumers to decide whether to buy or not. When someone with cultural authority states that a particular album has a certain significance, it can guide wider cultural discourse too. This is something that will not change, just because fewer people are buying. It is for this reason that album reviews published in notable media outlets need to be done well, and by specialists. If they are not undertaken in this careful manner, who will be there to verify a ‘classic’?

At a time when the voice of the public is amplified so greatly, and Internet publishing is a rush to be first to write about something (Green, 2010), so much frantic activity can seem to undermine the value of the critics’ output. It devalues the review, and essentially puts it at the same level as all of the other opinions online. But just as critics need to be able to distinguish themselves from the ‘noise’, so we need them to be able to do it.

In the past, this could be achieved by becoming part of the established media. With the likes of The Independent cutting back on its arts reviews (Guardian, 2013), the BBC discontinuing the album review section of its website in 2013, and once-critical ratings from specialist titles now coming under question (UpRoxx, 2011), there are doubts about the traditional stomping ground of the music critic. But that doesn’t mean that the overall role of the critic has suddenly become doubtful.

Today, some music critics are able to bypass this conventional route, by creating brands themselves. By nurturing their audiences (which could be through social media accounts, or YouTube) with unique content, they can create establish a thought-leader reputation in a specific field. The authority has transitioned from traditional media to newer forms, but may yet find a happy medium where the true experts can distinguish themselves from everyday consumers and be rewarded on their considerable merit.

What is the Role of the Critic?

In The Function of Criticism (Eliot, 2014, originally writing in 1919), T.S. Eliot defines the critic’s crucial ‘task’ as ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’. Criticism offers the framework from which ‘imposters can be readily rejected’ – a form of gatekeeping. Considering that barriers to the consumption of content have largely dissolved, and that Eliot was talking from a time prior to the birth of the LP, it is difficult to establish whether his definition still holds the same weight.

True, ‘tastemakers’ of some description still curate content to filter out the bad, but the voice of a critic does not have the same authority to banish ‘imposters’ as might have been the case in the past. For example, a feature on The Concurse (2015), that questioned the role of music curators in allowing an out-and-out copycat artist to gain significant recognition, was met with misdirected anti-critic sentiment, rather than meaningful discourse about the topic that was brought up.

Marinetti’s oft-quoted line: ‘regard all art critics as useless and dangerous’ (Meggs and Purvis, 2011, originally writing in 1909) will come up time and again, but some kind of cultural analysis is still vital. Marinetti’s thoughts were anti-establishment, i.e. against what was previously established, having faith in the future instead. However, this line of thought does not apply across all cultures and at all times. Being able to decipher the meaning, inspiration, purpose and execution of artistic ideas enables the critic to guide us through a cultural discourse.

Some may feel as though the concept of ‘correcting taste’ is outdated in an age where the world’s cultures are more interconnected and accessible. However, without critics at all, it still leaves us in a state where no one can declare something as culturally significant – unless they have the money to back it up. Better to have people who are trained to exercise judgement, I suggest.

Unlike in other arts, such as theatre and film, where critics can massively dictate the success and consumption, the same is not true of music albums. They are not giving ‘buyer’s guides’; potential listeners would not necessarily need to consult a review, as many will not need to buy in order to access it. (In fact, only concert reviews serve this purpose today). However, what really good album reviews do achieve is to identify, as Friskics-Warren (2006) puts it, whether musicians are able to achieve the state of transcendence that all arts strive for.

Opinion Oversaturation

Telling the public to ‘judge for yourself’ can be used too easily with music output now. If you want to hear an album, you can probably find it on YouTube and decide whether you like it for yourself. The same is true for concerts. Most of them are filmed and uploaded to YouTube. Does a consumer need to read up on their critiques of the performance if they can see if for themselves for free? In theory, no. In reality, the video is likely an optimised version of the best parts. Even if multiple crowd sourced uploads show a few viewpoints of the concert, they probably still lack context about what happened beforehand, audience mood and other things that you would only experience if you were truly there. Critical write-ups can cover this.

The same goes for the average consumer listening to an album and commenting on it. Yes, it is all based on individual taste and perception. However, those with the loudest voice online may distort reality. A young listener may not pick up on samples, cadences and sounds borrowed from older musicians. More mature listeners may not notice popular culture references in the work. It is the job of someone equipped with the right skills and knowledge to lead the conversation, and be given the correct platform to express it, before it is drowned out by whoever gets in there fastest.

Churnalism is usually discussed in a news writing context (Johnson, 2011), but it is just as damaging when applied to music criticism. This is why many ‘reviews’ of albums are simply top-level descriptions of the music. Even websites that specialise on curating content (so want to just highlight the best) will touch on bad popular music, simply in order to fulfil search engine optimisation and click-bait objectives. The more areas an editorial website can cover, the more chance that people will click a link (from either Google or a social media platform) to view it, which in turn, could mean more advertising revenue. Publishing music criticism for this reason completely undermines its purpose, and its importance.

There are fewer quality reviews of albums today. Online, consumers essentially have a Pitchfork opinion, a Guardian one, or nothing. The only other hope is the specialist magazines. If your favourite music does not fit into specific box, it will be left behind. Blogs can help to fill in the gaps, but they are inconsistent and face the issue of potentially being written by misinformed ‘have-a-go’ experts that mistakenly steer discourse off-track. The public needs to be able to have multiple resources that they can rely on. Sometimes, these will actually be blogs, but we should not have to rely on hobbyist writers for this content.

How Will It Pay Its Way?

These days, individual musicians often fund their craft through corporate sponsorships and live shows, rather than the sale of their actual songs. Could this aspect of the industry hold the answer of how to fund music journalism, moving forward? CRWN was launched in 2013, seeing a range of big-name musicians being interviewed about their art (exclusively) before a paying live audience. Once uploaded to YouTube, it could then be monetised further. For reviews, this is unlikely to work, as the draw of CRWN is that the artist is actually there. If the artist was present before the critics, it could compromise their responses. As far as corporate sponsorship goes, these often favour pop musicians, and it would be in the sponsors’ interest to support criticism that shared a similar sentiment. This clearly undermines the purpose of the reviews.

The value of a review from a well-established music journalist (Simon Reynolds, Nick Kent, Paul Lester) is that they can bring out elements of the music that the average consumer may have otherwise missed. They are expected to put music into cultural context, comment on its merits, offer critique and present this with personality and literary skill. Would the public be willing to pay for an enhanced listening experience? They do when they buy luxury headphones or opt to see an act live. It is not a stretch to believe that there is a demand for this.

The Needle Drop is a YouTube channel where music critic Anthony Fantano conducts reviews of current releases in a video format. With over 400,000 subscribers, 80,000 Twitter followers, and a thriving forum on his blog, he shows that there is a demand for the music review. He does not disclose how he goes about monetising this. No ads run on the videos, and the display placements on his blog are only likely to earn him around $18,000 per year (Stat Tools, 2015), yet he does this full-time, so presumably there are other revenue streams.

What can be learned from Anthony Fantano’s output is that the public has a desire to consume music reviews, and that it is not an outdated convention of music journalism. Much like the major labels’ shift towards streaming albums, he recognises that the public is more willing to consume the content if they do not have to dig into their own pockets (or even be exposed to adverts) to get to it. Product placements and outsider corporate funds contribute towards the incomes of many other vloggers, so it can be assumed that something along these lines is taking place here too. Perhaps independent, DIY reviews are the way forward, rather than through established journalistic brands. Perhaps the public can ‘buy into’ a personality they relate to more than a music magazine.

How Do We Move Forward?

For music journalism to progress, it needs quality album reviews from well-informed specialists to have more prominence. While vloggers such as Fantano may not fit Eliot’s idea of ‘the commentation and exposition of works of art by means of written words,’ (Eliot, 2014), he could not have foreseen the current landscape of the arts at the time. The future of music criticism needs to be just as receptive to adaptions in media consumption, as the presentation of news has, for example. As long as the content is of a high standard, it can be moulded into a number of forms. Written reviews still have their place, but so do podcasts, videos, Tweets, and so on.

As well as the adaptions that need to be made to the presentation of music critiques, so does the content. Filtering out the noise is a problem, in an age where the rate of music production has increased, and the price to distribute it is next to nothing. There is a need to rescue the review, despite what critics of critiques may think. The public might not need to have their tastes ‘corrected’ in the way that T.S. Eliot once suggested, but in a time when everyone’s viewpoint can be amplified, there needs to be a way to distinguish those with an informed perspective from those with just another opinion.

Music reviews will always be subjective, and varying interpretations on the music can add to the listening experience. This is why review platforms on Pitchfork still carry weight, but a decreasing number of platforms wish to explore this aspect of music journalism. The simplicity of musician and song aggregation is favoured, as it cuts out the bad, but it loses the discourse. These discussions are what is missing, and why it has come down to the-end consumers to take the critic’s place.

Critics earn their reputation by offering considered opinions, and these cannot be gauged through a single listen to an album, upon release (unlike how Twitter tends to respond). If we give specialists the resources and the platforms to get their voices across, it may improve the output. Music journalism cannot hope to do its job properly, until it gets to grips with the album review. This is still one of the most essential elements, so it is time we recognised it as such, and started treating it accordingly.

These are revised versions of papers presented by their authors to the student-led Future of Journalism conference at UEL Knowledge Dock, May 2015.

Bibliography

Collin, R. (2013). Who cares what Twitter critics think? Available: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/9810807/Who-cares-what-Twitter-critics-think.html. Last accessed 20.5.2015.

Cousins, M. (2014). Situation Critical. Available: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/dispatches-situation-critical. Last accessed 20.5.2015.

Eagleton, T. (1984) The Function of Criticism. London: Verso Press

James, N. (2008, October) ‘Who Needs Critics?’ Sight and Sound

Kermode (2013) Hatchet Job. London: Picador

Mattias, F. & Sayad, C. (2015) Film Criticism in the Digital Age. London: Rutgers University Press

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 1, January 2010 The Scale and Origins of the Threat to Journalism

Introduction: Under Fire

Journalists are facing new pressures. Even before ‘credit crunch’ became full-blown recession, there was the perceived threat to professional journalism posed by user-generated content (UGC), and the migration of classified advertising from the local press to the internet.

Now, in the current context of reduced advertising revenue, declining readership and deepening recession (at least in the UK), publishers are especially keen on UGC. They see it as an opportunity to cut costs by reducing the number of professional journalists involved in the production of media content (note, ‘media content’; no longer ‘news’ or ‘features’). Compared to paid-for journalists, citizens come cheap.

From the publishers’ point of view, it makes sense: if readers don’t pay for online content, why should publishers have to fork out for it? What’s free to the goose should be no-fee to the gander.

If implemented to the letter, this approach would spell the end of the professional reporter. News reporting, the front line of journalism and also its single, costliest component, now faces the firing squad.

Battle Of Ideas

Journalists are naturally opposed to this view, and the cost-cutting, job-slashing measures which it reflects. But so far we have been unable to re-think the problems facing journalism in such a way as to reinforce the role of professional journalists and confirm the essential character of news reporting.

What’s thinking got to do with it? Journalists are often called upon to enter into readers’ thought processes, but we ‘hacks’ do not normally include independent thinking in our job description. In any case, you can’t think yourself out of recession.

However, given that we are in recession, and recession means that already limited resources are becoming even more so, we should recognise that the ensuing battle for resources partly depends on a battle of ideas – ideas about what journalism does, what it can be expected to do, and what it is about professional journalism that is worth paying a premium for.

Holding The Line

The cut and thrust of office politics largely determine whether more or less of a fixed budget is spent on news reporting; and whether UGC is deployed as a substitute for it. Of course personal loyalties (and their absence) also play a significant part in these battles, but ultimately you can only hold the line if first you have an original line of thought to hold onto; and this we hacks have lacked.

Instead, journalists have entered the conflict on other people’s terms, unwisely accepting that digital technology destroys journalism; conceding, unnecessarily, that UGC inevitably undermines the role of professionals. Having ceded so much to the other side, we’ve hardly been able to convince ourselves of the importance of professional journalism. We know we would be penniless without it. But that’s about as much as we have managed to say; and in these penny-pinching times, it is nowhere near enough to prevent journalists being made to feel the pinch.

Commentator Ben Goldacre nearly had it when he said of ‘the media’ and swine-flu ‘hype’: they ‘have lost all confidence in their own ability to give us the facts’ (the Guardian, 29/4/09 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/29/swine-flu-hype ).

More than that, nowadays we journalists hardly dare claim to ‘speak truth to power’, because we have largely conceded that truth is beyond our ken.

The purpose of this essay is to show how journalism is true to the world it describes, despite the many, fully justifiable complaints levelled against some aspects of it; moreover, that professionally produced news reporting is disposed to provide a unique kind of truth which is not generally replicable by non-professionals – at least, not in current conditions nor in the foreseeable future; furthermore, that journalism which is true to the world is both true to itself and up to the money. Hard facts, if only they are hard enough, will measure up to the harsh realities of economic life.

By the same token, this essay also provides journalists with a convincing argument for professional journalism in general and news reporting in particular; an argument to be used against publishers disposed to dispense with professional journalism at its costliest and also its most important point, i.e. news reporting, the point at which new information originates.

This is the first in a volume of essays, ‘Journalists Defending Journalism’, published by Proof. The authors of these essays object to the various prosecutions currently brought against professional journalism, and offer a host of powerful arguments in defence of it. By lodging these objections and acting upon them, we can do more than cover our backs. The uncertainties we are presented with also present us with the opportunity to certify what journalism is for; and the chance to do this with more confidence than ever before.

Vested with the following arguments in support of our own professional interests, we journalists need not go naked into the conference chamber.

Economy of Time

Journalism pictures the world for its readers, viewers and listeners. Not so that they can appreciate the depiction (though we don’t mind if they do), but in order that they may know what’s going on.

Long before BBC iplayer, it was professional journalism which made the unmissable, unmissable.

Web 2.0 enthusiasts make out that people can do this largely for themselves nowadays, for and on behalf of each other. In the new world of their numerous catch-phrases, ‘here comes everybody’ segues into ‘we the media’. But this outlook confuses the possibility afforded by new media technology with the realisation of that possibility in an historically specific social context. Standing in between the two is an enormous obstacle – much more than a technicality – known as the economy of time.

We all know that ‘time is money’, and the ‘economy of time’ is shorthand for the allocation of work time, and thus the measuring out of lifetimes, according to the pressure to make money. All commercial companies are obliged to operate within the economy of time, and so are their employees. Accordingly, most people spend most of their time either working for the company or recreating themselves so that they are fit for work next day; and time allocated to these mainly mundane activities, is not available for journalistic purposes. What’s already spoken for, is not free to be spent any other way.

By the same token, i.e. having to have money to live, to earn a living we journalists are obliged to allocate the time of our working lives to the business of reporting the world. At first sight, this is merely to state the obvious distinction between amateur and professional; but it has been so readily obscured recently, that it merits a second look.

The economic pressures which inevitably distract non-professionals from journalistic activities, have the opposite effect on professional journalists, consistently focussing our attention on the continuous task of reporting the world and processing our reports into revenue-generating packages. Under the terms of this arrangement, consistent economic pressure matches the continuous nature of the reporting role that journalism takes on. The economy of time means that journalism is best-equipped to support readers, viewers and listeners, providing them with high-quality information about a wide range of events, when the people best-qualified to practise it are financially supported for doing so.

‘We the media’ people will have their calculators out, by now. They will have worked out that if you add up the shorter time available to most individuals for journalistic activity, it may outlast the longer time at the disposal of a relatively small number of professional journalists, so long as the non-professionals taking part are sufficiently numerous. But even this trade-off cannot match the unique social role played by professional journalism – a role which depends on the economy of time but is not reducible to it.

Time and Time Again

Setting aside quantitative considerations for a moment, getting paid to do journalism allows journalists whose time is paid-for to practise journalism continuously, which in turn lends a particular quality to the journalism they are thus able to produce. We journalists soon recognise this, just as we are quick to laugh at those who have not had enough practice. But there is more at issue here than technique; the latter is merely the outward form of the essentially social character of professional journalism.

Those paid to do journalism all day, cannot but do one story after another. Although we are not often asked to write exactly the same story twice (it sometimes seems otherwise!), repeated reporting – going out on one story after another – means that each time we do go out, we take with us what we saw last time, and what we think we might encounter on our next outing, even as we are working on the job in hand.

Continual repetition, in other words, makes for continuous comparison. As well as reporting on specific events, as and when they report them, professional journalists are also comparing these events to other events and relating them to other stories they have already reported. While recording the details of any one story, professional journalists are also measuring its details on a scale constructed from the previous details of earlier stories, and the way those other stories were also calibrated by reporters, sub-editors, desk editors, title editors, and the editor of last resort – readers. In describing one experience the professional journalist also inscribes it with other experiences, so that in making an account of it, journalists render every experience commensurate with all other experiences.

As authors of ‘the first draft of history’, professional journalists are the first to perform this comparison; moreover, all subsequent comparisons depend on our original evaluation, even if they end by rejecting it as incomplete or inaccurate.

A simple simile: each time they hear patients’ symptoms, doctors make their diagnosis based on what they have heard just now, together with what they have previously heard at medical school or from other patients. Without this comparative capability, they would be quacks; with it, they are essential to the health of society.

The Social Role of Journalism

Among professional journalists, the same sort of ability is loosely described as ‘news sense’. To veterans of the newsroom, it is as natural as walking and chewing gum at the same time. It is casually described but also rightly revered, for this is not only a matter of practised technique; it is also an essential component in journalism’s social role.

When professional journalists compare one story with another – the comparison which repetitive reporting will prompt them to make automatically, in their mind’s eye they are exchanging one human experience for another. This enables them to rate the new story according to its ‘news value’, i.e. to identify its significance in relation to other stories. But there is more to this rating than the ratings (viewing figures, readership, professional status). The fact that individual human beings can understand the experiences of other individuals, and even their own, depends on those experiences being exchangeable, commensurate, measured according to the same scale.

On a monthly, weekly, daily, hourly basis, professional journalism makes a particular contribution to mutual understanding because professional journalists are exceptionally well trained in sizing up a wide variety of current experiences according to standards held in common. Yes, these standards and the way we journalists apply them should both be open to question; nonetheless, it is largely by our efforts that each new experience is placed in relation to other experiences; and this association of all experiences is not only the stuff of journalism, it is also the precursor to every association between people. It is vital to the production of society itself. Moreover, because of the economy of time professional journalists are uniquely placed to play this socially constructive role: being regularly paid for long periods of reporting prompts particular development of the comparative capability from which society itself is partly derived.

Retrospective Standards

In taking up with UGC, and encouraging it to take over from professional reporting, publishers seem to think that the comparative capability of the professional can be introduced at a later stage in the production of media content, usually in the person of the sub-editor tasked with making some decent copy (applying common standards) out of the variable stuff (non-standard) sent in by the punters. But this is wholly unsatisfactory.

Though reporters and sub-editors have often differed sharply in their interpretation, nonetheless they are accustomed to working to a common standard. The comparative capability characteristic of the professional journalist is writ large in the sub’s re-drafting as it is in the reporter’s first draft. But it is not normally present in the raw form of UGC, which often consists of a simple invitation to ‘look at that’, or even to ‘look at me.’ This is one-dimensional, and when sub-editors (‘re-badged’ as ‘content processors’) are required to make something more of it, they are being asked to insert the social dimension retrospectively, into one-sided material which lacks the duality inherent in professional work.

The resulting content is devoid of integrity; it is highly manipulated, which makes it prone to inaccuracy; and at its worst it is laughable. Charlie Brooker got it right when he roasted BBC Online for the vast expanse of UGC which it devoted to…..snow.

Properly deployed, UGC allows news organisations to widen the range of their source material. A wider range of material may well result in better coverage, not least because there is more material available for comparative evaluation; but if used as a substitute for professional reporting, it can only lead to inferior coverage – and less (commercial) interest in that coverage on the part of readers, listeners and viewers.

The Money Shot

In response to all of the above, publishers will say that professional concern about journalism’s decline does not in itself make a convincing case for investing more money in news reporting. They point out that:

Journalism’s ‘social role’, as you have chosen to call it, is conditional on its commercial function; and now that its business model has been broken by the worldwide web, professional journalism, especially paid-for reporting, is increasingly dysfunctional.

For an industry which frequently declares itself ‘platform agnostic’, it is strange how many senior managers are true believers in the power (divine or devilish?) of one platform to destroy all others. Equally strange that journalism’s ‘broken’ business model is considerably stronger in parts of the world which have recently experienced rapid economic growth and cultural development, including the expansion of the internet. The simple equation of internet expansion with the contraction of professional journalism, does not add up.

Furthermore, the statements made by many American and European publishers are at odds with the measures they themselves have taken, and the promiscuous investments they have made. Without waiting for the development of a sustainable business model, many of these publishers have spent millions attempting to turn their titles into branded social media where readers can recognise themselves and associate with each other via the people (peers, professionals, celebrities) they see represented in them. This trend, which began nearly 10 years ago with magazines imitating online communities, has since spread along all media platforms.

Instead of updating and improving the outward-looking role that professional reporting plays in support of society, all sorts of publishers have sought to use quasi-journalism as the mechanism for engineering inward-facing, small-scale societies into short-term existence – just long enough (they hope) for the eyeballs of reader-participants to acquire a commercial existence. But it has never been clear why free association between people would produce a cash cow. Who needs to buy a magazine, or pay for access to any other media platform, if it offers virtually the same experience as Facebook? Or going to church/mosque/synagogue?

Greatly Exaggerated

The social role of professional journalism is to associate new human experiences by composing accounts of these experiences which are both singularly accurate and inherently comparative. Professional journalists have been paid by publishers on account of their dual capacity to capture an event in its particularity and its comparability; and in turn, readers have been ready to pay for paid-for journalists to rehearse this particular combination on their behalf.

From a global perspective, this model is by no means broken. In parts of the world such as China, India and Brazil, it is thriving like never before. In the West it has come close to breaking point (despite Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to retrench), but this point has been reached largely because publishers (and some journalists) have been promoting their publications not as journalism but as sites where users participate in quasi-therapeutic encounters. Instead of developing a relationship with readers via the quality of reporting, they have sought to establish a direct relationship between personalised users and the persona of a particular publication, aka the brand. By the same token, however, they themselves have demoted journalism’s mission to report, which in turn has done much to undermine the commercial basis for reporting.

Perhaps publishers were hoping to advertise the experience of media-based community, i.e. to turn the existence of such communities into a hook for advertising, in order to counter-act recessionary tendencies within the core business of bringing new information into the public domain. If so, this tactic has backfired. Disguised until recently, recessionary tendencies are now very much in evidence, and there is no evidence that the monetisation of community is enough to hold them off.

Worse still, many Western publishers gave up on journalism without waiting to see whether it would give up on them. They changed their core business from truth-telling (allegedly) to facilitating conviviality, and now they complain that the traditional model for journalism does not cater for the new package of therapy and hospitality which they want us journalists to produce (in smaller numbers and on lower salaries).

Meanwhile the continuing success of some titles which have positioned themselves primarily on the strength of their professional journalism, e.g. the Economist, confirms that publishers need not have rushed to abandon the core business of speaking truth to power. Even the devoted following for TV shows such as The Wire points to a continuing public appetite for veracity.

Publishers claim to have been responding to drastically different appetites on the part of new media users, but they were already predisposed to the demise of journalism before they announced the death of its traditional business model. This means that reports of the end of journalism have been grossly exaggerated; but unless publishers are confronted and their miscalculations challenged, unfounded rumour may yet become self-fulfilling prophesy.

Conclusion: Recovering Our Nerve

On the other hand, if we professionals recover our nerve, and re-assert the significance of journalism for society (not as a substitute for it), hence its commercial viability, it is more likely that publishers will re-instate us. They may even find some backbone of their own, as Murdoch seems to have done.

If many remain resistant to the force of our argument, we should remind them of the terrible fate of those other companies which recently moved away from their core business in search of new models and (over)-extended revenue streams, only to find that they had made their own situation far worse. In the UK, such companies were formerly known as….. building societies.

Securing the future by extending publishers’ brands into non-journalistic areas, has been as fallacious as the ‘securitisation’ of assets in over-extended financial products. Conversely, just as the further development of society requires journalism to play its social role, so economic recovery in publishing demands the immediate recovery of professional reporting.

On this occasion, our demands as professional journalists coincide with our employers’ long-term economic interests, and the common good. Professional news reporting must be recognised and re-instated not only as the foundation of our trade, but also as the cornerstone connecting commercial publishing with the public realm.

Andrew Calcutt is the editor of Proof and course leader of MA Journalism and Society, UEL.

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 1, January 2010 The Scale and Origins of the Threat to Journalism

Introduction: Indispensable, But Not Guaranteed (Financially)

Andrew Calcutt’s defence of professional journalism in the face of the perceived threat of user-generated content (UGC) is cogent and timely; I want to enlarge upon it.

Journalism, especially online, is said to be writing itself out of the social, cultural and democratic processes it helped to create, maintain and develop. Journalists are supposed to be an endangered species caught between apparently incontrovertible truths: (1) everybody is a media outlet; and (2) everybody has a free view of everybody else’s content. If this were really the case, it would mean that journalists are now a professional class which no one needs. When everybody else can do journalism they don’t need specialists like us and, even if they did, they wouldn’t pay us for it.

Journalists and professional journalism are indeed threatened by many things: the restructuring of the television and newspaper industries that carry our stories and employ us; the migration of news (like most information) to the internet; and most threatening of all, journalism’s openly suicidal response to these problems. Andrew Calcutt’s manifesto for the defence of journalism is, hopefully, just in time. But in his emphasis on therelationship between the social role of journalism and its economic prospects, Calcutt comes close to losing sight of the essential distinction between them.

It is true that journalism developed as a commodity in an era of centralised mass production; and it is frequently pointed out that now, in the new era characterised by networked, non-hierarchical organisations sharing information freely, the business models of commodity journalism are bust. But the job journalism does, and especially the role it has played and continues to play in the public sphere, are not the same thing as the business model hitherto employed to distribute it.

Similarly, while it is the case that milking advertisers has been key to financing journalism and consequently to the practice of journalism, and it is also true that nowadays there are fewer advertisers standing around waiting to be milked, nonetheless the sum of journalism’s parts is not reducible to the sums of advertising revenue (whether or not they can be made to add up). Leaving aside the mechanisms of how it is paid for, there is something about the way we live which requires that people get to know how other people are living and what’s happening to them. And that’s journalism.

Where there is modern life, in other words, there is going to something like journalism. It is a basic requirement of modern society. Of course the fulfilment of this requirement is not to be taken for granted. People have to work to meet this demand, and at times like these we are also obliged to find new ways of working. But like the banks that suddenly became insolvent, journalism is simply too important to society to be let go. Put another way, lives led without journalism cannot not be part of modern society; if such lives were to exist, they would have to be of an altogether different order.

No Guarantee of Democracy

Professional journalism once enjoyed an exclusive relationship with the hardware of media production, from printing presses to transmitters. Journalism all but monopolised the origination of news through purpose-built channels that comprised the mass media. Now the process of origination has been democratised in a technical sense; the many can engage directly with the many, and that is a good thing because it opens up so many democratic possibilities. But just as it is misleading to conflate the business model that created journalism and influenced its practices with its democratic role, it is also incorrect to assume that the role played by many-to-many publishing is necessarily, in and of itself, the realisation of democracy.

Democracy requires not only popular participation but also popular orientation to questions of power and the exercise of it. Were Roman circuses democratic simply because crowds of people applauded the gladiators? Not while the power of life and death was unquestioningly reserved for the emperor or his representative. Similarly, the facility for self-expression offered by digital media, and the increasing take-up of this provision, do not guarantee that the ensuing media content will assume a political character, whether democratic or authoritarian. Just as journalism is not reducible to the economics of distributing new information, so the new facility for self-interested self-expression is not identical to the continuation of democratic politics by other means. The absence of guarantees works both ways.

Their Business Model; Our Journalism

When all media technology was expensive so, too, was access to it. Consequently, (professional) journalism produced by accessing (expensive) media technology commanded a relatively high price that could be offset by advertisers’ readiness to pay for that access. In the age of internet, however, professional journalism’s access to print distribution and broadcast ceases to be such an advantage either to its practitioners or to advertisers. Unsurprisingly, businesses modelled on the assumption that information will be produced and owned by a few are proving to be less successful in a period of many-to-many communication.

That’s business, the business of journalism as was and will be no more; but that is not the future of journalism per se. Yet, in response to the loss of our employers’ business model and their loss of revenue, we journalists seem to have collectively decided that anybody (or everybody) can do our jobs better than us. In the short term it may seem to be in the publishers’ interests to identify the failings of the business model that financed journalism with the failure of journalism itself; but it is not in our interests to do so. In the long term, it is not in their interests either.

Seeing the writing on the digital wall, the more sanguine among us declare that journalism is just going through a period of adjustment from one media platform to another. But those who hold this view too often take it that advertising revenue will simply migrate online also, in sufficient quantity to compensate publishers for the provision of free content. But this view is more rosy than realistic.

Advertisers are spending less money overall. The advertising industry developed as the reciprocal partner of the traditional media which have been pronounced terminally ill. Why should advertisers continue to use the Mad Men’s specialised skills any more than those of journalists, if they can find ways to place their products in the public domain without paying anyone?

Then there is the prospect of pay-per-view. Rupert Murdoch has announced that the Times and other titles will stop distributing so much of their content freely and make users pay for it online. The technical (but crucial) difficulty is that an effective micro-payment system for news has not yet been invented. The Financial Times and the New York Times have managed to extract some payment from users for specialised products at the high-end of the market, and the latter recently launched an online subscription package for the general reader, but it is not proven that the public can be made to pay for non-specific news.

The Guardian, online in the USA, and the Times, online in India, have built their brands in those markets, and their efforts to generate revenue will be significant, but not necessarily sufficient to establish a pattern for other news organisations. The BBC is a unique broadcaster and publisher and it may play a very significant role in distributing many kinds of content, but its singularity means it cannot be a business model for others. To the contrary, there is a growing volume of complaints from the others, to the effect that news coverage put out by the BBC and paid-for indirectly by UK license-payers, is skewing the market and spoiling the development of pay-per-news.

Simon Jenkins has suggested that newspapers could go to market with a ‘long tail’ of businesses such as conferences and other live events that generate revenue by building on the brand. Thus the Guardian becomes the Guardian Experience (‘Goodbye Guardian. Hello Guardian Experience’, Jenkins, S, p25, the Guardian, international edition, 11/08/09).

I don’t buy this. I’ll buy the Guardian and pay to read what it says but I don’t want to join a Guardian ‘lifestyle’ or ‘affinity club’. Newspapers will migrate to digital forms and will continue develop subsidiary revenue streams (as the trade press has with industry awards), but they can’t just become something else entirely. Why do news if you’re a promotions company? And if the brand you’re building is becoming less closely associated with news, whatever it is that’s being branded, it can hardly be a news organisation, first and foremost.

Hacks all, folks!

As Calcutt points out, embracing digital journalism, according to much of the currently received wisdom, means that publishers have put great emphasis on creating special relationships with users online. In an uncertain and dramatically changing situation, the consensus (more or less) has been to build what Calcutt calls an inclusive community of ‘citizen journalists’ who will called upon to help create a whole new world of content possibilities. But as Calcutt also points out, there’s no reason to assume that even the successful use of quasi-journalism for ‘engineering inward-facing, small scale societies into short-term existence’ can somehow be monetised or otherwise exploited commercially.

Journalism faces problems right across the board, regardless of the medium of its distribution or the business model that funds it. Some of us may like to envisage some special, so far undiscovered content that somehow encourages people to spend money on it. But no one is really sure about this because the distribution of loads of content, by click or by truck, does not seem to make enough money unless advertisers are prepared to pay heavily to occupy the space right next door to it. As I write, and as others have been writing since the first wave of internet advertising failed to materialise more than a decade ago, advertisers are turning out to be stubbornly unwilling to do this.

The Shock of the Nearly-New

Old local newspaper hacks (like me) recognise the value of freely collected and cheaply processed reader-generated content. We learnt this in the days of manually typewriting our copy onto little strips of paper, back when the word ‘web’ was usually preceded by ‘spider’. We have exploited community correspondents, sports and society reports, amateur dramatics and entertainments reviews, teen reporters, work experience seekers, events listings and all kinds of stuff both online and off. When we opened the gates around our content so that this kind of stuff could get in, did we make our papers more democratic? Well, maybe a little bit.

The point is that there has been a series of attempts to incorporate UGC, many of them pre-dating desk-top publishing let alone the internet, but none has managed to halt the long, long decline in local newspaper readership; and there’s no reason to assume that a new version of this second hand tactic will arrest the commercial decline of this or any other print sector. The internet makes possible an instant interaction not conceivable with any other medium; but if the content is more snow pictures, now reproduced digitally, then all we have gained is more slush; and slushy content is not going to unfreeze the cash needed to pay for the production of the whole (paperless) paper.

New technology is, of course, the future of everything (except for costumes in competitive swimming!). But just because content can now be generated and distributed by mobilising the good old general public, it doesn’t mean that anyone is going to pay to read it, or pay us to edit it for them.

Chancing It

Calcutt established that seeking to emulate non-journalistic content can obscure the special qualities of professional reporting, and thus undermine the basis of the very media brands which are in a position to offer such quality and even exploit it commercially. He is surely right to emphasise the uniquely comparative character of professional reporting, which is brought into play whenever reporters compare and evaluate what they are witnessing with what has been witnessed and evaluated before, i.e. each time they do their job. This is a quality of observation, cognition and mental reconstruction, by whatever medium the latter is subsequently disseminated. Even if new media kit has levelled the technological playing-field, the distinctly comparative, evaluative process of professional reporting constitutes a different ballgame.

Thus there’s nothing wrong with a bit of Tweeting by professional journalists. Done well, Twitter is a useful device for taking a snapshot of what’s happening as it happens. But while professional journalists may use Twitter to capture fragments of an event outside themselves, most Tweeters are holding up a tiny mirror to their own miniscule actions. They are engaged in an essentially different process.

For the majority of participants, the news function of Twitter is secondary to its existential role: it tells me and my friends (me and the extension of me) that I must exist because right now I am doing x,y or z and you can confirm I am doing it because I have just used Twitter to tell you that I am.

Twitter, like most UGC, serves primarily to confirm the existence of the people who generated it. Depending on what’s happening to these people at the moment of content origination, what they generate may or may not contain something that qualifies as news to the rest of us. Accordingly, the news content in UGC is likely to be either negligible or of a lesser order, not least because news is not first in the order of priorities for UGC. If it so happens that newsworthy content has been generated in this way, this can only have come about because the content generator happened to be in a place where something significant happened to be happening. With UGC, it all comes down to happenstance.

Professional journalism, on the other hand, is a concerted, conscious effort to deploy people trained to find significant events and to find out what is significant about them. Of course it is easy to pick holes in the track record of professional coverage: less than comprehensive, inadequate, misleading, just plain wrong etc, etc. But for all the examples of journalists behaving badly, journalism’s redeeming quality is that human beings have developed it over time and by design as their chief means of getting to know what’s going on. To abandon this tradition, to declare, as even some journalists are now inclined to do, that UGC is something equivalent or even superior to professional journalism, is not only an act of professional suicide; it amounts to the rejection of purposeful human activity in pursuit of information about the world we live in. It means leaving news to chance.

Journalism Is Not Dying From a Surfeit of Journalism

Falling viewing figures, shrinking circulations and diminished revenues did not afflict media brands because they spent too much on developing good journalism. Rotary printing and desktop publishing aside, newspapers at the end of the twentieth century were pretty much as they were when invented in the nineteenth. Local papers saw their revenues decline when the recruitment, car and property ads went elsewhere. Way before the internet, the distribution of free admags had already damaged their revenue streams. The locals’ response was to cut staff and streamline their titles and editions, thereby cutting back on the journalism that should have been their strongest selling point. And what’s made the situation worse is that journalism has not responded in terms of its use to society as journalism, but in terms of its industry’s uselessness as a profitable system for information distribution.

Having conceded more than half the battle, both journalists and publishers are turning to UGC. But this does little to confirm the significance of journalism. The identification of UGC as an especially important connection with the potential audience is partly encouraged by the success of social networking, and partly prompted by the desperate desire to recover a relationship with readers/viewers/listeners which the old media assume they have lost. Such is our anxiety about being left behind that fellow-journalists have jumped on every bandwagon setting off on the trail.

I can now watch a local reporter read me a story on my local paper’s website (the BrightonArgus), and scroll through pictures and video footage. But why would I do any of this if I’m not interested in the story? Supposing I am interested, and I am not visually impaired, why shouldn’t I simply read it? And if I don’t want to read it, putting it out like this with bells and knobs on, is not going to make me any more interested in it.

Away From ‘Old Media’, Inside the Other Camp

The democratic impulse implicit in accessible digital technology is wasted if we assume that communicating for public consumption is the same as chatting with friends. Most of the content of blogs, Tweets and the social networking sites is not crafted for wide public consumption, but aimed at networks of friends.

It is good that anyone can publish, no question, but the potential for greater democracy is not realised by everybody publishing just anything; all this does is cast more shadows of doubt over the significance of news as a public service. In this context it is especially important for the experts in news, professional journalists, to show how it is done best.

Because of the importance of blogging and Tweeting to the opposition movements in Iran, Burma and elsewhere, some bloggers in Britain correlate their eponymous activities with those of freedom fighters, regardless of the content of their blogs. Whether naive or cynical, this is gross over-estimation. NightJack was not a whistleblower. Belle de Jour may have something to say, but the fact that the account of the sex work she performs is blogged, does not in itself challenge the political system.

Blogging, or something like it, is surely part of the future. It’s clear that there are many possibilities, especially where the specific expertise of the blogger, combined with the expertise of many others, can achieve unprecedented effects for the public good. An outstanding example is the online network that has arisen to support Simon Singh in his resistance to a legal suit by the British Chiropractic Association, as has been described by the Guardian’s Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre (‘An intrepid, ragged band of bloggers’, p28, Goldacre, B, the Guardian, 30/07/09). But this network is a temporary one that relies on more permanent networks of scientific media watchers. The ongoing efforts of those networks are maintained by a common desire to take group action on particular issues defined by specific scientific fields and prompted by the recognition of the poor job that the traditional media have made of reporting them.

This user-co-ordinated scrutiny would be immediately devalued by close involvement with a news organisation, even if the people who organise and co-ordinate it allowed such a thing to happen. The journalist’s job is something altogether different.

YouTube, Facebook and the rest seem to suggest that the public is colonising everything, along with the news. However, as the philosopher of science and mind Dr Robert Clowes has pointed out, these technologies are themselves consistently repurposed and redeveloped by public interaction with them, which in turn facilitates further interactions between people that are enabled by the repurposed technologies.

These new kinds of social interaction have both public and private uses, hence the difficulties in recognising where journalism ends and more private discussion begins. Journalists and journalism specialise in the public, regardless of which bit of the public you’re aiming at. News itself is both a component of the public consciousness and an interactive tool freely available for use between different fields of that general consciousness.

Facebook was once an electronic Harvard yearbook. At last count, as I write, it has 250 million users after a little more than five years of redesign, repurposing and application adding as its user numbers grew. Similarly, blogs were once in the vanguard of citizen journalism but many millions of them have now become dormant. Increasingly, the best blogs are transforming themselves into media brands that bear no relation to private and individual practice; or they are places where the collective actions of many people are co-ordinated by people with social authority.

Mercurial Networking and Established Authority

Twitter is booming, but for how long? The big media that bought into Bebo, Yahoo Messenger, MySpace and the rest may yet seriously regret it. Young people have fled the colonisation of Facebook that older people undertook two years ago, again changing both the purpose of Facebook and the uses to which it is put. The time spent on Second Life is falling across its usership. To maintain a serious presence on any of these platforms becomes more and more time-consuming for the individual. When the fad slows, people spend less time in those spaces that have been established; the search for the public and the spaces it inhabits moves on to the next place, and the next.

IT industry insiders tell me the next big thing is less likely to be the new killer platform, application or device. They predict a concentration and rationalisation of the many platforms that people use, according to their individual needs and tastes. Although insiders have said this before, it seems likely that user-customisable reception of newly integrated networks and services will offer even more uncertainties and opportunities within our wired (and constantly rewired) world.

Media organisations and journalists signalled something of this possibility when they commenced multi-platform production of their content, regardless of whether they started from a broadcast, print or internet base. But fiddling with the form of transmission of information, simply making sure it can be carried by whatever device or application is being used by your target audience, has a limited effect on the relevance of the information to its receiver.

The Huffington Post is successful because it explicitly challenged the political position of established media without having to raise the cash needed to launch in print. It offered different content, much of it written by professional journalists, to an audience it could see was dissatisfied with the venerable print titles that it may now outlive. The internet allowed it to come into existence financially but its continued success is the result of its content. Distinguished by its journalism, it has carved out a loyal readership and a position of authority across the whole news ‘ecosystem’. Technology allowed the Post to be born but a political, motivated approach to journalism has seen it thrive.

When talent show contestant Susan Boyle got 120 million hits on YouTube, it wasn’t simply because of YouTube’s ability to share video. She had already appeared on the most popular weekend programme on British TV, which is closely followed by Fleet Street, from red-tops through to broadsheets. Wide reporting of her first 60 million hits, and good old word of mouth, doubled the numbers.

What people look at on YouTube and other sites doesn’t acquire significance in itself, however many people view something, because the discussion, the buzz, is not generated on the comment boards of those particular sites. This kind of news only becomes news when other, more authoritative organisations imbue it with significance and/or controversy.

Equally, when any item, however generated, becomes real news it ceases to be simply the video on YouTube or the photo on Flickr; it is the starting point for a general discussion of its significance, because it has migrated from its origins to the rest of the media. Flickr and YouTube have commentary facilities, but they cannot support the cultural exchange that characterises authoritative journalism.

Bringing the Two Camps Together?

Jeff Jarvis, writing in the media section of the Guardian, quoted the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to the effect that collaboration with its readers amounted to the ‘mutualisation of news’ (‘User-generated content is only the beginning’, Jarvis, J, p4, MediaGuardian, 08/06/09). Rusbridger has told staff that the separation between reporter and reader is blurring, and that this is both the future and the ‘natural state’ of media.

But it is misleading to assert an equal partnership between the Guardian and the users who generate content for it. For example, in the event that the Guardian took some interest in my local group (as in the past have the Brighton Argus, the Publican, the Telegraph, BBC-online, BBC1, Radio Four and a few Australian newspapers), who would be the senior ‘partner’ in this relationship? I don’t think it would be me and the Brighton Salon. And quite right too.

The Guardian has won its authority and with it the discretion to select and therefore elevate any old stuff that falls out of the blogosphere, if it chooses to do so. I read it in old-fashioned, paid-for-by-me, print form every day. It retains its authority because it generally has not, so far, transformed itself into a blurry partnership of newspaper and citizen journalists. If a news organisation lends its authority to content that is little different from an old-fashioned reader’s letter, Rusbridger’s ‘mutualisation’ may come true, but painfully so. It is not UGC itself but its presentation as something else that reduces the separation of reader and reporter in a way that now threatens the very concept of the reporter and, eventually, that of the reader, too.

I’m all for UGC being used imaginatively, but mostly it’s the result of a bunch of amateurs getting hold of media equipment. I have a camera but that doesn’t make me a photographer unless I happen to be standing close enough to something worth photographing. If you have blog, that doesn’t make you a journalist unless you have a story; and even then, unless you adopt a consciously impersonal stance in the way you tell it, having a story makes you a source, not a reporter.

It is striking that when reading popular books that try to rethink the future of the world in the age of the internet, such as Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, the same few examples of what is possible crop up again and again. While the views of these are thought-provoking, they feed off rare successes extracted from a vast pool of failure. Shirky might say that this is a good thing and that only mass-participation in a constantly recurring process of trial and mostly error, can create the future. He is right to maintain that democracy is necessarily experimental; but this is not the same as simply standing by and allowing people to ‘crowd source’ the news. In order to minimise error (and maximise the democratic content of the experiment), news must be accountable not only to a self-selecting group of users but also to its own industry standards; and it doesn’t help democracy if the standard bearers (the professionals) have already walked off the job.

The sweeping view in which hierarchical organisation can only ever stand in the way of innovation, assumes we can learn little from the past, simply because its forms of organisation are expensive and its revenue streams defunct. But this is another case of the mistaken identity referred to above. Journalism as a practice, and a hierarchical practice at that, has been much more like the professional end of the open-source operating system, Linux, that web gurus worship.

Conclusion: Journalists and Users Should Keep Their Distance

Journalism, even before its current crisis, was said to be the least trustworthy occupation, with journalists roughly on a par with estate agents. But members of the public also trusted journalists to provide most of their news, most of the time.

It’s not generally talked about in these terms, but what Calcutt came close to describing as the universalisation of experience by professional journalists, is broadly appreciated by members of the public. They feel our objectivity, even as many of us have disavowed it.

However much we may be detested personally, there is a visibility to what we do that distinguishes us from others. We can do things that the anonymous blogger, perpetually undercover, cannot aspire to. Working for a newspaper, TV station or a professional website that has gained authority and recognition, is what allows journalists to comment, doorstep and demand access to investigate. This authority is based on professional and indeed public appreciation of the ability to capture the particulars of experience and at the same time generalise from it; an ability that sets journalists apart from society but also gives us a place in it.

Yes, at the present moment it is hard to see how this ability will thrive commercially; all the same, it is not reducible to the business models which hitherto allowed publishers to make a profit from having us exercise it.

Sean Bell is completing his dissertation for the MA in Journalism & Society at UEL.