An event occurred in October 2015 which will cast a long shadow over the work of journalism and the jobs of journalists.  Associated Press (AP) had been testing a piece of software which generated stories from the quarterly reports issued by listed companies.  These reports flood out four times a year and AP wanted a fast method of getting the news on the wires.  It had already implemented a software which can generate pyramid-style stories from this highly structured data; but it had also maintained a further stage in the process whereby human being were called on to check the stories generated by the software.  In October 2015, however, AP ceased taking this extra step. The software would do it all: no human interaction at all.  No salaries; no holidays; no maternity or paternity leave; no sick leave; 24-hours a day the software can produce pyramid stories reporting on the financial results which are seemingly indistinguishable from human output.

Computers take out “computers”

This is not the first time computers have taken over the jobs of humans.  The first time computers took over human jobs was the job of the “computers”, i.e. people who did the thousands of small calculations for scientific or technical applications on hard-cranked calculators.  Computers, the electronic type, could do this faster and more accurately.

In business the first application in the UK was the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) computer in 1951.  LEO did the bakery valuations application.  The application was first run on September 5 and took over the job without manual checking on November 29 1951.  Later other jobs were developed for LEO including the payroll.  Lyons even ran the payroll for other companies such as Ford Motor Company in 1956.  There went the jobs of wages clerks.

The starting point for the application of electronic computers to human jobs was Alan Turing’s 1936 paper. ‘On computable numbers.’  In it Turning devised a theoretical machine to solve a problem in mathematics.  He also showed that any mathematical problem which could be reduced into an algorithm, a series of logical steps, could be loaded onto this theoretical machine.

Theory to practice

Turning turned theory into practice while working at Bletchley, using the Colossus machine to help crack German military codes; then at the National Physical Laboratory and afterwards at Manchester University.

The more computing power there was, the faster algorithms could run and therefore extend the range of jobs for which the computer could be used, tackling more complex jobs which would run in a time to make the application practical.

Leo, Colossus and early computers depended upon the technologies developed by the radio and telecommunications industries.   With the coming of integrated circuits, the computer industry started to replace single transistors with its own technology.

In 1965 Gordon Moore,  a leading integrated circuit engineer,  showed that the integrated circuit industry had doubled the number of integrated transistors on the same area of silicone every year.  Later he revised this to every two years. More components on the same piece of silicone means faster computing: faster computing brings in applications which can be run as long as they have an algorithm and the time in which they run makes them practical.  As the chips get smaller then they need less power until they can be run by battery and be mobile.  As long as the computer can run the algorithm fast enough, it becomes a practical application.

Finite limits

The power of computer technology is not ever-increasing.  There are finite limits to integration: it is just that semiconductor engineers have found ways to achieve Moore’s law, which was not originally a prediction but an observation of what the engineers were able to do in the early days of integration.   There are other types of processor technology now available in the form of quantum mechanics which offer even faster processing speeds than conventional electronics.

As the price of computing fell and continues to fall and the speed increased and continues to increase, so layer after layer of human labour could be transferred to computing: it became practical to do so and, more importantly, profitable.   Employers sought out bottlenecks in production processes and tackled them in turn, starting with simple jobs and going onto the more complex ones as prices fell and speed increased.  The bottleneck in the newspaper industry was the process of composing  in hot metal.  Most journalists looked the other way as the jobs of compositors were automated and the bargaining power of compositors was crushed.  Today journalists cannot look away from the forward march of automation since it is their jobs which are now on the line.

Humans using the tools developed by humans

This is not to say that there is an inevitable technological determination about this process.  It is, after all, humans seeking to improve productivity and/or improve profitability by the application of technologies created by humans.   And not all the applications are successful.  There are many well documented IT disasters in the public sector where the algorithms where not sufficiently robust and/or the processing power fast enough to create a successful application.  There are just as many failures in the private sector, but they mainly remain private. Not so in the financial sector, where there has been a litany of much-publicised IT disasters. For example, a group of academics and traders called Long Term Capital Management thought they had developed a piece of software to play – and beat – the market. But they were wrong-footed, and their fund exploded, when the rules of the financial trading game change after a slump in Russian capital values in 1998.

The steps to computerisation

The process of transferring some aspect of human labour into computing takes several steps.  First it has to be identified as a bottleneck: this is in business applications where consultants come in.  They regularly review the labour process to seek out these bottlenecks.  Then the software has to be created for the application.  This often involves reviewing what the labour process is and transferring it into software.  Often this involves the collaboration of the very human labourers themselves who will eventually be replaced by the application, if successful.

There are always limits to what the software can do.  In the AP application the stories are routinely generated from standardised data contained in company financial reports.   These quarterly reports from publically-listed companies are accompanied by a long document which the US Securities and Exchange Commission requires for every quarterly announcement: it is called the 10Q form.  It includes the structured data of the financial report but also long passages of text which describe and analyse the context behind these financial results.  Software cannot yet drill down into these reports to get exclusive stories: it can only do the mundane task of writing a pyramid story from the numbers.   For some years to come, it will take humans to do the analysis.

We can begin to see, therefore, where journalists as human workers can fit into the new pattern of “content generation.”  Software can do the mundane task of generating stories from highly structured data.  Humans must continue to do the analysis.  For now.

We have seen that the application of computing is not a single event but a process depending on the ability of humans to identify bottlenecks and exploit the technology then available.    What was not (previously) possible to transfer to computers, (eventually) becomes possible.  For example, artificial intelligence (AI) applications can now mimic the reasoning of humans and provide mechanisms for f taking human reasoning into the world of computing.   According to Wired magazine, some financial traders are already using AI to make all of their trades, without human intervention.  This is an area where speed is essential to catch the price at the right level during the trading period.   As early as 2010 researchers at New York University estimated that over 50 percent of all trades on US stock markets were driven by software (Quant Congress).

Associated Press (AP) developed its quarterly reporting system because speed was essential.  The analytical side of the process of reporting, currently left to humans, is not yet so time-critical.  There will come a time when it is, and then it will be a candidate for the application of AI to what remains of the human involvement in financial reporting.  If the many prophets of AI are right then all human intelligence could, at some time in the future with the continued development of computing power, be transferred to algorithms.  These could then be captured in software and then run on hardware.

Does this mean that human journalism is just a long rear guard action of retreat in the face of the computerisation of journalism?

Forty-seven percent of employment at risk

In 2013 Frey and Osborne, two Oxford academics, plotted out the likelihood of jobs being computerised.  They used the US labour market classifications of 702 job titles.  They used a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation of those jobs.  According to their estimates, 47% of total US employment is at risk.  Here is an extract from their full table focusing on the jobs which are in journalism or close to journalism.

Jobs in or close to journalism with their probability of computerisation

Source: Frey and Osborne (2013)

In this table the least likely roles to be computerised are PR and fund raising managers.   The probability of the editor’s job being computerised is 0.055.  Reporters and correspondents are at 0.11.  Court reporters are at 0.5.  Outside of journalism the least likely to be computerised are recreational therapists with a probability of 0.0028.  The most likely to be computerised, say Frey and Osborne, are telemarketers with a probability of 0.99.

Frey and Osborne refer to further research by Goos and Manning (2007), entitled ‘Lousy and Lovely Jobs’, because it “captures the essence of the current trend towards labour market polarization, with growing employment in high-income cognitive jobs and low-income manual occupations, accompanied by a hollowing-out of middle-income routine jobs.”

In other words, don’t be in the middle where computerisation is more likely to take over the job.

Social intelligence

A major factor which stems the march of computerisation is the employment of humans of social intelligence, Frey and Osborne observe.  They do not define social intelligence but give some examples.  These include creativity, perception and manipulation, negotiation skills and persuasion skills.  Social intelligence relies on our human understanding of each other, our empathy and our ability to use what we call “common sense”.   In other words, being human in a human society.

From all of this we can tease out where the humans may be able to flourish or at least survive in journalism, even in the context of the long march of software.

We can flourish where we have the social intelligence which software currently does not have.  Where we can empathise: to interview people in different situations.  Where we can negotiate for the access to people and data to make our stories.  Where we understand the complexity of the world and are able to capture the vital parts of that complexity and present it to our audiences.

Where we can be

We should avoid being in the middle of any labour process: either be an editor or do a job which software cannot deal with because it means dealing with the complexity of people.

Avoid the routine: the more the job of journalists is a routine, one of creating content from the content given to them, the more vulnerable they are.

Be analytical: some forms of developing AI can do this but they are dependent on vast amounts of data and a large amount of computing power, even at today’s speed and prices.

We can anticipate the future of journalism produced by humans in two ways: by looking at the processes of journalism, on the one hand; and on the other hand, by looking at the types of journalism.

With regard to editorial processes, we can review the skills (the things we can do), the knowledge (the things we know), the attitudes (how we normally see things), and the habits (how we regularly do things), of the job of the human journalists, and see where our strengths and weaknesses are.

We have the skills of writing.  Computers can do this as long as the journalism they generate is of a regular pattern.  We will have to give up the ground of the pyramid story to the computer.  But we have other ways of writing, in long and short form which will take AI  a long time to capture.  We have, for example,  the drop lead story with its quirky or anecdotal opening and varied structure.  Only a deep knowledge of the human reader allows us to employ these and other forms of ‘non-standard’ journalism.

For the moment, we have a monopoly on the skill of interviewing, although AI systems can engage in conversations with humans and gather information, and they may soon be programmed to ‘look’ for a story just as the human journalist does when interviewing.

Then there is our knowledge.  Computers have more information than a human does.  But information is not knowledge.  Knowledge is information with meaning.  At the moment human journalists have the edge here.  We have our social intelligence to give information meaning.

AI systems can only acquire attitude when it is programmed into them. Humans have attitudes as a result of the experience of our social lives as formulated into our social intelligence.

In the area of habits the computer seems to beat the human every time.   It can repeat the same thing without tiring and in the same way every time.  But that does not allow for the mutation of habits which is part of our human development as humans and as individuals.  The capacity both to maintain habits and make a judgment on when such habits need to be adjusted – again, our humanity gives us the advantage.

Human senses

Humans have senses.  Computers can “see” through cameras.  They can “hear” through microphones.   They can “speak” through loudspeakers.  But they cannot enjoy the smell of the flowers, the taste of a crisp and chilled white wine, or the touch of the hand of your lover.   There is no enjoyment nor sorrow in a computer, only the simulation of them.   Here, maybe, is our final advantage.   AI is, is after all, artificial intelligence, not artificial feeling or emotion.   What may seem to be weakness on our part may turn out to be a strength.

Now we can look at some of the types of journalism to see where human action is still, to some extent, required.  I cannot yet predict how fast the computerisation of journalism will develop.  This depends much more on the economic issues – costs versus rewards – as it does on the availability of the technology.  There will be areas where computerisation could be used but the investment is not available.  And there will be times when the computerisation of journalism is set back because it produces such absurd stories that its advocates flinch from pressing forward.  These will come, I think, as computerised journalism enters the areas social intelligence is needed to make sense of the story and AI, lacking in social intelligence, proves unable to do the job. But the boundaries will not stay the same forever; already some pioneers are seeking to press beyond existing limitations.

Ten types of journalism

I use 10 types of journalism and judge them to be either highly susceptible to computerisation, through to moderately susceptible and down to hardly susceptible.  This is not based on a mathematical model as used by Frey and Osborne but on the arguments above about the qualities (and current limitations) of computerised journalism.

It is clear already that the creation of stories from structured data in a pyramid form is highly susceptible to computerisation.  Employers will seek to lower costs and increase speed  of publication, so they will increasingly target this form of journalism.

Equally the ability of AI to sift through large amounts of data rapidly using different approaches will mean that any investigative journalism requiring the discovery of patterns in large data sets is ripe for computerisation.

These would seem to be the first available targets.

The next big target in journalism may well be the reporting of structured events, i.e. events which are structured in much the same way as data is structured.   Any game played by a set of rules is susceptible to computerised journalism, as long it is reported in a pyramid style.  This includes the reporting of sporting events or of court procedures, hence court reporting is high on the list of the types of journalism identified by Frey and Osborne with a 0.5 probability of being subject to AI.

Photo journalism is already subject to technology.  Drones are used to gather images.  But photo journalists with a camera are able to “see” the best shot and to frame it using their social intelligence to tell them where the human action is.   Drones can use cameras to farm images but humans are needed to select the telling image.  Thus the area of photo journalism is a medium term target for computerisation.

Unpredictable events, even if reported in a pyramid style, are harder to computerise: low predictability makes for low risk of computerisation. Conversely, if AI can create patterns which make such events more predictable, then they become more susceptible to computerisation.

A lot of journalism today is reviewing of products and services.  Since this form of journalism is largely dependent on the prior experience which the reviewer deploys as the basis for comparison and evaluation experience, the possibility of computerisation is low.

There are four areas of journalism which have a very low susceptibility to computerisation: interviewing, investigative journalism based on interviewing, commenting and the journalism of self-expression.

The key skill of interviewing depends on the interaction of the journalist and their human subject.   AI systems can mimic the role of humans in conversations but they only mimic it; they do not include the intelligence to focus on what the story is which unfolds in an interview.  Yet.

As a result the forms of investigative journalism which depend on interviewing humans, also have a low susceptibility to computerisation.

Writing comment in editorial and in analytical pieces is well beyond the power of AI at the moment.

Finally, and here is an irony for many professional journalists, the journalism of self-expression, the journalism of emotion, the journalism which entails the journalist’s own experience, is very low on the radar for computerisation. It is technically possible for AI systems to generate this type of journalism, but it seems that readers, listeners and viewers need the human being behind the expression to give it validation.  At the moment.

Ten forms of journalism and their susceptibility to computerisation

There is an eleventh form of journalism which, I think, has a very low susceptibility to computerisation:  headline writing.  What software could come up with such beauties as “Shit hits fan” when Eric Cantona dropped kicked a fan taunting him?  What software could come up with another gem when the Italian designer Versace was killed: “Shoots you, sir!” was a punning eference to a running gag in The Fast Show.  The amount of social intelligence needed to make human  readers, listeners and viewers smile at a good headline is so vast that it may take a very long time before software can write such headlines.  Summary headlines, yes, but gems like these, no.

An answer

I asked above, and did not answer the question: is this to be a long retreat in the face of the computerisation of journalism?  Retreat is the wrong military analogy: instead we should see this as a protracted asymetrical guerrilla war in which we human journalists use the tactics of the flexible power of scattered forces against a massed army.   We will stand where we can but our labour organisations are so weak that we will be defeated, not by the technology itself, but by our employers and the way they deploy it against us.

Journalists have few allies

We journalists do not have many allies, if any at all, in this struggle.  I am not sure that our readers, listeners and viewers, on the whole, mind if they are consuming the journalism of humans or of software.   They do not seem to care that a growing volume of journalism is only content marketing to boost brands.  Some readers, listeners and viewers will and they will follow their favourite human journalists.  But most will not.

Some people will benefit from these developments.  Employers and the shareholders of content generation companies who can exploit these developments will find their profits higher and their productivity soaring as humans are replaced.   Areas of publishing currently under threat because they are loss-making may again become profitable.  AI development companies will also benefit.  So will consultants and those providing the processing power and storage capacity.

So we journalists need to move and keep moving.  Move from the areas most threatened at the moment to areas where our humanity counts more than the speed, low price and accuracy of software journalism.  Move to new areas as yet unexplored which we can innovate in our human practice as journalists.  I cannot yet predict exactly where those areas are, but we shall find them and we shall survive, certainly not in the numbers we are now but with the best values we can have as humans.   I do not want the conclusion to this manifesto to be a wishy-washy assertion of human values; instead it should be a project to project our human values into journalism.  These values include empathy with the subjects of our journalism and the objects of journalism: to communicate with other humans.

We have become used to machines which can lift weights we cannot, to machines which can move faster than we can, to machines which can calculate faster than we can, which can make an image more accurate than we can draw or paint it.  Our humanity is none the less for that. We can lift weights to improve our body shapes rather than to carry a sack of coal.   We can enjoy the experience of a walk despite the existence of fast cars.  We can stretch out our understanding of the world using the speed of calculation afforded by technology.  Remember how we shifted to other forms of expression or representation once photography took hold of the portrait.

I think I have given ample evidence of what we human journalists need to do to sustain our role in journalism, even though the encroachment of software journalism is not under our control.

This manifesto is based on senior lecturer Richard Sharpe’s closing comments at the UEL Future of Journalism seminar in May 2016.

References

Goos, M. and Manning, A. (2007), ‘Lousy and lovely jobs: The rising polarization of work in Britain,’ The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 89, no. 1, pp. 118–133

Frey, CB, and Osborne, MA, (2013) The Future of Employment: How susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?, available at: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf, viewed on 3/7/2016

Slaving away at a big-time news cooperation may be your cup of tea, but to some aspiring journalists making the tea may not be enough.

On the other hand, how else can we begin to make a living, when many independent publications are unable to pay their way?

In 2014, a record-breaking 581,173 UK businesses were registered with Companies House, while 238,000 crashed out. The report by startups.co.uk found that the trend for failing businesses sloped by 6 per cent. In layman’s terms, 59 per cent of all businesses in the UK have survived.

Journalistic ventures, however, don’t.

Survival is Success, published by Reuters, found that the publications they examined across three countries ‘struggled to break-even’. So why do start-ups in journalism perform so poorly? The Reuters report explains that there are two particularly important challenges that start-ups face. The first is that income from online revenue is far lower than it was many years ago, and declines even more when millions of websites saturate the market each year. But the second point, which is my major concern here, is that the competition from the legacy market is much, much too fierce.

‘The market for online news continues to be dominated by legacy media organisations,’ Reuters continue, ‘which have leveraged their existing resources and well-known brands to draw audiences and generate revenues’.

Effectively, the big guns (News Corp, News UK etc) can pay to smother smaller publications using high-cost ad campaigns to bully the print and digital shelf-space into submission. Leading by example, Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corp bought-out a UK-based video ad tech firm, Unruly, for $176 million this year. The company has the ability to monitor and predict viral ads and correctly channel ad-spend into the fastest-growing areas of multimedia. It’s a dog eat dog world, after all.

Thankfully, one Australian start-up has found a way to produce and fund content that doesn’t fit into predictable boxes.

The Typewriter, founded by University of New South Wales student Benjamin Cheung, is a platform designed for ‘global citizen journalism’. Content is submitted from several countries and is written in several languages. Cheung claims the site to have a unique following of 200,000, generating 800,000 hits per month. Although a mere stripling in comparison to the Guardian‘s 1,077,000 readers, The Typewriter has managed to sustain itself by publishing free, user-submitted material.

Cheung remarks, however, that revenue is not prioritised and instead ‘the major focus for the company is building the platform and growing its user base’.

Elsewhere, most independent start-ups focus on finding and exploiting the ‘gap’ in the market. But what happens when the enemy fills these cracks?

UsVsTh3m (or Us Versus Them) was a project developed in May 2013 by British tabloid the Mirror, which translates mainstream media for niche audiences. Topics such as the general election were made attractive for teens using ‘memes’ and ‘awesome’ language and articles such as ‘The list of the nation’s favourite biscuits is making the Internet angry’ and ‘How obeying the law will no longer be enough to protect you from the police’ made front-page stories.

This ‘more digestible’ approach to journalism was such a success that the Mirror now publishes the content to its own website. Along with comparably focused in-house brand, Ampp3d, which was released shortly after the success of UsVsTh3m, these sites have been credited with the Mirror’s remarkable growth between 2013 and 15, more-than-tripling their online readership from 1.2 to 3.8 million.

The move, however, is paper-thin. Following the announcement of domain repositioning, angry and confused users lashed out. Apparently, UsVsTh3m readers hate the Mirror.

‘I think I’ll pass. After a year of coming to UsVsTh3m, it’s disappointing to hear,’ said one distraught follower. ‘That’s me done with this site, sorry guys,’ said another. In a further turn of events, the Mirror announced that the ‘new formats’ team would loose 27 jobs, with both sites facing the axe. Seems like they have managed to pull failure out of previously successful developments.

As evident, legacy media can’t always fill a gap in the market. While undisputedly effective at what they do, they can’t have it both ways. They can’t be the majority and minority.

UK comedian and activist Russell Brand is a perfect example of what the anti-mass wants. Produced, directed and starring Brand, The Trews is an online medium published to YouTube, ‘telling you how it is’. It’s heavy on anti-austerity and anti-establishment; everything legacy media is not. Each 10 minute short was completely free to consume, and although capturing 1.2 million subscribers, and amassing over 113 million video hits, The Trews was sadly cut short in August for Brand to focus on other ventures.

While it’s possible The Trews was successful only because it was fronted by Brand, it surely opens up a range of possibilities for like-minded entrepreneurs. So be inventive. Be creative. But most importantly, don’t be satisfied with what’s in the Mirror.

Links:

http://startups.co.uk/start-up-business-record-smashed-in-2014/

http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Survival%20is%20Success%20Journalistic%20Online%20Start-Ups%20in%20Western%20Europe_0.pdf

http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/06/citizen-journalism-startup-typewriter-needs-decide-revenue-strategy-survive-harsh-australian-media-landscape/

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/13/trinity-mirrors-usvsth3m-and-ampp3d-thought-to-be-facing-axe-as-jobs-set-to-go

http://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/

http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/intelligence/2015/09/news_corp_buys_unruly_for_176m_to_boost_ad_tech.php

http://usvsth3m.com/post/usvsth3m-has-moved-but-dont-panic

http://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/

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

Graham Barnfield
‘With the Internet, everyone with an opinion can have their say and be heard. The poorest squirrel eater out there in the sticks, provided he has a decent Internet provider, can set up his Web page right alongside the rich kid in the suburbs. Technology and entertainment have levelled class distinctions and created a pure form of democracy.’ (Bachelder 2002: 165)

‘When our individual intentions are left to the wisdom of the crowd, our access to information becomes narrowed, and as a result, our view of the world and our perception of truth becomes dangerously distorted … For all their claims to be more democratic and honest, these supposedly editor-free social news sites are actually creating a more oligarchic and corrupt media.’ (Keen 2008: 94)

Introduction: Forgetting Our History
In the heat of the moment, a new trend can appear inevitable, as if it were the only possible answer to the demands of its time. Thus the trendy idea that the tradition of journalistic objectivity is doomed, seems more than a knee-jerk response to the historical decline of traditional, paid-for journalism; in today’s context, it has acquired the status of logical necessity. But the history of journalism tells us that its objectivity (or lack of) is not the inevitable corollary of professionalism (or absence thereof); equally, the current collision course between the idea of objectivity and the concept of the amateur, may turn out to be no more than an accident of history.
The Cult of the Amateur (2007/8) offers an insightful yet one-sided account of the threat to professional standards (more precisely, the standards associated with professionalism). Author Andrew Keen insists that reporting on events in the world should be synonymous with getting paid for doing it. Along pro-am lines, Keen is keen to maintain a division between serious reporting and insidiously, persistently trivial commentary; he predicts disastrous consequences should the line between professional and amateur become any more porous than it already is. True to form, he doesn’t do freebies for anyone.

There is some substance to this argument, as Andrew Calcutt demonstrates elsewhere in Proof. Professional reporters have close to a monopoly on length of time spent reporting. Even when supplying eyewitness accounts, or sifting through documents in an investigative fashion, other citizens – among whom I would number certain types of journalist – may sometimes add to the total of available information, comment and punditry; but only intermittently. That said, noting these real differences – marked out by training, resources and time – does not mean that truth and amateurism should be treated as everlasting enemies, forever locked in a fatal embrace.

History Inverted
In the blogosphere, Keen’s argument is more likely to appear in reverse. According to Media Lens (2009), payment and professionalization together drive the distortion and misrepresentation characteristic of corporate news media. In this claim there is a sense of history, of the same thing happening over and over again over time; but the one-dimensional view expressed here, is hardly less distorting than Keen’s one-sidedness. True, the professional code of ‘due impartiality’ does not guarantee objective reporting; often it has lent credibility to otherwise unbelievable depictions of good versus evil. However, the fact that some professional reporters have filed woefully inaccurate, disgracefully biased copy, does not mean that inaccurate, biased reporting is all we can ever expect to get from the professional reporter. This is what Media Lens sees as the essential trend within professional reporting; but taking professional to mean propensity for distortion, is to misrepresent contingent connections (the coincidence of professional reporting with distorting practices) as necessary relations (as if professional reporting is an inherently distorting process). This is itself a warped view: it is as one-sided as Keen, though looking at professional journalism from the other side.

Taking the long view, it would make sense to treat the Keen-ish linkage between amateur journalism and avoiding the truth as a present-day contingency; the same is true of the obverse position, represented by Media Lens.

‘Objectivity’ and the Pro-Am Debate
Historians of American journalism point to the decades in which objectivity became central to the professional ethics favoured by big city newspapers (Schudson 1978: 77-87). Suspicion is rife (now) that deploying a scientific methodology (then) served to inflate the public standing of journalists, propelling them away from ‘hack’ status towards the scientific reputation enjoyed by medicine. Meanwhile, readers who valued a partisan, biased and entertaining press were making way for those who wanted facts and a journalistic profession trained to supply them (Kaplan 2002).
Whenever a scientific method was propounded, it was usually couched in terms of objectivity. This terminology has been open to too main interpretations: those who see objectivity as a way to approximate closely the natural world, human society and the dynamics of both; and the growing chorus of voices for whom the ‘objective’ approach was merely a rhetorical strategy for boosting one’s own authority and legitimacy.

Some of today’s enthusiasm for user generated content is also an expression of the latter position, while contemporary concerns over UGC being inherently untruthful are redolent with reaction against its ascendancy. In the hard sciences, the shifting balance of power between these two stances led, in part, to the Sokal affair (Sokal and Bricmont 1998), in which a disgruntled, old school scientist successfully hoaxed a group of cultural relativists with a spoof article that was subsequently revealed as a parody of their own worst traits.

In today’s journalism as in academia, the (anti-)epistemology of relativism rules (more or less). Each sector has its own group of radical dissenters from relativism, but in seeking to overthrow the regime which itself overthrew the rule of ‘objectivity’, most of these dissidents can only think of resorting to the status quo ante. Thus the current controversy over professional versus amateur, summarised above as Keen v Media Lens, is also part of an ongoing, epistemological struggle between essentialism and relativism.

The Real History of Pro-Am
The turn to objectivity among the salaried staff of newspapers was partly an attempt on their part to distinguish themselves from a pool of journalists which included wage-earning hacks, jobbing semi-professionals, and unpaid enthusiasts (typically, a gentleman with private income). The latter were ensconced in a publishing industry which barely distinguished the hobbyist from the autodidact, or self-publishing from vanity publishing. The trend towards professionalism can be seen in the hard sciences too, where French civil servant Nicolas Camille Flammarion’s frightening work-rate resulted in countless volumes of popular science and astronomy. Flammarion was so prolific he even found time to invent the sci-fi alien (Stableford 2002).

Thus the man of letters came to be divided into the paid professional on the one hand, and the amateur on the other; though no one felt the need to describe these transformations as a ‘crisis of journalism’. The overlap of science and amateur journalism continued into the twentieth century: weird fiction pioneer HP Lovecraft was among the writers who got into print via this route (Joshi 2002).

Around a century ago, a distinctive cohort of amateurs within publishing thrived alongside a more profitable and prestigious newspaper industry, with objectivity enshrined as its professional ethic. Newsgathering and assembling ‘the facts’, mediated through the idea of journalists having a ‘nose for a story’, was standard practice – and not just in journalism. Techniques associated with the big city newsroom came to play a foundational role in empirical sociology. Former news reporter Robert Park organised University of Chicago researchers around distinctive beats; and the raw material compiled in subsequent monographs came to resemble muckraking accounts of urban hardship and low life (Linder 1996). Thus did US social science present itself as more scientific by emphasising its close proximity to the methods of the professional newspaper reporter.

In the years after the Second World War, US intellectuals moved some distance from this position. In different ways, the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School combined a sceptical approach to claims of scientific objectivity with concern about the potentially totalitarian consequences of mass media. Unease about claims to know the greater truth was fuelled by recent experience of fascism and Stalinism. Fears were focused on industrialised, mainstream media; indeed, the first generation of critical theorists made few direct references to amateur journalism. But in their dual capacity as junior professors and amateur/semi-professional journalists, they were affected by the disappearance of financial advantages such as low rent and plentiful freelance opportunities, which had been enjoyed by the previous generation of Depression-era intellectuals. Perhaps the new generation’s argument that corporate employment sapped the strength of independent journalism, was partly a response to their own experience of newly straitened circumstances.
Note that the trend of the time was to equate professionalism with a propensity for distortion (the Media Lens position), in contrast to that side of today’s debate (Keen and company), which blames the ‘cult of the amateur’.

Encountering Dwight Macdonald
One notable voice was that of Dwight Macdonald. In an Encounter essay published in 1956, he praised London for hosting seven weekly publications – and two dailies – which he ‘continues to marvel at’ (1957: 140). With the exception of The Listener (1929-1991), all seven weeklies remain in circulation to this day. Comparing such titles to what he saw as a moribund US marketplace, Macdonald was full of praise for London’s weekly news magazines, which he described as running on a voluntary basis. In his judgement, the financial position of their writers gave no indication as to the quality of their writing: ‘the amateur is not necessarily inferior in skill to the professional; the difference between them is simply that the former does because he wants to what the latter does for pay.’ (1957: 141)

Many contributors to London-based weeklies were astute observers of British society, just as Macdonald describes them. Some of them had other jobs, not necessarily in journalism, and they will have been writing for the Spectator or New Statesman because they wanted to (and because the editors of these publications wanted them to). But they were also paid for doing so: Macdonald miscalculated this aspect of their financial status. He also appears to have adopted the tone of an anthropologist revealing a subculture previously unknown to American readers. Furthermore, he praised the British weeklies for targeting an intelligent general readership – an ambition widely shared among US intellectuals until Macdonald himself lambasted it as ‘midcult’. But for all his inconsistencies, Macdonald’s point that high quality journalism can result from low budget operations, still stands.

Prolonging the Problems with Macdonald
In recent years, bloggers such as Phil Nugent and Yule Heibel have stumbled across Macdonald’s ‘Amateur Journalism’, and have seen themselves reflected in it. Linking one’s output to Macdonald’s essay is risky, since it is heavily flawed. The botched account of who gets paid for doing what is significant since Macdonald starts out by defining his position (and the position of journalism) by reference to the dividing line between amateur and professional. Later on, the question of payment ceases to be his reference point, and he moves to define good journalism as a matter of spirit and sensibility, including ‘freedom with off-the-cuff value judgements’ and ‘jaunty expertise’. He portrays localised pockets of press excellence as a product of class divisions in 1950s Britain: these publishing gems appear causally connected to ‘the degradation of the rest’ (1957: 145-146). Popular newspapers are slotted into the mass culture paradigm. Even the Manchester Guardian seems to have relocated to London almost a decade early!

Macdonald’s biographer notes his extraordinary enthusiasm for London, which he visited in June 1956 (Wreszin 1995: 309-313) and returned to the following summer. Macdonald’s liking for London may have influenced his perceptions of the seven weeklies, which themselves were – according to subsequent critics – corrupted by over-specialism and academia. Indeed, at the very moment when Macdonald was flying away home to the United States of America, Britain’s amateur journalism may already have been on its last legs. At least, this is how it is depicted in a recent, retrospective narrative of catastrophe (Schwarz 2002) which nonetheless pre-empted the current, doom-laden discussion of Web 2.0.

Pro-Am Revisited
The focus has moved to professional journalism, now presented as the victim of UGC. Whereas amateur journalism was only recently an object of mourning, suddenly it is recast as a burgeoning, threatening development. But today’s critics of ‘the cult of the amateur’ are guilty of disconnecting their target from both content and context. No wonder their aim is wide of the mark.

Macdonald praised so-called amateurism, by which he meant literary London’s publications, because it seemed to offer a well-informed and thoughtful account of matters of public interest. Compared to a hastily written tweet or status update, this was undoubtedly the case. Equally, Macdonald’s observations presuppose readers who were both ready and hungry for detailed reviews and long form essays on such matters. Largely absent nowadays, this kind of readership could only be bemused by the highly personal outbursts which comprise so much of today’s internet traffic.
Whether this latter represents the triumph of the trivial or a revised public sphere in which the personal is central, is a question for another day. But using the amateur as the category to explain the pending extinction of the professional, objective reporter seems myopic, to say the least. It means wrenching amateur journalism from the earlier settings in which it survived and thrived, and recasting it as an inherently destructive force. It means presuming that it has nothing good to say, and denying that it may say it well, regardless of any external, social pressures that might be driving more trivial, superficial and untruthful media activities.

While Anglo-American pundits sulk or celebrate, other parts of the world bear witness to more political, outward-facing forms of amateur journalism. In Malaysia, for instance, oppositional blogs played a significant role in recent elections (Tan and Ibrahim 2008). Ultimately we get the Web 2.0, the public sphere and the journalism – whether professional or amateur – we deserve. Blaming the form it’s delivered in won’t change this.

Graham Barnfield co-edited Reconstruction Vol. 8, No. 1: Class, Culture and Public Intellectuals. He is programme leader of BA (Hons) Journalism, UEL.

References
Bachelder, C. (2003) Bear V Shark London: Bloomsbury, OP 2001.
Edwards, D. and David Cromwell (2009) Newspeak in the 21st Century London: Pluto.
Joshi, S.T. (2002) ‘Introduction’ in H P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, and Other Weird Stories London: Penguin Modern Classics, vii-xx.
Kaplan, R.L. (2002) Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity Cambridge University Press.
Keen, A. (2008) The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy London: Nicholas Brealey, OP 2007.
Linder, R. (1996) The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School, trans. Adrian Morris et al, Cambridge University Press; OP 1990.
Macdonald, D. (1957) ‘Amateur Journalism’ in The Responsibility of Peoples, and Other Essays in Political Criticism London: Gollancz, pp.140-152 (OP in Encounter, 1956).
Schwarz, B. (2002) ‘Men of Letters: The decline of “amateur journalism”’, The Atlantic, July/August.
Schudson, M. (1978) Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers New York: Basic.
Sokal, A. and Jean Bricmont (1998) Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science London: Profile.
Stableford, B. (2002) ‘Introduction’ in Camille Flammarion, Lumen Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ix-xxxiv.
Tan, J. and Zawawi Ibrahim (2008) Blogging and Democratization in Malaysia: A New Civil Society in the Making Selangor: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Wreszin, M. (1995) A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald New York: Basic.

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

Introduction: No Place For Nostalgia

Traditional print media are in trouble and many have gone on record saying the newspaper industry in its current form is unsustainable. In countries where internet access is good, it is not hard to see why this is. Commuters who pick up a newspaper at the station before their hour-long journey to work, will find that once they have reached their office much of what is in their newspaper will already be out of date. Why, in the age of emails, blackberries, iphones and css feeds would anyone buy a newspaper other than for nostalgic reasons?

There is more: the internet is not like the newspaper which comes to the consumer as a finished product. The internet offers a level of interaction between the consumer and product which can increase the value of that product, and additionally the consumer can create their own products which, though separate from commercial media outlets, may enjoy almost equal status in the search engines’ results list (the newsstand of the virtual world). Furthermore, user-generated content (UGC) in the form of ‘citizen journalism’ offers a cheaper and more cost-effective alternative to professional journalism for editors looking to save money.

A combination of these factors and a dose of recession have combined to put pressure on the journalism industry, which as yet has been unable to come up with an alternative model. At the heart of this issue lie two problems:

i) How can news media make money from online content?

ii) How can professional journalism ‘compete’ with UGC?

Advertising May Pay Its Own Way…..

Theoretically the first problem should be less of a challenge. Newspapers make their main income through the sale of advertising space, and they may continue to do so on their online platforms. Indeed, the internet offers exciting opportunities for advertisers to create more effective marketing strategies. For example, news outlets could incorporate Web 2.0 into their sites allowing consumers to create their own ‘front page’ to suit personal preferences and interests. A more user-friendly and aesthetically imaginative version of Google News is not beyond the realms of possibility.

With increased participation and the capacity to build a platform to suit the individual, consumers reveal more personal information about themselves, albeit sometimes unknowingly. This information (as Facebook has shown) can be used to target advertising at consumers in a more effective way. The email updates and the feeds (which consumers subscribe to) give the advertiser another opportunity to target the consumer. This could act as a large incentive to create more original content: the larger the number of updates, the more opportunities there are for advertisers to make contact with consumers.

…Or It May Not

Of course commercial projections like this depend on a healthy advertising industry, and whilst advertisers are still spending money on new campaigns, they are not immune to the current recession. Like the journalism industry, they need to come up with a sustainable business model to fit the new paradigm; and it’s not yet clear that they will succeed in doing this.

In a recent blog (http://tinyurl.com/d87q2e) on TechCrunch, Professor Eric Clemmons argued that advertising simply will not work in this new medium which ‘is not replacing advertising but shattering it.’ Clemmons sited three main reasons for this: ‘Consumers do not trust advertising. Consumers do not want to view advertising, and Consumers do not need advertising’. His research shows that internet platforms where consumers (who are considered more objective then advertisers) can review products and services, make adverts redundant and unwelcome. Apart from their hostility to advertising, it is important to take into consideration the availability of software which enables consumers to avoid adverts altogether.

Whether this is an accurate prediction of things to come, or simply an apocalyptic exaggeration of the effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Clemons does raise some interesting points and it is hard to deny that, for news media to be successful on the internet, they must find another way to generate revenue besides advertising.

Adapt & Survive

Charging consumers for content is the most obvious way of doing this, and worth considering, especially since the idea was recently mooted by Rupert Murdoch (http://tinyurl.com/co2xqv). For the Financial Times, Lionel Barber also predicted that newspapers will start charging for online content with in a year (http://tinyurl.com/nk8sj7). The new problem therefore, can be summarised as follows:

Is it possible to make people pay for access to something that is currently free of charge, easy to re-produce (albeit illegally), and available from rivals such as the BBC who may have other sources of funding?

A parallel can be drawn with the music industry, which has been facing a similar threat from illegal file sharing but was (eventually) able to adapt to change. Music providers introduced their own legal download services which gave more choice to consumers, who can now download tracks individually rather then having to buy whole albums. Spotify and other streaming services allow users to listen to music for free, while charging a small fee that enables listeners to avoid interruptions from adverts.

In this newly emerging context, instead of the music biz going out of business, classic bands have reformed and recorded new material, and live music is increasingly in demand. There is certainly no lack of new music; if anything it is a lot easier for new bands to promote their own material without the backing of a major record label. New research cited in a recent Guardian article ( http://tinyurl.com/m4f44w) suggested that although it remains a problem, the number of illegal downloads is declining, with more consumers turning to legal services and streaming.

It seems that music consumers are prepared to pay for products and services if they believe the quality is a worthwhile investment. The same is true for journalism, as titles such as the Economist have shown with their growing readership ( http://tinyurl.com/ktk4cp). As long as an equilibrium can be found between what people can afford and the cost of production, there is little reason why journalism of a high standard should be at less of a premium than any other quality product or service.

Breadth Of Coverage, Depth of Quality

The question of quality brings us conveniently to the next issue: how professional journalism can ‘compete’ with user-generated content (UGC). Citizen journalism is often criticised on the grounds of quality, bias, and an inability to provide viewers and readers with a complete picture. Whilst one must recognise the limits of citizen journalism, it is certainly unfair to be so dismissive, since many citizen journalists produce work of a good standard. These charges also fail to acknowledge the collaborative nature of citizen journalism. It is often supported by sites such as Demotix which actively encourage collaborative reports made up entirely of UGC (http://www.demotix.com/page/hubs). This in turn allows for community regulation as well as the pooling of limited resources.

It is important to note that citizen journalism has made its biggest impact when professional reporters have faced practical difficulties preventing them from covering particular events. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008 prompted the use of Twitter by residents of the city who uploaded eye witness reports as events took place. Meanwhile mainly for safety reasons, professional journalists were unable to get so close to the fighting.

In the wake of recent protests surrounding the G20 summit in London, coverage by citizen journalists made a large impact, specifically with regard to the death of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson. In this and other controversial situations, police statements were contradicted by footage taken by citizen reporters. Another good example of the positive effect of citizen journalism is the aftermath of the elections in Iran, when the authorities effectively banned foreign media and subjected Iranian journalists to intimidation. It is important to note that in both these cases reports from citizen journalists did not replace the work of professionals, but for whatever reason the key events were not captured by professional reporters. On the other hand, the limitations of citizen journalism must also be recognised: the footage which did emerge from the G20 and Iran was predominantly the work of activists, and thus questions of objectivity have arisen in relation to it. However, whilst citizen journalism might have limits in both these cases, user-generated reports did complement the work of professionals: the latter provided a valuable context in which to place the relatively raw data originated by the former.

Another interesting development is the recent unrest in China’s Xinjiang province, where the authorities uncharacteristically accommodated the international media by giving tours and holding press conferences (albeit with some restrictions), whilst at the same time blocking the tools commonly used by citizen journalists (internet and mobile phone networks). One wonders if one of the effects of UGC is that it has shown that restrictions on the press can be futile; also that it is in the interests of the state to accommodate respected journalists rather than unknown citizen reporters.

Of course, this could be an exaggeration and time will tell what the true effect of citizen journalism will be on authoritarian regimes. Nevertheless, as the above examples have shown, citizen journalism does have a valuable role to play in reporting the news, and regardless of some people’s low opinions, it is hard to see it disappearing. However, it is worth remembering that consumers are unlikely to pay for UGC in the same way that they might for the work of professionals, and it is this that might ensure the limit of its appeal to editors.

Ed Hadfield is a member of the editorial team at Demotix www.demotix.com, a user-generated news outlet and photo-agency. Ed is also preparing to take the MA in Journalism and Society at the University of East London.

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

Introduction: Unthinking Anxiety

In this analysis I discuss two factors that I believe are partly responsible for the ongoing rush to turn every citizen into a reporter or journalist. These are an uncritical faith in the transformative capacity of technology, also known as technological determinism, and a nervous anxiety, largely suppressed until recently, that journalism as a profession is defined by paper walls, which are not only permeable but also easily flattened.

At its most liberal technological determinism asserts that social change is driven by technological innovation, and that this counts for much more than the influence of society on technological development. At its most conservative, it sees technological development as autonomous, free of social influences and almost entirely driven by technical innovations. The development of a particular technology is perceived as the inevitable first stage of the development of a more sophisticated version that will further tighten the grip of technology on society, and make citizens carry out its biddings unquestioningly.

Technology Is A Dependent Variable – Dependent Upon Humanity

It is worth pointing out that technologies do not initiate actions. People do. As Smith (1994, p. xii) aptly puts it: ‘…no technology, no matter how ingenious and powerful, ever has initiated an action not pre-programmed by human beings.’ It is therefore a fallacy, albeit one propagated with zeal that has exerted considerable influence, to assert humanity’s inability to control its invention or to resist its push and pull.

Nonetheless, this misconstruction appears to be one of the dominant themes in the narratives of those who assert that newer and more sophisticated technologies of communication, impose on all citizens the obligation to report from everywhere and about any subject under the sun. Technological invention, especially the dramatic development in ICTs of the past three decades, would be wasted or grossly under-utilised if every literate and semi-literate adult and child did not assume the onerous duties of a reporter, the argument goes. Its advocates have been hard at work to come up with terms which best describe the ‘new’ journalism or the death of ‘journalism as usual’. Grassroots journalism, citizen journalism, news activism, many-to-many journalism, interactive journalism, conversational journalism, user generated content (UGC) and civic journalism – all these different and sometimes contradictory terms come down to the same, basic idea that ‘anyone’ can and should report the news.

This idea is most forcefully espoused by Dan Gillmor in We the Media, a seminal but provocative analysis of the implications of citizen publishing for journalism (and of citizen journalism for publishing). Gillmor invites journalists to accept ‘an evolution that is turning some old notions on their heads’ because ‘we really have no choice, anyway’ (2006, p.111).

Oh Yeon Ho, founder of South Korea-based ohmynews.com (widely acknowledged as the biggest and most popular citizen-journalism outlet in the world), is even more blunt is his assessment: ‘Every citizen is a reporter…journalists aren’t some exotic species, they’re everyone who seeks to take new developments, puts them into writing, and shares them with others’ (Reported in Gillmor 2006, p.110).

In fairness to Gillmor, his book does not advocate the usurpation of the role of professional journalists but rather a re-articulation of that role and of the relationship between professional journalists and the audience. Still, his ideas and those of like-minded analysts have been cited by those opposed to the professionalisation of journalism per se.

Moreover, these zealots have created the erroneous impression that access to sophisticated technology is really all that is needed to produce good journalism. This poses problems for journalism educators, especially when they are confronted by fresh-faced students who claim they are already full-fledged practitioners simply because a picture of Kate Moss at a London restaurant that they took or text messages about Amy Winehouse’s latest antics sent by them, have been published by the BBC or Sky News.

The point I am making is not that journalism can and should be practised without regard to technological innovations and the participation of non-professionals. These developments are inevitable and positive. In fact they have been integral to the development of journalism throughout its history. Rather, my argument is that the ideals and purpose of good journalism must not be deposed in favour of or conflated with the superficiality and emptiness that often result when constructive and critical thinking are abandoned to machines or computer. With regard to news reporting, superficiality and emptiness are evident when, for example, live broadcasts or instant relays on television degenerate into a meaningless mix of de-contextualised narration and repetitive pictorial display. In their haste to avail themselves of sophisticated technology and bring the event to the audience ‘as it happens’, broadcasters often fail to supply detailed and contextual information that would enhance a more meaningful interpretation of the news by the audience, i.e. the gizmos get in the way of showing what is really going on. In that it continues the tradition of projecting technology as panacea, I am concerned that the uncritical elevation of UGC will inflict similar damage on journalism.

Participatory Journalism

Without any doubt journalism is more purposeful, rewarding and satisfying when those trained to deliver it maintain a close and beneficial relationship with the audience or target group. Almost since the invention of modern mass communication, the relationship with the audience and users’ participation in the news production process, have been encouraged by journalists keen to put the media at the service of society. Through phone-ins, letters to the editor and other platforms, journalists have successfully incorporated the views of users without abdicating their professional responsibilities or compromising standards.

There have been many previous instances when users’ contributions to the news process have been either constrained or (even) enlarged by (newly) available technology and (widening) socio-political contours. So the idea of media democratisation trumpeted by the apostles of UGC is not entirely new. What is new and also objectionable, is the call for the usurpation and bastardization of journalism, all in the name of making it more accessible and acceptable.

In my view, those championing this call have either misunderstood the nature and true importance of journalism or their judgement has been clouded by an un-problematic acceptance of the capacity of technology to transform and empower. Journalism is important to society for the well-rehearsed reason that it serves as its life-blood by ensuring that vital news and information circulate through every part of it. However, its importance also derives from the individual and collective records of those who through unswerving devotion to truth and passion for objectivity, have made journalism the collective conscience of many communities. While I am not suggesting that practitioners of UGC are incapable of this sort of commitment, it must be emphasised that the critical oversight and comradeship of professional colleagues – traits that are hardly present on the myriad, lone planets inhabited by many UGC practitioners – have been instrumental in enhancing the allegiance to their profession on the part of many journalists. Put differently, journalism’s reputation and importance have endured, among other reasons, because trained men and women, working with and among professional colleagues, have upheld its ideals and integrity, and thereby underlined the indispensability of journalism to modern society.

As the formats and fruits of the various forms of UGC become increasingly manifest, it is clear that an un-creative and un-disciplined application of this brand of news reporting will neither enhance the value and integrity of journalism nor serve the audience and society better. Journalism is much more than simply collecting and documenting ‘facts’. It is also not about ego trips and one-way discourses disguised as commentaries and features. Good journalism implies meaningful and critical editorial judgement, ethical sensibilities, editorial autonomy, and public service and trust. These are concepts that many advocates and practitioners of UGC do not appreciate or even understand. The future of journalism depends on how deeply or loosely these traits are imbibed and implemented by the armies of current and future entrants into the profession. That is why we must resist the move to limit or even eradicate them in the name technological application and media democratisation.

Abel Ugba is an African-born journalist who worked in Dublin, where he also gained his PhD, before joining the Journalism team at the University of East London.

References:

Gillmor, D (2006) We the media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people, Beijing, Cambridge, Tokyo: O’Reilly publishers

Smith, Merritt (1994) ‘Technological Determinism in American Culture’, in Marx and Smith (eds)

History? Dilemma of Technological Determinism . Massachusetts: MIT Press pp. 1-36