All people deserve equal access to the information that affects their lives and shapes their attitudes about the world. Is this a revolutionary idea? Or is it the basic tenet of journalism?
Traditional journalism is committed to the documentation and distribution of impartial information, but with the explosion of non-print media sources, its guiding principles have been paired with new questions of accessibility and scope.
In his blog post "Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic," Clay Shirky discusses possibilities for the future of journalism in a world where more people swipe screens than smudge their fingers with newsprint. Shirky contends, "...there is no such thing as the news business. There is only the advertising business."
Shirky explains that the old business model of journalism is based on a newspaper's relationship with its advertisers, rather than its readers. Advertisements, sports, and classified ads pay for the real news, but pages of trivia punctuated with few relevant articles create a newspaper without a consistent internal structure. Shirky writes that the system "...never made much sense, but at least it worked."
Shirky believes that this haphazard union of advertising and reporting is unsustainable in the news environment of the Internet. He writes, "Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren't just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence." This comment raises two entwined issues that will define the future of information dissemination: relevancy and profitability.
Shirky thinks that the traditional newspaper model overlooks the information needs of the community it serves. He writes, "The average US paper runs more soft than hard news, uses more third-party content than anything created by their own staff, and reaches more people who care about local teams than local zoning." This means articles cover topics that are broad and frivolous, and the information that impacts people on a local level is replaced with generic content.
Many small newspapers have folded in recent years. Although some survive when they are absorbed into larger news corporations, this again raises the question of relevancy. How can a paper offer commentary on local news if none of its content is local?
This phenomenon is not limited to newspapers. A Free Press report from June addresses the issue of "covert consolidation" in television news, a trend in which local stations run content that has been produced by other stations. Josh Stearns and Corie Wright, authors of the Free Press report, explain this practice:
In most cases these partnerships are established through agreements that appear to circumvent the FCC's media ownership rules, while producing exactly the sorts of results those rules are meant to prevent: a decrease in competition, diversity and localism-the longstanding concept that broadcasters using public airwaves have a duty to serve their local communities.
When journalism no longer addresses local issues, its influence in a community is limited. Stearns and Wright, in clear agreement with Shirky, write, "Local news outlets help shape the public agenda for communities in profound ways. The public overwhelmingly depends on local television to uncover local stories."
This is the ideal incarnation of local news, both printed and televised, but it rarely occurs in news media that adheres to the old business model of advertisements before content. Although Shirky might argue that newspapers have always struggled to produce relevant content, he writes, "...even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared." But with the advent of online news media, the reader base of traditional newspapers has declined further. As more readers turn to online sources for information about their communities, newspapers are hemorrhaging money.
Shirky notes that the old business model of journalism could be kept afloat through a combination of government funding and private funding from non-profit organizations, but he is not enthusiastic about this solution. Shirky, and many other proponents of new news media, think that the slow death of traditional news media provides an opportunity to explore new models of information distribution.
Shirky writes, "...if our test for any new way of producing news is whether it replaces all the functions of a newspaper, we'll build things that look like newspapers..." He acknowledges that newspapers were valuable for a time, but in a new era of widely accessible online media, they fail to carry currency of any kind.
So what does the future of news media look like? Shirky asserts, "News has to be subsidized, and it has to be cheap [to produce], and it has to be free," but these are the only criteria of which he is certain. Other people and groups are recognizing the same issues that concern Shirky. Ashoka, a non-profit organization that supports social entrepreneurship, recently launched a competition to promote "full information citizenship."
Ashoka defines full information citizenship as the idea that "All people must be able to engage freely and powerfully with information to advance their own lives and society." Revolutionary idea? A new kind of journalism?
Or is this the ideal vision of journalism that its most steadfast supporters have believed in from the start? Ashoka has already received submissions in a variety of languages that range from established media production organizations to individuals who happen to have good ideas, but not much else. This vast assortment of innovative projects and solutions approximates the chaotic news ecosystem and "multiple competing approaches" that Shirky has in mind, and from this chaos may come the future of journalism.