News 2.0 by Martin Hirst

Author:Martin Hirst [Hirst, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Computers, Internet, General, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism
ISBN: 9781742370576
Google: ITRTnwEACAAJ
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2011-01-15T03:51:13+00:00

Amateurism, political economy and exploitation

. . . the less appealing side of this amateurism is the cut-price labor economy it has established as the default mentality of the cyberworld, where sacrificial labor and self-exploitation are the order of the day.

Andrew Ross

There is another factor to consider in relation to amateurism in the news industry. It is one thing to argue that this is journalism from below, but the logic and dynamic of capitalism means that there will be serious— and probably successful—attempts to incorporate amateurism into the mainstream news media’s value chain. In terms of the political economy of amateurism, Andrew Ross (2009) has argued that it in fact creates new conditions for exploitation of labour and a potential new channel of surplus value and profit for the mainstream media. Ross points out that contestants on reality TV shows often ‘work’ long hours for little or no pay under poor conditions and that when writers on the syndicated reality show America’s Got Talent wanted to join a union they were fired. New York University’s Sue Collins (2008) also points out that the huge global growth of reality television has displaced a highly unionized and professional workforce in Hollywood and is moving the industry towards a ‘flexible’ profit and cost model. Ross makes the point that these changes have occurred in sections of the ‘old’ media that are ‘most clearly aligned with the neoliberal ethos of the jackpot economy’, but in the ‘world of new media, where unions have no foothold, the formula of overwork and underpayment is entirely normative’ (Ross, 2009).

Ross’s ‘The political economy of amateurism’ is a short article, but it makes some very telling points about how exploitative the world of Web 2.0 can be—for example, social network users signing away the copyright on any materials they upload to Facebook or YouTube. For the corporate players, the avalanche of user-generated content uploaded to their servers ‘serves as the lucrative raw material for data mining, corporate market research, and entrepreneur hosts bent on getting bought out’. In terms of a political economy of UGC, it is important to add amateur, alternative and citizen journalism and all forms of UGNC into this mix—perhaps not when content is hosted on independent sites, but certainly when it is uploaded to CNN’s iReport or to any other commercial website where it becomes the property of the host. As Ross points out, ‘the outcome is a virtually wage-free proposition’ in which users, or ‘prosumers’, as industry strategists call them, ‘create all the surplus value’ (2009). In much the same way, the incorporation of crowdsourcing into news-gathering and reporting routines does much the same thing. This is not to suggest that further developments in digital technology and social media applications won’t alter journalistic practice even further, but it does imply that social media, crowdsourcing and collaborative production models will not replace mainstream news organizations or cause the total collapse of the news industry any time soon. Cheap labour and exploitative content farms are more likely to extend its life span.

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