Sharing by Matthew David

Author:Matthew David
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509513260
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

The digital challenge

Stuart Allen (2006, 2013) notes that the current ‘crisis’ in journalistic news production is, for the most part, driven by attempts to reduce production costs. The process of collecting and reporting news is expensive by the very nature of its supposedly being ‘new’. While some level of news gathering has always been ‘outsourced’ via news agencies, independent reporters and photographers, newspapers and broadcasters do require their own staff, both in-house and in the field.

James Curran and Jean Seaton (2010) document the proliferation of new media channels in recent decades. The upshot of such media pluralization has been that advertising revenues that were once concentrated in a small number of print and broadcast titles/channels are now spread far more thinly. Many new digital channels have very little interest in news content, while a small number of new digital channels (such as Fox, Sky and CNN) have specialized in news. Both types of new channel challenge traditional news-driven media organizations – diverting advertising revenues and viewers (which again translates back into declining advertising revenues per channel). Digital technologies have radically reduced costs in print media. While this has saved money, digital publication has also afforded an explosion in lifestyle/niche magazine publishing (McRobbie and Thornton 1995). These new publications have eaten up a growing share of advertising revenues and diverted sales from newspapers (which has also reduced what advertisers pay established titles), so paralleling the crisis in broadcast news revenues.

Curran and Seaton (2010: 247) observe that declining budgets for news production are associated – not least in the minds of journalists and editors – with a reduction in the scope for ‘investigative reporting’. Two things are worth noting here, however. First, the digital challenge arose primarily from commercial media competition, due to the proliferation of commercial channels and publications, not from the Internet and ‘free’ news distribution. Second, the claim that cuts have eaten into the capacity of journalists to engage in investigative reporting does rather assume that this was once a widespread practice, now being diminished. It should be recalled that the greater part of professional news reporting was and remains ‘routine’ news production – the practice of reporting the claims being made by dominant actors (politicians, business leaders, the police, stock markets, banks, other media commentators, celebrities, and so on). As such, ‘free’ citizen journalism is not responsible for killing professional journalism, and neither is most professional journalism the investigative heroism depicted in romantic accounts (whether in fiction or in the ideals of journalists themselves).

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