The retreat of print: a media revolution and democracy
This is the draft text of a public lecture I gave at The University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, on Tuesday, November 29, 2016.
In January of 1999 I gathered with a group of other — then young — reporters and editors for the launch of a newspaper. It was to be called the Sunday Herald and it was to plug a gap in the Scottish newspaper market.
Now, that was pretty unusual. At the time there were something like 13 or 14 titles casting themselves as “Scottish” or “national” available to the five million Scots.
But the perception was that the Herald group, which produced the Glasgow quality daily that had had a circulation of more than 100,000 needed a Sunday sibling — giving it seven-day-a week advertising.
Yet there was a political and journalistic reason for launching this newspaper. And it was a factor that had stoked excitement across the Scottish media at that time.
For Scotland was, for the first time in almost 300 years, to have its own parliament. It was clear that for the media, this could only mean one thing — boom times lay ahead.
Ok, there were some fears about the internet, this technological wave that was already sweeping the globe, and how journalists might engage with it. But there was plenty of optimism too. The web was merely a platform, another place for our articles to appear. So what if in a few years we stopped chopping down trees and all our articles were read from screens, that would be ok.
In fact, given deforestation that would probably be a good thing. Whatever, managers and business leaders would make that side of it work, we just had to keep being journalists.
Anyway, all that was a long way off. What lay before us was a changing democracy; one that carried with it the trappings and temptations of executive, legislature, and lobbyists.
There was also fear. Even by 1999 newspaper launches were pretty unusual. And often they flopped quickly. Even well-backed, London-based titles would toy with Scottish editions from time to time and wind them up after a year or two, during an advertising downturn, or if a new owner took the helm.
So, if you’d told us in 1999, that come 2014, when another massive moment in the history of Scottish democracy took place, that our newspaper would still be on the go, still appearing on the review programs, still setting agendas and being talked about, we probably would have been pretty happy. That would, I suspect, have been regarded as a success.
And as Scots went to the polls in September 2014 to decide whether to leave the United Kingdom, and become an independent country, the Sunday Herald was very much alive and kicking. I was long gone — from Scotland as well as the paper — and so had most of those I worked with on the launch.
But the title itself still publishes today — every week. Indeed it was at the heart of much debate around that referendum, having taken the rare step for a Scottish media outlet of supporting the case for independence. There was even a circulation boost, driven by that stance; lifting it, albeit temporarily, close to the levels we achieved back around the time of it’s launch.
So, is Scotland bucking an international trend of print decline — driven by this experiment in devolved democracy, and a campaign for independence?
Far from it. Like pretty much everywhere else in the Western world, the Scottish newspaper — and journalism — sector is in a state of freefall. This collapse has occurred over exactly the same period that its parliament was becoming established and, latterly, dominated by a single party.
Does it matter?
Circulation figures tell a desperate story. But perhaps it is even more useful to look at public views. And data from a Scottish Social Attitudes survey tracking precisely this period tells a dramatic story. Between 1999 and 2014 — the years I am talking about — a third of Scots gave up reading a daily morning newspaper. A third. From 76% reading in 1999 to 41% in 2014. Meanwhile, only 33% said they checked online news on a daily basis. More of that in a bit.
But does that really matter? I mean, didn’t I just say my old title had survived, even thrived for a bit in the heady days after September 2014? Well yes, it certainly is still around. But it is very different to the organisation I worked for. And what I’m about to detail is a story of journalistic decline that is true across Western societies. It has been documented in Baltimore in the TV series The Wire, in Boston in the film Spotlight, and I’ve seen it in various London newsrooms.
Because what we have witnessed is a complete hollowing out of staff to keep products alive — and in some cases profitable. For inevitably, as audiences have shrunk, and moved online and to social media, advertising has fled. For a time, around 2009 some thought this to be a symptom of the global financial crisis and that the money would return. It did not. And it will not.
So, back in my old newsroom. The jobs done by 40 journalists in 1999, were by 2014 done by eight or nine, who were also doubling up on other titles within the group. But again, does this matter? Clearly the answer is yes for journalists. But all industries change. Why should this have wider resonance?
Kathrarine Viner, Editor of The Guardian, writes: “My belief is that what distinguishes good journalism from poor journalism is labour: the journalism that people value the most is that for which they can tell someone has put in a lot of work — where they can feel the effort that has been expended on their behalf, over tasks big or small, important or entertaining.”
I believe the key thing Kath says there is the “journalism that people value”. And I would contend that she is in some part right, and in some part thinking wishfully.
Where this is wishful, in terms of politically significant journalism, is that what we see unfolding before us is more a case of people valuing the “journalism” they agree with, rather than journalism they feel has particular virtue.
If we look at the recent election in the United States,we find a report revealing that more than 100 pro-Trump news sites were being run out the the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The have pretty catchy names, such as worldpoliticus.com and usconservativetoday.com.
All these are being run from a town called Veles (population 45,000), experiencing a digital gold rush by running fake news stories. And these are stories, which if headlined with the right sensationalism could be read by hundreds of thousands of people.
By pumping stories about Hillary’s emails into Trump social media bubbles they could make money. It is worth knowing this is a trickle of money. Money that wouldn’t go so far in Western Europe or the United States, and certainly not enough to sustain an old-fashioned newsroom, but enough to sustain a reasonable lifestyle for a young person in Veles.
Now, you probably think, who believes this stuff? But it is incredible what you’ll believe if you want to believe it. Or if it’s kind of funny.
One of the most shared lines of the presidential election was a quote attributed to People magazine interview with Donald Trump in 1998. “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox news. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”
This circulated widely, often accompanied by a still of Donald Trump apparently from a television interview. Pretty compelling stuff, huh? Well, except it now seems that it wasn’t true. I was stunned when I discovered this. Because I really did believe that Trump had said that. In fact, I thought I could remember watching it in a video clip, such was the slow burn influence of the image.
Similarly a quote in the aftermath of the US election on Twitter about people chanting “down with Muslims” and Mexicans in New York had me duped for a moment. And it’s my job to follow news, to scrutinse it, and make sense of it. I pause before hitting retweet and think. But do most people? Or do they bolster their views, retweet, share and move on?
Social networks, specifically Facebook, have come under enormous pressure in recent weeks to justify the sharing of certain content — to introduce filters, to badge “accredited news outlets”. That’s a wide debate that will continue to rage, and I am sure we will discuss in the Q+A session to follow.
But what is clear is that on a grand news event scale, such as the US election, the audiences are so large that there is some money to be made by driving content — even if it isn’t true. But what of smaller polities, such as Scotland and New Zealand? Well, I suspect their news cycles are less likely to drive traffic at such levels that would allow people to generate advertising revenue from industrial scale fabrication. However, for the politically inclined the internet does offer up opportunities to drive your own version of the truth.
Take, for instance, the example of two Scottish websites. One is called The Ferret, the other Bella Caledonia.
The Ferret makes a virtue of its objectivity and independence. Bella largely produces content that is strongly pro-independence. The Ferret places value in old-fashioned investigations. Scoops. That’s what it exists to pursue. Bella is an opinion site.
Both are strong sites, bearing high-quality writing. Yet, I am told Bella has raised way more money in appeals to readers. There may be a number of reasons for that. It has been around longer. It is seen by many supporters of Scottish independence as a bulwark to a still pro-UK mainstream media.
But my view is that such patterns are powered by the same skew that drives shares on Facebook. People just like sharing — and it seems funding — content they agree with. Content that they feel will cast them in a good light with their friends. Make them popular. They value it more.
So, we are heading towards (or we are already in) a media world of polemic silos, sometimes very honest and respectable polemics — but sometimes more sinister, masquerading as news. Where does this leave the pursuit of truth?
The pursuit of truth
And this is a debate that’s been raging in recent weeks. The final dawn of the post-truth era has been hailed. Indeed just a week or two back Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” was their word of the year.
But I think it is important to remember that we are not coming from a glorious era of truth telling. Indeed, the late 20th and early 21st centuries did see their fair share of exaggeration, media scandal. This pervaded even the quality end of the media. All sorts of tricks were in play as circulation declined, ad revenue struggled and pressures increased on editors and reporters desperate to keep their jobs. Articles that once would have been deemed merely interesting, were laden with adjectives and adverbs to drag the reader in. Indeed many of the tricks we now see in the fake news stories and click bait of new media, have their roots in dying days of the newspaper industry.
And this approach stretched beyond mere wordplay. I recall as a reporter being asked to “put a bit of top-spin” on a story; to “write around” the facts; to “make the story work”. Essentially what all that meant was don’t worry too much about the detail, or the qualification, write a story that will get us the headline we want, to make an exciting page, to make a sale in a time when every sale potentially staved off the next round of redundancies — keeping you in a job.
These approaches were not wholesale across the industry. But they weren’t uncommon. And how was such myth-making called out? Social media. By 2010, an article with a flaw in it, even a well meaning or accidental flaw, would be exposed by social media users in seconds.
This forced the mainstream to raise its game; but it also poured fuel onto a bonfire of truth. Quite simply, on social media, nothing was believed, everything could be called out for something. And the conditions were suddenly ripe for all multitude of different versions of the truth — as we have just seen from the recent US election.
Because, flawed though it was, the old media consensus, of news organisations and print gave us a broad consensus. And an agreed wider truth. The new media age leads us to a post-modern fragmentation of truth. The old certainties and positions of authority have snapped suddenly, sometimes spectacularly.
Press v social
Pretty much every Editorial Board of every newspaper in the United States agreed Hillary Clinton was best equipped to run the country. The insurgency portrayed her as a criminal. Who did the public believe?
In Scotland, in 2014, we saw another interesting version of this battle for truth. And I suspect it will be a precursor of wider battles to be fought in the post-truth era. It pitted BBC and parts of the press against new media outlets. And it led to marches outside the BBC in Glasgow; calls for leading journalists to be sacked.
In a sense you had one government — Westminster — outlining one version of the truth, while another — Holyrood — ploughed a different line. A contest of truths. Both believed they were right. This ranged from issues around oil revenue, to the rules and regulations for EU membership, to the chances of Scotland being able to use the pound sterling in the aftermath of a vote for independence. The truth was vigorously disputed. All certainly was lost. And it was contested and debated daily in detail via social media. And its a debate that continues today — in an ever more fractured way.
In a way this is a good thing. Why should newspaper barons, national broadcasters and politicians dictate the parameters of debate. Surely the public has a right to challenge and dispute what in the past was portrayed as good, right or just true. I believe they do — and they now very much have the means to do so.
Indeed, a recent piece by Andrew Calcutt, Principal Lecturer in Journalism, Humanities and Creative Industries, University of East London reminded me it was academics who, more than 30 years ago, academics started to discredit “truth” as one of the “grand narratives” which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of “the truth”, he writes, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths” — always plural, frequently personalised, inevitably relativised.
Citing Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge from 1979, Calcutta says, “for as long as we have been postmodern, we have been setting the scene for a ‘post-truth’ era”.
Calcutt goes on to suggest this intellectual trend played a key role in the change within journalism that we then witnessed, and that I’ve just talked about — decline of objectivity, rise of opinion. So, he views journalists, not the alt-right, as the trail-blazers of the post-truth era.
So, is all hope lost? Are we destined to exist in a freewheeling world of fiction masquerading as fact. Almost a free-market in truth?
No, I’ve already mentioned The Ferret. And there are many other such examples around the world of green shoots amid the devastation.
And some legacy titles will survive. Though my hunch is that it will be those that slim down, and at the same time specialise in the core, valuable, elements of what they do best. In most cases this will be local news. Or content that speaks to a clear and defined community.
For these the prize is great. There is real potential for outlets that can build a reputation for trustworthiness, rigour, and a thorough approach to revealing information.
James Conroy, Vice Principal Univ of Glasgow, philosophy professor told me recently: “We need to create a better climate to help folk distinguish approximations to the truth from utter drivel.”
And in doing so, new ways of sourcing reliable knowledge and conveying information will be pioneered. Now, if you will, for a moment allow me the luxury of self-promotion, I’ll talk briefly about the project I am involved with: The Conversation.
A role for media outsiders
The Conversation offers academics, the chance to be key participants in this new media landscape.
You bring expertise; specialist knowledge. Deployed in collaboration with professional, experienced journalists this can be channelled directly to the public — at key moments in the news cycle.
TC launched in Australia in 2011, the UK in 2013, and is now operating with university partners in numerous countries. We meet as an editorial news team, we schedule and publish articles swiftly. But all of the content is written by academics. And it is reaching an audience of millions every month. It is free to read, and to republish, and appears on well-known titles — those same titles now desperate for new, valuable content — around the world.
And — once again — all of it is actually written by academics. To write for the Conversation you have to be a registered academic at a higher education institution. And you can only write on your area of academic expertise. Yes, there is opinion. And yes, there are truths that are contestable. But no-one can say those who produce content for The Conversation do not know what they are talking about. This is a new form of journalism that celebrates expertise, and is rooted in research.
There will be other good models. They will emerge from the apparent crisis, and they will sometimes come from places that are not obvious. Sometimes, they will be run by individuals, with a passionate expertise and knowledge of a specific area.
And long may they succeed.
For the prize is great. No less than Joseph Pulitzer, operating in the old word, but one that at times had, let’s not forget, very similar challenges, said:
“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.
“An able … public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.”
The platform has changed, and as a result the challenge should not be underestimated. But the tools to meet it are at the disposal of all of us. While the internet and social media can seem terrifying at times of political defeat and despair, we much remember, they do offer us — the people at large — great opportunities, and the chance to forge a plural democratic media environment in the future. And hopefully, to give a majority of the public a chance to distinguish approximations of the truth from utter drivel.
