How to fix journalism
By Nafeez Ahmed
Via INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.
Journalism is in crisis. Journalists know it. And so does everyone else. Less clear is what to do about it, and how to fix it.
In this piece, we’ll explore what’s broken about journalism, along three broad categories: the profession, the business and the public interest. We’ll then move into one of my direct experiences at The Guardian that led me to the place where I am now. Finally, we’ll look at what our analysis suggests the solutions should be — and what I’m building to make those solutions real.
As with any crisis, the deeper it goes, the greater the opportunities for change. And the journalism crisis goes pretty deep. It goes to the heart of our craft.
And it starts with the embodiment of journalism: the journalist.
1. Journalism for the journalist
Axiom: The journalist is increasingly overworked, underpaid, editorially-constrained, psychologically under siege, and at risk of disappearing beneath the wave of corporate public relations.
Most working journalists feel out of sync with their own field. Just under 60% of American journalists say that journalism as a whole is simply heading “in the wrong direction.”
Job satisfaction is at an all-time low. Less than a quarter of journalists say they are “very satisfied” with their job.
And there is a growing tension between the need for journalists to promote themselves, while improving the quality and productivity of their journalism: 80% of journalists think that social media has helped them promote their work, but 75% don’t think its improved their actual journalism.
Journalism is also becoming whiter and older. The number of minority journalists in US news media has decreased from 9.5% to 8.5% in the last decades. Over the same period, the average age of full time journalists has increased by six years to 47.
Since Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance, the impact on writers has been profound. One in six American writers avoids writing or speaking on a topic they suspect might subject them to surveillance.
In Europe, 31% of journalists admitted feeling compelled to tone down controversial topics due to fear of reprisals.
We’re also getting paid less and less for our troubles. While more and more journalists are working outside traditional newsrooms as freelancers, their average salary is just over half that of their employed counterparts.
If journalists were a species, you’d be forgiven for worrying they might be going extinct. Over the last two and a half decades, 60% of US journalism jobs have vanished. Similar trends are visible around the world.
Local reporting and investigative journalism have suffered most as a result.
We are being replaced by a new breed of journalistically-trained PR specialists — if journalists aren’t becoming freelancers, they’re moving out of the field entirely into PR, where they can actually earn a living.
The challenge for journalists is that the pressures of survival are increasingly in conflict with the ethics and craft of journalism. We have to promote ourselves in a situation of ever heightening insecurity under tightening editorial constraints influenced by converging business, PR and ideological pressures. In this context, the integrity and quality of journalism is sacrificed under the very rationale for self-preservation.
2. Journalism as a business
Axiom: A major driver behind why journalism is suffering as a profession, is because it’s becoming less and less viable as a business.
What that means is that the business of journalism is increasingly at odds with the values and methods that make journalism great.
Despite massive increases in advertising spending, fully 65% of digital ad revenue is controlled by just five giant technology firms, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter.
This has raised new questions about the editorial power of these firms over what their users read and watch.
Meanwhile, newspaper circulation is still declining year-on-year, along with total advertising revenue among publicly traded media companies — across both print and digital.
That’s even though digital is growing rapidly as a source of ad revenue, and even though actual audience numbers in terms of readership is growing for many publications.
The dependence on advertising and the digitisation of media has another side-effect.
Now anyone can become a publisher of ‘news’, which can then be widely distributed for mass consumption at relatively little cost.
The digitisation of advertising revenue has incentivised this. Clickbait can be highly profitable for micro-platforms that keep their overheads as low as possible, while dishing out ‘search engine optimised’ stories designed to game Google.
Faced with this onslaught of clickbait competitors, traditional media institutions find themselves struggling for attention.
The rapid growth in alternative media outlets demonstrates the reality of rapidly growing popular unease with traditional media. Mass audiences all over the world on both left and right of the political spectrum are hungry for information outside the traditional global media circuit.
Those alternative news sources are either very well-funded by political and ideological vested interests — think Breitbart News or Russia Today; or they lack a level of resources even remotely comparable to traditional media institutions.
Either way, their capacity to sustain integrity in their journalism is compromised.
3. Journalism for society
Axiom: All this means that journalism’s capacity to fulfil its core function of informing and empowering the public as a service to society is increasingly at risk.
Rather than the public turning to journalists for answers, they are experiencing a sense of being overwhelmed with contradictory information.
No wonder public trust of journalists is at an all-time low. According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, the public’s trust in global media has dropped from 51 to 41% since last year, to a degree which matches plummetting distrust in government officials.
Last year, a Gallup poll found that the number of Americans expressing trust in traditional media had dropped eight percentage points from the preceding year to just 32% of the population.
Last month, a UK study found that only 30% of Britons trust journalists, and 66% feel journalists generally disregard facts. Half suspect they have unwittingly consumed fake news from the mainstream in the last year.
To compensate, people are turning to friends and closed-loop social networks to find news.
But in this new clickbait-driven digital landscape, there are often no standards or regulations whatsoever.
Understandably, we journalists lament over and over about this rise in ‘fake news’. Yet we undertake little soul-searching on how the popularity of micro-outlets with no meaningful journalistic standards has been driven by repeated failures in the reliability of the traditional media.
News consumers are basically fed up with being lied to.
So instead of repeatedly pointing the finger elsewhere, the only way to genuinely address this problem is to recognise its roots.
“A starting point would be admission that the phenomenon of fake news has its roots in mainstream media failure. Issues of partisanship and bias, ethical standards in journalism, and unhealthy levels of ownership concentration have created an environment in which trust in journalists is at an all-time low,” wrote Prof Darren G. Lilleker of Bournemouth University’s Centre for Politics and Media Research in written evidence to the House of Commons Culture, Media & Sports Committee’s ‘fake news’ inquiry.
So: The crisis of fake news outside the traditional media is being fueled by growing public unease with the traditional media’s function as a system of propaganda.
In his recent study Media Control: News as an Institution of Power and Social Control (2016), journalism professor Robert E. Gutsche of Florida International University argues that news media operates as an ideological mechanism to perpetuate narratives which ultimately sanitise existing structures of power.
In the US, he concludes, journalism as an institution is in itself a system of power that reinforces racial inequalities and hierarchies.
This should not come as a surprise. Six huge transnational conglomerates own and control the entirety of the US mass media, including newspapers, magazines, publishers, TV networks, cable channels, Hollywood studios, music labels and popular websites: Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal.
In the UK, 71% of UK national newspapers are owned by just three giant corporations, while 80% of local newspapers are owned by a mere five companies.
Centralised ownership translates into self-perpetuating and self-censoring editorial structures which produce a particular culture of what is considered to be legitimate news.
This has alarmingly concrete results in media coverage of our most pressing global challenges.
On the global financial crisis, a new paper in Journalism Studies looked at mainstream newspaper coverage in the US, UK and Australia of the 2008 global financial crisis. The paper found that the mainstream financial press “did not provide any forewarnings to the general public; … lacked sufficient scepticism when reporting on financial and economic trends; and that reporters were too close to the sources they used for information.”
The paper went further, though. It also looked at coverage of previous financial events over three decades, including the late 1990s recession, and the Dot Com boom in 2000. The verdict is sobering:
“The interviews and empirical evidence indicate there has been a decline in mainstream financial journalism standards since the 1980s, as the media have faced increasing institutional, ideological, and industrial pressures.”
On global poverty, a study in Media & Jornalismo — a journal published by the Centre for Media and Journalism Research, University of Coimbra, Portugal — found that while Western news media frequently report on manifestations of poverty like famine, overcrowding, and natural disasters, “they rarely reflect the political, economic, and ideological structures that have directly caused and continue to exacerbate it on a global scale.” Poverty is communicated as a “pressing issue” but journalists:
“… ultimately fail to point out underlying causes or suggest any changes to the status quo.”
On climate change, the findings of a new model of journalism published in the Journal of Public Economics explores how journalistic practice has contributed to the public being largely uninformed about climate change.
In 2016, a Pew survey found that the number of Americans who agree that human activity is causing climate change was in a minority at 48% — unchanged from six years ago.
The new model concludes that the gap between the actual scientific consensus and public understanding is:
“…. due to efforts by special interests to influence media coverage, and ‘balanced’ reporting that creates the impression of controversy.”
Cognitive dysfunction
At the most basic level, then, the present system of journalism has been failing to do its job for some decades, and the problem is worsening.
The fake news crisis is not the real problem; instead it is a symptom of a deeper problem in the structural inability of the traditional media to empower the public by challenging power.
Yet the present system of journalism as a whole is unable to provide meaningful coverage of issues like the financial crisis, global poverty and climate change. Worse, it is now increasingly overwhelmed by the escalating complexity of these crises and their inherent interconnections.
Journalism is mired in the same disciplinary overspecialisation that plagues our sciences; and so is, for the most part, unable to grasp how major events are escalating due to a convergence of systemic failures in our climate, energy, food and economic systems.
As such, journalism is ceasing to be an agent of change as an institution that acts in the public interest. Rather, it is devolving into a hapless, fragmentary mess of binary, reactionary ideologies fueling a deep sense of public confusion and alienation.
Instead of empowering, it is generating apathy.
Instead of engendering constructive conversations, it is creating isolated bubbles where people are ill-equipped to engage in generative dialogues with people who disagree with them — a fundamental precondition for an effective democracy.
And as a result, it has become incapable of generating or empowering viable alternatives to the status quo.
In other words: at a unique moment in human history of unprecedented crisis — where multiple systemic environmental, energy and economic challenges are converging — precisely when the human species requires as much collective cognitive clarity as it can manage, one of the most critical mechanisms of our collective cognition, journalism, has become simply an extension and reflection of the same crisis.
4. My story
I’ve been a freelance investigative journalist for 16 years. Like so many other journalists, I spent my early years writing from the margins, slowly building up a portfolio.
Eventually, I got my Big Break in early 2013 when I was recruited to join The Guardian’s team of environment bloggers.
My beat was to report on the geopolitics of environmental crisis, and its interconnections with energy, economics and society.
Things went well until, about a year and a half later, I wrote a piece on the role of Palestinian offshore gas resources in motivating Israel’s military incursion into the Gaza strip.
The following day I got a call from a senior editor, who told me that my Guardian blog, Earth insight, would be cancelled. I was stunned, but this wasn’t a conversation open to any form of negotiation. Within hours, I received a formal email from the newspaper’s rights manager giving me notice of immediate termination — in breach, by the way, of the terms of my contract.
For months, I languished in a state of uncertainty, confusion, alienation and despair. I felt like I’d been on an upward trajectory only to smack head-first into a ceiling I didn’t know existed. And it felt like the only other possible direction to go in was down.
When I started getting emails from Guardian readers asking me why I hadn’t posted anything new, I started to realise that this wasn’t just about me. My readers, Guardian readers, wanted to know why I’d suddenly gone silent. And they wanted me to keep writing. And I’d put myself in this weird position where I couldn’t give them an answer, because I didn’t want to come out and say what happened for fear it would jeopardise my ability to ‘rehabilitate’ myself in the ‘mainstream’.
Eventually I began to realise that a return to the traditional freelance treadmill, an effort to ‘rehabilitate’ myself by simply finding a new ‘mainstream’ home or homes for my work, was not the answer.
Because The Guardian’s decision was symptomatic of a fundamental fact: that even one of the world’s best liberal newspapers was ultimately incapable of tolerating journalism that sought a systemic diagnosis and prognosis for humanity’s biggest global challenges. If the present system of journalism is incapable of doing that, then what, really, is the point?
When I went public about my Guardian experience, I made the decision that has culminated in what I’m doing now. I decided to explore new ways and new models of journalism. I decided that passively scrapping along as a cog in the machine is just not good enough, not for me, not for journalists, not for journalism, not for people, and not for the planet.
I realised my choice, and my power. I could either keep on scrapping and complaining, a cog in the machine, complicit in the machine, and powerless to do anything about it, while pretending to myself that I’m somehow outside of it.
Or I could see and accept this stark reality for what it is, and use it to build journalism anew from inside out.
Crisis is an opportunity for evolutionary change. Exile is a necessary precursor for a return to forgotten wisdom. Collapse is not the end of the world, but the end of an old world, which paves the way to create a new one.
All the world’s wisdom traditions tell profound stories that recognise these basic truths.
The Bhagavad Gita tells the story of the warrior Arjuna. At the very moment Arjuna must lead his army into a cataclysmic war, he finds himself paralysed and overcome by the scene before him.
Yet it is in the confusion and disorientation of this moment of collapse into self-doubt that Arjuna converses with his charioteer, Lord Krishna — who represents the Ground of All-Being — and begins to see the world. Through this dialogue, Arjuna unlearns how he has been taught to see both himself and the world, and with unprecedented clarity realises that liberation can be found in something entirely unexpected — letting go of attachments to the things he perceives, so that he can act from a space of pure devotion.
In the Bible and the Qur’an, we find the story of the Prophet Jonah (Yusuf in Arabic), who is tasked by the Divine Reality to speak the message of love, generosity and compassion to the town of Nineveh. When the towns people vehemently reject the message, Jonah is disillusioned and gives up. He flees, and ends up on a merchant ship in the midst of a tumultuous storm. The sailors throw him overboard as a sacrifice to their gods, and Jonah is swallowed, inexplicably, by a giant whale.
As he sinks to the bottom of the waters, Jonah is trapped in the darkness, exiled to a state of despair, to oblivion. At the bottom of the depths of the oceans, covered by layers upon layers of darkness, Jonah realises his own complicity in his fate.
He accepts not only that he was unjust to the towns people by giving up on his mission, but that in doing so he created the scenario in which he finds himself. And yet, he also sees that the state of exile, here inside the whale’s belly, has been his salvation. He was saved from the storm, and only in this darkness, he found the strength to reflect, to learn, and to truly see.
And so Jonah’s return begins. Eventually the whale resurfaces and Jonah is deposited back on shore. Still unsure of himself, Jonah returns to Nineveh, embracing again the opportunity to declare the message he was originally supposed to deliver. This time, he finds that the town is receptive.
The crisis of journalism is taking place at a truly historic moment, when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises. The business-as-usual trajectory of this Crisis of Civilization is a planet that will become increasingly uninhabitable not just for our species, but for all life on earth, by the end of this century.
As this crisis accelerates, our collective cognition as a species based on the media platforms, tools and institutions we use to communicate and share information, is breaking down.
Yet it is only when we are truly able to see and understand the crisis collectively that we will be empowered to respond meaningfully. The challenge for journalism, then, encompasses people and planet.
The stakes could not be higher.
So what is the next step?
5. The solution
Our analysis tells us that the present system of journalism isn’t working:
1. The present system of journalism isn’t working as a profession.
2. The present system of journalism isn’t working as a business.
3. And the present system of journalism isn’t working for society.
And what we see is that the fundamental reason the present system of journalism isn’t working is because of the entire design of the system of journalism in its current form.
Therefore, journalism cannot be ‘fixed’ from within the present system.
Rather than attempting to salvage journalism from within a broken system whose structure is fundamentally and inherently compromised; we need to re-design journalism from the bottom-up.
And that means building a new system.
My effort to do that revolves around a new open journalism and networked intelligence platform, built in partnership between INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, EXILE, FUTUREDRAFT and QUINTYPE.
Our goal is to design a new system of journalism that makes it viable as a profession, successful as a business, while restoring it to service to society, or more specifically, to people and planet.
INSURGE has a new business model. We will combine crowd-subscriptions with shared ownership for our subscribers and journalists; and our platform will be integrated with holochain technology and our own currency system to ensure users are rewarded for engaging on the platform in a way that contributes to the generation of insights, solutions and real-world actions for change.
The business model will mean we can scale without dependence on advertising revenues, ensuring that our journalists are the best paid in the world, while offering scope for new forms of revenue-sharing with our contributors.
Because we’re not ad-dependent, clickbait will be a thing of the past. We’re not going to produce work to maximise ad revenues, because we won’t need to. We’ll be producing work to maximise insights, user participation and collaboration, in a way which stands by our values of quality and integrity.
INSURGE has a new journalism format which we call ‘open inquiry’. Open inquiry adapts the principles of Euclidean geometry so that our journalism output is structured around identifying irrefutable ground-state facts around a particular issue, using these to generate new insights, and then navigating these insights to explore multiple potential scenarios (here’s an example).
Our open inquiry format is integrated with a design which maps out the complex interconnections between different issues across climate, energy, economics, food, the deep state, war, culture, psychology, ideology and spirituality in every piece we produce.
What we offer is systematic, transdisciplinary investigation, reporting and analysis that empowers users to navigate the growing complexity of our world with ease and simplicity.
And one of the most important things here is that open inquiry will be about two types of investigative journalism: challenging power; and exploring solutions.
INSURGE will deconstruct prevailing institutions of power; and showcase solutions and change initiatives people are building here and now all over the world. And we will provide a space for people at the forefront of such initiatives to share best-practice, tap into resources they would otherwise be unable to access, and innovate new ways to scale their projects.
INSURGE will do away with the sort of comment system that functions as an afterthought on most platforms. For us, every piece is an opportunity to cultivate a meaningful conversation in a community that generates new insights, solutions and possibilities for real-world actions. Our journalism is therefore integrated with a social network for open inquiry, conversations for possibility, and building actual solutions in the world.
INSURGE will publish fiction. Because stories are what move us to action. And because breakthrough change is enabled when we find the power to tell new stories that let us break free of old narratives that hold us back. And while our fiction will always take inspiration from the real, with a view to enhance our engagement with the real, we’ll also cast our eyes on exploring what the worlds of contemporary fiction, whether on TV, cinema, stage and beyond, tell us about who we really are.
INSURGE will be a platform that you, as one of our journalists or subscribers, owns along with others. We will be accountable to you, and our journalism, our platform, our design, will be continuously crafted and refined collectively through a participatory process that connects a systemic exploration of the world with actions to build a new world.
We’re retrieving journalism from the co-opted, top-down ownership structures that put information in service to the few; and putting it, literally, back in the hands of people and planet.
We’re not just revealing the operations of power in the world, but in the process, empowering people to build real solutions that enrich their lives, and those of their friends, families and communities.
In short, we’re building a central nervous system for the change we need to be in the world.
We all have a choice.
As a species, we now find ourselves at a pivotal fork in the road. We can either continue business-as-usual, which entails an accelerating path toward escalating mass extinctions, unprecedented environmental destruction, and a virtually uninhabitable planet — or we can bootstrap into our coming post-carbon future by adapting and evolving through a systemic transformation that brings us into harmony with our environment, and ourselves.
We cannot do that without accepting our complicity, and using that acceptance to move into transformation.
We cannot do that without building new information architectures which cultivate spaces for actionable knowledge along with the capacity to build solutions in our communities.
We cannot build INSURGE without you. With you, we will together build journalism anew from inside out.
