From picas to pixels and beyond: things Jeff Jarvis told me — and a few things he didn’t
Despite constant rumours to the contrary, journalism has a solid future. But that future or futures isn’t much like its immediate past in several key ways — in terms of the skills and attitudes journalists will need to survive and thrive and the business models that will support them.
First up, some history. Sitting in the middle of the old pre-internet journalism business model was a big fat fib. That fib — and I’m not calling a lie because it was (especially for people like me) a benign deception — was that advertisers could be charged on the basis that all the people saw all the ads all the time.
That wasn’t true. But if you were, in Australia, a Fairfax or a News Ltd and you controlled the printing press, the trucks and in effect the audience, you could get away with it. The barriers to entry, the cost of entry, were so high as to be prohibitive. It was a very profitable fib while it lasted.
And much the same was true if you held an Australian TV licence (with the exception of public broadcasters, ABC and SBS) and even now, it holds to some extent for commercial radio.
It was a benign lie because that control — that scarcity — meant that people like me could be well paid and not worry too much if at all about the business of journalism.
That was the unspoken joy of being part of the mass media.
Such ignorance was bliss. And such ignorance left most journalists ill prepared to understand what has followed when scarcity disappeared — and everything and everybody got connected.
So my first point is that to stop that happening again, journalists have to be better equipped to understand the business of journalism. Because if we don’t, we risk having the wool pulled over our eyes by people who do!
That is the view of US journalism provocateur Jeff Jarvis, from the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where I’ve spent the past four months or so.
I couldn’t agree more: journalists must understand and participate in the business of journalism.
The big fib, the one that underpinned newspapers for a few hundred years, has proved surprisingly enduring and flexible in our digital world.
Publishers are still clinging to the concept of the mass, the idea that one entity — once a newspaper, now the homepage of a website — could hold all the truths you, the reader, needed to know. That all eyeballs, all the clicks are of equal value; that the information universe could be contained and corralled.
Many media companies have been thinking — and still getting advertisers to agree — that we remain in an age of mass media, where one size fits all, where money is to be made by flooding the market with their own variation of whether it is a blue, black, white or gold dress.
Again, as Jarvis says, why not link to the original and best version of that yarn — and get on with some journalism.
The enduring concept that the mass exists is perhaps a more dangerous and more exposed fib than the one that supported newspapers. Because, as we all know, no one person’s Facebook feed is the same as any other. And Google is probably the greatest tool for personalisation the world has ever seen.
And if your response is, so what? Then let me just say as media analyst Mary Meeker has noted in the past few days, 85 per cent of all new digital ad revenues is going to Facebook or Google.
And yet the idea of mass persists: the idea of reach — the size of the audience — and frequency (the number of visits) propel the business model and the behaviour associated with it. What does it get us?
Well, as a senior Australian publishing executive told me only last week, the quest for more and more eyeballs simply ends up devaluing eyeballs.
The value of digital advertising to publishers continues to slide because there is so much content being produced. And, because there is endless inventory to fill, journalists have to keep producing more and more journalism to get and keep those eyeballs.
The result? Peak content — the point, as media executive Kevin Anderson noted earlier this year, where the glut of things to read, watch and see becomes financially unsustainable: where there simply isn’t enough ad revenue to go around.
And that’s before we get into any argument about quality or worth, though the truth is much of what we are being dished up is:
Vanilla
Repetitious
Or about cats and Kardashians
Or just how many elastic bands can you fit around a watermelon before it explodes.
I should come clean here: I have nothing much against cats, melons or Kardashians. And BuzzFeed does some great work. But I just don’t think tricks are the foundation of a sustainable journalistic business model.
I also fear that we are in danger of swamping an already time poor audience with more and more stuff they don’t want, need or value. If we keep doing that, the audience will simply turn off.
This is the real problem for journalism: no audience equals no business.
Here are a few questions, by way of conversation starters, for editors and journalists:
Who trusts you?
Where do real, meaningful or valuable conversations happen?
Who or what helps your readers, viewers and listeners make sense of the world?
We can talk about these questions later if you like, but let me just riff on the middle one.
A couple of days ago I ran into the former ABC broadcaster and Sydney Morning Herald journalist Deborah Cameron who now makes a living in the community engagement space. She brings her considerable communications skills into play in forums, workshops and the like to help flesh out issues and solutions.
Deb has a theory that one of the reasons community engagement is thriving is that large parts of the media has vacated this part of the conversation.
The media used to be a place where, in the hands of skilled and knowledgeable rounds people, ideas were thrashed out before they descended into a political shitfight.
It wasn’t perfect, but ideas were aired and perhaps solutions suggested when the public debate happened more frequently and with more depth.
Is this so? Is Deb right? Well, I don’t have hard evidence to say either way but it certainly feels right, that with a few exceptions there is more noise now than reasoned chat, more heat than light.
There’s certainly less trust in journalists.
I don’t see any reason why the situation here, in Australia, is that much different than in the United States, where according to the most recent Gallup polling, only four in ten Americans trust the media. This is a crisis.
In the US, some people are trying to do something about this. Financially backed by Google and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, the Trust Project being run by Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics in Santa Clara University, California is investigating how to rebuild trust between journalists and their audiences.
What are the elements of trust? Can they be regained?
We certainly need something similar in my country.
The initial research shows readers want to know more about the choices individual journalists and their bosses make. They want to know why certain subjects are chosen, how they were researched. They want know about sources, citations and references. They want links to the information behind the story. In other words, audiences want greater transparency.
But I suspect the media is giving readers, viewers and listeners less transparency, rather than more of it.
Being more open is part of what is clearly in my opinion the biggest mind shift for media: the need for journalists and media companies to put audiences first and design products and services that meet their needs.
A large part of this is to stop thinking as a mass provider and start thinking as a provider of a series of niche, targeted and increasingly personalised services. Here are three prompts for publishers:
Again, we can discuss this later but let’s take the final one: what is valuable?
Well, it is pretty obvious that information that helps me make an informed decision is valuable. So Domain, the real estate section, is great because it helps me buy a house; CarsGuide likewise. They are obvious.
A story that simply repeats what he said, what she said yesterday (or this morning or even two hours ago) is not really going to do much for me.
You might argue that it is keeping me up to date. But even using that as the criteria, much of it is out of date when published, and very little of it is either original or holding any lasting value. It is noise.
I am not standing here tonight to say everything is easy and all you have to do is ask the punters what they want. Journalism is bloody hard and getting harder, especially if the concept of the mass is dead or dying.
Journalists and publishers need to learn new tricks and that’s especially hard when the enticing ghosts of the old ones still come calling.
Yes, there’s a good reason why the advertising model persists: it worked for a long time and despite being under severe pressure, it still delivers revenues. So let’s say it will persist. But unless there is a massive wipeout in media choice, itself a disaster, media companies need to come up with some new ways of making money.
Here are nine.
Let me pick out a few.
Aggregation sites like Blendle and Inkl are showing that there is a business model in readers paying for what they wish to consume.
A site like Die Correspondent in Holland has survived pretty well on a crowd-funding model.
Vice’s content model is bolstered by providing full service advertising and content marketing to clients sitting next to the journalism. I was in a meeting recently where a financial analyst claimed Vice was valued at $44bn. This seems absurdly high.
And yes, while I am not a fan of paywalls, they clearly work for a few global brands.
My broader point is that there are multiple ways for media companies and journalists to create new revenue streams. A few of them are even suited to the notion of a mass audience. But most are suited to more niche or specialist endeavours — or collating niches into a workable mass.
And in all of this I’d argue that the most underutilised skill journalists have is the capacity to go and observe what people do and ask them what they actually want — rather than tell them what we in the media want to give them. Take a look at the New Tropic out of Miami if you want to see what happens when journalists adopt user or audience-centric design.
It is because of this and because journalism can fulfill so many fundamental needs of society that I remain optimistic about its future.
We may have reached Peak Content.
But we haven’t made it to Peak Journalism.
To get there, if we ever do, there will need to be changes at every level, within the industry and within the academy.
A few weeks ago the Tow-Knight Centre at CUNY released a survey on the future needs of employers by Mark Stencel and Kim Perry. They asked more than 30 key employers from old and new media what skills they were looking for.
Here’s the top three.
I’ve added product development because without creating products and services that people want we journalists are going to keep struggling.
I don’t think this is holy writ or the last word on future skills, but it coincides with what I’ve been told by key employers in Australia.
Also, I don’t think it negates the need for journalists to tell stories, tell them well and tell them within ethical, moral and legal bounds.
And just because you can code and write a few paragraphs, don’t think the future is all yours — just like that.
En masse and as individuals, we still need expertise in writing, research, investigation and editing.
But as, say, the recent experience of Panama Papers shows, the new superpowers are going to come in very handy bringing the powerful to account when you have to make sense of the biggest data leak in history.
Journalists are going to be telling and delivering stories in many ways, some of which, such as virtual reality and augmented reality, we are only starting to use and understand. And some of which, like bots and machine learning, will be a revolution.
Here are some of the ways journalism will survive and thrive in the future:
1. Personalisation: The NYT wants to make every subscriber’s journey a personal experience by next year; that is, then, a mass product creating a niche experience.
2. Aggregation/Curation: There are roles for curating and aggregating — helping time poor audiences get to the good stuff fast.
3. Messaging: There will be new and highly attractive journalism products and services that building on messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp.
4. Distributed platforms: The immediate future will definitely belong to Facebook (and others) where more than 60 per cent of content will be discovered.
There is a bigger debate about the extent to which publishers hand over their brand to Facebook in return for a share of eyeballs and revenues. I’d commend Emily Bell’s piece in the Tinius Trust’s annual report as a good place to start.
5. Mobile: And, as we all know, everything is going to be on mobile.
I mentioned bots and smart machines earlier. They are going to change many aspects of publishing and journalism forever, but also open up new opportunities.
I’ve been closely following the advance of Wordsmith, an automated writing tool, and only the other day, joined up Kittybot and CareerLark to my Slack channel. Already, they are bringing up interesting ideas and content.
There are massive challenges ahead for journalism and journalists. They will be constant and often painful; there will no doubt be times of despair, frustration and heartache.
I certainly can’t promise that there won’t be more jobs losses and that some doors, some functions, will close on journalists.
But I am firmly of the view that if we embrace the challenges in front of us, build up new skills, adopt new attitudes and keep experimenting with business models, that we will continue to play a vital role in democracy.
The smartest person in the room may well be the room itself, the thing that connects us all to each other and every other thing to everything else.
So long as journalists and media companies are willing to accept that they are no longer the room, they will certainly have a legitimate seat at the table. Which is perhaps more than many others will have.
This is an edited version of a talk given as part of the UTSpeaks series in Sydney on June 2, 2016. The audio and visual of the talk will be available soon. Peter Fray acknowledges the influence and inputs of Jeff Jarvis, Jeremy Caplan and several other mentors and lecturers at City University New York. Fray is now back in Sydney looking for partners in crime.
