The problem with news media
TL;DR
- The news media industry saw their business model crushed by a sledgehammer, with the advent of the advertising-based internet and the emergence of companies fare more savvy around user data.
- With different strategies, publishers try to meet this challenge, not all are successful — and we see many news media companies struggling to this day.
- At the end of a long chain of events, we have current levels of “trust in media”, which are on all time lows on almost all fronts.
- This article is an attempt in trying to make sens of it all, how the advent of advertising-based internet, and other dominant issues of the industry are linked to where we stand today with the news media economy.
The picture we will get to here is this one (yes, I know, it’s a hot mess, but we will dissect it):
The legend at the bottom of the illustration provides initial help understanding it. Further understanding will hopefully emerge by reading the following dissection and deeper dives into several aspects of the problem map above. I will especially try to explain some of the today relevant or problematic attributes of the media ecoystem and relations that connect to them. To clarify, I will in many cases refer to “news media” as “media” only, for the sake of brevety and to honor my own lazyness. With news media I mean journalistic work, reporting on and investigating of the visible and hidden events of our world, work that requires research.
Also, as further pretext, let me be clear that the above illustration as well as the text that follows is just a subjective attempt to explain what is going on in the news media sector — and how some of the biggest current issues are connected. This attempt is researched according to my means and complemented by my own experience in the industry, as founder of a software startup in the journalistic field. But it has gaps, some known and some unknown ones, which I invite you to fill by providing feedback and comments. Thank you.
Trust in media
Where to start? At the end, with “Trust in Media”. Because when there is no more trust in media, we can shut the sector. Do journalism and news media have a trust issue? Yes:
When looking at graphs about levels of “trust in media” I usually miss the question about the right level of trust in media. One should not blindly trust any source, media or otherwise. So 100% cannot be the goal here — a generally declining trend is however not what we want either, and levels of 30% or lower are clearly alarming. Because if nobody trusts media sources, who do they trust — and is that likely better or worse? A media sector with low levels of trust also lends itself easier for politization (see relation in the hot-mess-illustration), as it will be way easier for representatives of any side, to discredit the other side. The USA are a case in point here, also exemplifying some self-reinforcing dynamics of this aspect. I recommend checking out the referenced 2022 Reuters Digital News Report on this, as it has a special section on the USA/Finland differences in trust, through a political lense.
Apart from the USA at the bottom-end of the above chart, Finland stands out as the extremly positive example, which I cannot fully explain, as I have not studied the finnish media sector enough. Some people at Finlands largest daily newspaper (Helsinki Sanomat) are toying around with our journalistic research application, but to claim that this had a force of impact here, would of course be taking false credit.
The biggest positive impact on trust in media apparently came from the Covid-19 pandemic. People realized that they have to get the news about the spreading of the virus, the severity of it, precautions and official guidelines from somewhere. They zapped out of Netflix for a moment, and turned their attention from entertainment media to news media. Why do people trust news on a pandemic more than other news? This question seems not fully settled, as different local studies point towards different reasons (1,2,3). Personally I think that the big share of (known) medicinal experts (epidemiologists, virologists) that got a dominant voice in most news sources played a big role. Furthermore, journalists fulfilled their role in translating scientific studies and results for broader audiences, making latest research results accessible in news digests. An important task, one that people learned to value and trust. What all went wrong in news coverage of the pandemic is worth a whole other blog post, I will not dive into this here.
Looking at the initial “hot mess graph”, we can see four factors directly linked to trust in media:
According to the Reuters report, people are most concerned about and impacted by the spreading of fake news, when it domes to trust in media. Selective facts, which can of course either be done on purpose, driven by a narrative or agenda, or by neglectful omission, further negatively impact trust in media. The more politizised a media ecosystem, the more polarized and reliant on selective facts it will get over time. This triangle of dangerous relations is also highlighted in the hot-mess-illustration. As the only direct positive relation, we see journalistic quality. Makes instinctive sense, but you have to follow up with the question: what is journalistic quality?
Journalistic quality
Yes, one could approach this in a very journalistic manner and point towards reporting standards of e.g. source validation and diversity. How well a text is researched is of course of utmost importance, however it might not be easy to capture journalistic quality of a newspaper overall. This is in any case difficult, as each piece of content will have a slightly different level of quality, even when adhering at best to coporate/newsroom standards.
Hence, instead of looking at the creation process and respective standards of individual articles, I try to look at the issue of measuring journalistic quality through a “north star metric” style lense. As a news media company, what is the ultimate key metric that one should optimize for, if the goal is to make sure we boost journalistic quality — and do not sacrifice it for mere revenue or site-visit goals?
The ideological diversity of your audience.
I was arguing for the relevance of this metric for quite a while already, when finally some research on the topic emerged in 2020. Shun Yamaya (et al.) looked at political audience diversity and news quality in a remarkable study. A lecture of the full paper is highly recommended (its only five pages and you are at this point 850 words deep into a mediocre Medium article, so you can handle it). The study is insofar limited as it only looks at politicl diversity and not at other dimensions of ideological diversity, and its US based only. A replication across different nations and news ecosystems would of course be highly appreciated. Best positioned for such research would be the news publishers themselves — who in some cases, to my knowledge, conduct such research, however rarely publish their findings (if you have some data, please do share).
Here is an excerpt from the paper, validating the audience diversity as measure for journalistic quality:
These results demonstrate that diversity in audience partisanship can serve as a useful signal of news quality at the domain level. Using data on millions of pageviews from U.S.-based Internet users, we show that the variance of par-
tisanship among all unique visitors to a website is strongly positively associated with the scores for news quality (…).
How to attract an ideologically diverse audience? The most solid ingredient to get there might be to ensure ideological diversity among the news publisher’s workforce. A (not very solid, small sample, but still relevant) study at the German public broadcaster ARD revealed how this can shift out of balance, or out of representative boundaries. Having an ideologically diverse workforce is of course a means to an end: having different perspectives and a range of relevant topics represented. In addition to work with a diverse set of talented journalists, op-eds have proved a valuable way to bring in new points of view, from media outsiders and from people potentially distant to the publisher’s core values. The Tom Cotton / James Bennet affair at the NYT however showed that this can be tricky as well. In my view, it would not have to be; op-eds are op-eds, if clearly marked as such and accompanied with an outline about how/what journalistic or editorial standards apply for op-eds, let them roam free. As a publisher, you always have the opportunity to publish a commentary alongside.
But how is this linked to the online economy?
Selling news online
In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the evolution and shift in monetization focus of news in the offline and online world in more detail. In short; the process went back and forth, either dominantly monetizing content (through subscriptions) or reader attention (through ads). With the advent of the internet, many publishers thought, that online everything has to be free. In the early days online content monetization and the plain choice of no-paywall or hard-paywall, the earlier was the preference for many — and it worked, early on. Soon however, it became clear that access to audiences alone is not going to cut it in the new world of online marketing. Marketers started to expect more, more precision, better tergeting. That requires knowing your audience to a degree that publishers just cannot fulfill. At least not at the level of their new and big competitors in the fight for corporate ad-dollars; social media companies, search engines, ecommerce giants (you know their names). The result was this:
The emergence of content for free and ad-based audience monetization, as dominant revenue model of the early days of the internet, led to an over-exposure to ad-revenues — and to several evolvments down the road, as the hot-mess-illustration shows:
First of all, the over-exposure towards ad-dollars is having a negative impact on business model resiliency of news publishers. This was very well exemplified during the Covid-19 pandemic, as some publishers were struggling, while others — who were already more successful in monetizing online subscriptions — actually thrived.
If you are reliant on ad-revenues, you are relying on two things: people paying attention, and people peying ad-dollars. This puts a challenge to your independent reporting, evidently so, as this terrible example from Austira shows (its only one of many). That challenge to your independence can of course come from any wallet that suddenly funds a significant share of your ad-revenues, be it of political or corporate origin. And if ad-revenues are all that you have, your independent reporting will suffer — and so will the journalistic quality & trust in media as consequence.
The attention economy itself made fake news and sensationalism a business model that works. If a headline (and the click on it) is worth as much as a great article, why invest in educated journalists and decent research for each story that gets published? If you optimize for clicks, you optimize for quantity, not for quality.
But the tables are turning, or have turned already. Over the last ten years, the news media sector has learned to monetize online content (not just audience attention). Paywalls now come in all forms and shapes, dynamic, individual, metered, soft, hard, etc. A majority of news executives now consideres online subscriptions the most important source of revenues:
The above chart also highlights that the revenue stream question is not just one of ads vs. subscriptions. The playing field is larger, and a successful news publisher of the 21st century must be able to play all positions.
Subscriptions to save us all?
Not quite, the subscription revival has its own issues, that we have to take into account:
You want people to pay for great journalism, but not everybody can afford great journalism. A nice conversation about different pricing models and what they might imply for the media sector can be found here (mostly focusing on UK media). Media companies seem well aware of the pricing-out effects that that the subscription revival has. People cannot afford to pay for or subscribe to all interesting news media content. So they tend to opt for one publication — which in turn leads to a siloed media landscape. Efforts to create “the Shopify for news” have been started and ended many times. The introduction of micro-payments or pay-per-use articles has so far also not been a success story.
Public broadcasting can play a very important role here. Their role is to be challenged (as I elaborate here), but they certainly should contribute their share to well informed societies, as “only informed societies can sustain democracies” (Alexis de Tocqueville). The role of public broadcasters is in most countries set in stone — or at least in a quite static paragraph of law text. However, nobody said that public broadcasting has to be fixated on content production, providing subsidised access to global quality media could also be a function of public broadcasting. Stepping in some sense away from content production, as we live in a world of abundant content, and focusing more on media accessability, affordability and curation.
How to fix all of this?
The most important realization, after reading this article, should be that the news media ecosystem has many issues — and that you can’t fix them all at once, or by pulling one lever. The industry has been too slow in realizing what the online economy means for them, holistically, and has been too slow to adapt their publishing and monetizing practices to the digital world. Leaders of the industry have realized that themselves and are now arguing for more user-centric news product development. News organizations are now hiring “news product managers”, to imitate what other companies, more successful in the digital, age are doing. This might help with some issues outlined above, but certainly not with all. We need to realize how multifaceted the problem with news media is — and how one factor relates to another.
In an ideal world, each of the boxes in the hot-mess-illustration would have a clearly defined unit of measure, and each relational arrow could be examined through studies. If you are an academic in that field, looking for a new paper topic, let me know, let’s pick one or two boxes and relations and help solve some of the problems of news media!
This article has now addressed several, but not all, of the key issues highlighted in the hot-mess-illustration of the “problem with news media”. Before letting it grow even larger, I will draw a line here — — — — and allow this article to continue in a second part (once ready, I will link it here). If you want to read more on perspectives, and why they matter, you are in luck, this has already been covered in an earlier article, as well as the issue of confirmation bias, which is also linked to many of the cited problems. You can check out both articles here:
All feedback is welcome, thank you for your time.
This article was researched and written with Varia Research
Further sources (referenced but not linked in the text):
