The Future of News Media
In mid-February, tech media was abuzz with news about a proposed Australian law that would make tech companies like Facebook and Google pay for news links on their websites. Some, including Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, applauded the proposal. “What is wrong with compensating independent news organizations for the benefits the tech gatekeepers derive from this content?” Smith asked rhetorically. Others criticized the law, pointing out that one, no one pays for links on the internet; two, that if anything, Facebook and Google drive traffic to news websites not the other way around; and three, by the way, the legislation was most likely lining the pockets of Murdoch-owned News Corp rather than actually helping journalism.
The controversy around this new law (which has since passed) is emblematic of the broader crisis that traditional news media is under, and the (perceived) role of technology in the crisis:
Loss of trust: The share of Americans who trust the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” has fallen from ~70% in the 1970s to 40% in 2020 according to Gallup, and 83% see a “great deal” or “fair amount” of political bias in news coverage.
Financial crisis: As ad sales increasingly shifted from news companies to tech companies, traditional news companies have struggled financially. Over 2,000 newspapers in the US have closed since 2004 and some 36,000 newspaper jobs - or close to 50% - have been lost since 2008.
Loss of relevance: While news websites or apps remain the most popular source of news for Americans (68%), tech platforms have become an increasingly important source of news. 65% of Americans get their news “often” from search engines and about half from social media (53%) according to Pew.
Of course, these are issues plenty of other industries have faced, and many (e.g., music, TV, retail) have had to evolve. However, news is distinct from most other industries. Often referred to as the “Fourth Estate,” news media is generally regarded as having an important civic role in a free democracy, keeping the citizens informed and those in power accountable. The future of news is therefore not only important for the CEOs and the employees, but also for the rest of us.
So how should the news industry adapt to the changing dynamics of the industry? What role do society and government have, if any, to support the news industry?
Do news organizations have an obligation to be objective? Should the purpose of news be to provide objective information or to drive people to action?
What social responsibilities does the news industry have and how can they be balanced with their business needs?
Who gets to determine what is “newsworthy?” Is there a tradeoff between “democratizing” news and quality?
1- Do news organizations have an obligation to be objective?
According to a 2020 Gallup and Knight Foundation study, 88% of surveyed Americans believe it is “critical” or “very important” for the news media to provide accurate and fair news reports. Unfortunately, 83% see a “great deal” or “fair amount” of political bias in news coverage, and 68% see this as “a major problem.”
Interestingly, the idea that news media should be objective is a relatively modern (and American) one, and one borne out of a business need rather than moral principle.
The commercial history of objective news
In the 19th century, newspapers were subsidized by political parties and highly partisan. “Editors unabashedly shaped the news and their editorial comment to partisan purposes,” writes historian William E. Gienapp. “They sought to convert the doubters, recover the wavering, and hold the committed.” Newspapers regularly withheld information that was unfavorable toward their parties. Apparently, the Republican Los Angeles Times didn’t even report that Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, had won the presidential election in 1884 for days.
As it turns out, what eventually led to a more “objective” press was not some sort of moral reckoning from the journalism industry, but cold, hard, market economics. (Ah, good old capitalism.) According to the New Yorker, ad sales started becoming more important over time, and by the 1900s made up more than two-thirds of revenues for most newspapers. In order to attract and appeal to a larger readership (and therefore get more advertising dollars), newspapers became less partisan — more “objective” throughout the 20th century.
Back to subscriptions...and partisan media?
Unfortunately, with the advent of the internet, advertising revenues shifted away to tech platforms like Google and Facebook, which were much better at reaching a wider and more targeted audience. Advertising revenue for newspapers dropped by a staggering 70% between 2000 and 2018, from around $48 billion to a mere $14 billion.
Under rising financial pressure, news outlets started increasingly turning to subscriptions as a way to boost revenues. In their 2020 strategy report, the New York Times declares: “We are, in the simplest terms, a subscription-first business. Our focus on subscribers sets us apart in crucial ways from many other media organizations. We are not trying to maximize clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them... Our incentives point us toward journalistic excellence.” Papers like the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, etc. have all put up paywalls.
And lo-and-behold, we may be returning to a more opinion-based world of news. Even though 66% of Americans claim that they would prefer to read newspapers that share no point of view, there has been an increase of opinion-based presentation in news, particularly in cable news and online sources according to a report by RAND. “The language in the online journalism samples tended to [have] more emphasis on … personal perspectives and opinions. Appeals were … more argumentative, with an eye toward persuading readers.” Even the New York Times admits that they themselves are “in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives.” As one journalist told the Guardian, “the reality is that subscriptions are driven by the stories that get people frothing at the mouth.”
“The reality is that subscriptions are driven by the stories that get people frothing at the mouth.”
The risks of an increasingly partisan news media, real or perceived, are clear. People turn to sources they feel better represent their beliefs and values, and it is difficult to build a common foundational understanding of the world. As we have seen in the past several years, eroded trust in the so-called “mainstream media” also creates more space for extreme views and conspiracy theories to gain more traction.
Not everyone sees the return to more partisan coverage as a bad thing. Some researchers believe that more “objective” news over the last century that exposed the flaws of politicians across the spectrum may have contributed to increased voter cynicism (“all politicians suck”) and potentially to reduced voter turnout. While there are likely numerous other factors, it is true that voter turnouts dropped considerably from 70-80% in the late 1800s to 50-60% in the 2000’s.
For discussion
What is the main purpose of news media? To provide unbiased information? To provide informed analysis and diverse perspectives? To drive people toward action?
What are the risks and tradeoffs (e.g., engagement, partisanship, trust, etc.) of different objectives (e.g., provide unbiased information vs. driving toward action)? How can news organizations balance their priorities?
Is true objectivity even possible? Or are we better off educating people to better spot biases and question assumptions?
2- How can news organizations balance their business needs and social responsibility?
Last week, the Daily Telegraph announced that they were planning to “link performance to reward” by paying their journalists according to how many clicks and subscriptions each of their stories generated. “It seems only right,” wrote the editor Chris Evans, “that those who attract and retain the most subscribers should be the most handsomely paid.”
The Daily Telegraph is not alone. Gawker reportedly used to have a giant screen in their newsroom with a dashboard of which stories were driving clicks and shares, while the Washington Post also supposedly “winnowed out reporters based on their [audience engagement] numbers.”
These practices should sound familiar to anyone who works in business. Whether you’re trying to increase subscriptions or ad sales, it is important to understand what products are driving customer engagement. This used to require customer interviews and surveys, but now services like Chartbeat that track clicks and shares will tell you not what stories customers think they want to engage with, but what they actually engage with in real time.
There is nothing inherently wrong with producing news content that people want to consume and engage with. In fact, there are many potential benefits. For one, unless you can get people to engage with your content, you will neither be able to inform nor drive toward action. Two, it may incentivize innovations in the way that stories are told. For example, I appreciate all the data visualization work that the New York Times has done that makes complex content much more engaging for the reader.
“Journalists everywhere are struggling with this tug of war between the need to create traffic and the need to fulfill the civic mission of journalism. Sometimes those two go hand in hand. Most times they don’t.”
However, unlike say, clothes, what people like is not necessarily what is "good" for society. A case study of two community newspapers found that “the paper more focused on audience metrics published fewer stories about civic issues, used fewer sources and let reader traffic guide news judgment to a greater degree than the paper that viewed analytics as a secondary consideration.” As the lead author of the study said in an interview, “journalists everywhere — at the management level, at the reporter level — are struggling with this tug of war between the need to create traffic and the need to fulfill the civic mission of journalism. Sometimes those two go hand in hand. Most times they don’t.”
Some argue that news media companies should be nonprofits or funded as a public good. While this may certainly help reduce some of the financial pressure many news companies are facing, I do wonder if it would be sufficient. Even for the journalists and editors with the highest standards of integrity, I imagine it might be hard to not look for a beat or an “angle” that could be more attention-grabbing and emotion-inducing. In the absence of a consistent and effective way to measure the social impact of a specific news story — Pulitzers are a bit too hard to come by — immediate and quantifiable metrics such as clicks, likes and retweets are hard to ignore. As Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and co-founder of Vox points out, “what people want a lot of times is feedback...and journalists are feedback machines.”
For discussion
How can news organizations (and journalists) balance their need to better meet audience demand and to tell stories that “matter” for society? Is there actually a conflict between the two? What are ways in which conflicts of interest can be better managed? Are there better ways to measure the impact or relevance of a news story?
What business models would better support the news industry and their broader social responsibility (to bring “truth to power”)? What is the role of society (e.g., readers, government, tech companies), if any, in supporting these models?
3- Who gets to determine what is “newsworthy?”
All the news that’s fit to print
"All the news that's fit to print," has been the motto of the New York Times since the beginning of the 20th century.
A major challenge with not solely relying on customer demand is that somebody - who is not the customer - needs to determine what to produce. Traditionally, this has been the job of editors and producers, who have enormous power to shape social discourse by determining what constitutes “news that’s fit to print.”
One of the criticisms against these “gatekeepers” is that they themselves are often beneficiaries or products of existing power structures, and therefore may not be the most effective or willing to bring “truth to power.” (Think about Chris Cuomo of CNN interviewing Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York and Chris Cuomo’s older brother.) According to the Columbia Journalism Review, minorities make up less than 17 percent of newsroom staff at print and online publications and only 13 percent of newspaper leadership. This is a lower degree of racial diversity than VC, another industry often criticized (by the media) for its lack of diversity, where minorities made up 25% of investment professionals and 20% of partners. Not to mention the unpaid (and underpaid) internships that are almost requirements to “make it” that often excludes people from less privileged backgrounds.
The internet and the “Fifth Estate”
In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg referred to this ability for “people...to express themselves at scale” as the “Fifth Estate,” a new force that may complement? supplement? replace? the Fourth Estate, news media.
“People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands. It’s part of this amazing expansion of voice through law, culture and technology.”
Whatever your views on Facebook, it is undeniable that the internet and tech platforms have upended the traditional ways that news has been produced, distributed and consumed. As Ben Thompson of Stratechery points out, the rise of tech platforms has helped “all news sources compet[e] on an equal footing,” and to shift the “power… from the supply side to the demand side” as any story can now gain traction “based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it.”
In other words, power has been taken away from traditional “gatekeepers.”
Further democratizing the power to determine what is “newsworthy” seems like a positive development for society. It is unclear, for example, how much attention the recent rise in crimes against Asian Americans would have received had it not been for social media.
However, the clear tradeoff is that by doing away with elite gatekeepers, we may have also removed a form of quality control.
Whether or not you believe the New York Times or the Washington Post are good publications, you can still usually assume that they will have interviewed several experts on a given topic and that their reporting has been fact-checked, an assumption we cannot make about Facebook posts, tweets, or newsletters from Substack. Yes, we should know by now to fact check anything we read from Facebook or What’s App, and we should probably read up on multiple sources to develop a balanced perspective, etc. etc.. But honestly, who wants to do additional research on every article they read or podcast they listen to?
Ensuring that Facebook or Twitter better combat misinformation may work for egregious posts like conspiracy theories, but it seems highly unlikely that these platforms will be able to offer the level of fact checking of major news outlets. And even if we were to assume that tech platforms could effectively combat misinformation, a high variance in quality in social media posts seems inevitable. Perhaps that is simply the cost of providing a platform for more voices.
For discussion
Who should get to decide what stories “matter” for society and how they should get told? Are there necessarily tradeoffs and if so, how can we better manage them?
Are we actually “democratizing” news through the internet and technology or are we just shifting power from newsrooms to platform CEOs, algorithms, and / or the masses?
SIDEBAR: Is the internet actually “democratizing” news?
Interestingly, it’s not entirely clear if the “dismantling” of newsroom gatekeepers have successfully created room for greater diversity. Tech platforms may have opened the possibility to give anyone a voice, but that doesn’t make everyone open to hearing anyone’s stories.
According to a 2017 study of more than 2,000 DC-based political journalists accredited to cover US Congress on Twitter, “male journalists amplify and engage male peers almost exclusively.”
91.5% of replies from male journalists were to other male journalists and 21 out of the 25 most-followed were male. Similarly, a CJR article points out that the top writers on Substack, a platform meant to give individuals writers greater autonomy and power, are also mostly white and male, who have established themselves in traditional establishment institutions.
In other words, everyone may be “competing on an equal footing” in theory but the “likelihood any particular message will ‘break out’” is in fact at least somewhat based on “who is propagating said message.”
Resources
“Does Journalism Have A Future?” New Yorker, Jan 21, 2019
“Goodbye Gatekeepers,” Stratechery, Oct 16, 2018
“The Substackerati: Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system—or replicate the flaws of the old one?” Columbia Journalism Review, winter 2020
“The Fall and Rise of Partisan Journalism,” James L. Baughman, Apr 20, 2011 (video version; summary article)