I am getting tired of people moaning about the death of journalism. Much has been said about the topic in a letter from someone at the Telegraph which was published and responded to on Roy Greenslade’s blog in the Guardian. It is the constant plaintive wail emanating from every American media outlet. This defeatism makes me want to scream.
I realise that traditional media is in a state of flux. Not only did I gleefully portend its death when I was selling advertisers the dream of online, but I merrily danced around its grave, idealistically pontificating about how editors would have to come down from their ivory towers and take part in the democratisation of mass communication.
Journalism is not dead it’s just changing. It was reported the other day that Perez Hilton, whilst not a paragon of great journalism is bringing in $54,000 in ad revenue a day. I spent two years working in ad sales for a reputable publisher whose UK profit was in the millions of pounds, and our target for one site per quarter was somewhere in the vicinity of £500k, and it was a target we regularly hit. So I am confused when people say there is no money to be made from the internet. Companies that aren’t making money, are not doing so because they do not value their online proposition either from an editorial perspective and aren’t putting the ‘good’ content on there, or from a sales perspective by either bundling it up as a free extra on a print buy or selling it dirt cheap because they didn’t realise how difficult it would be to triple their CPM (cost per thousand impressions) when their users migrated online.
I understand that present financial issues mean that journalists are being made redundant left right and centre, and that the workload that remaining journalists wind up with is virtually untenable. I understand that the internet requires different skill sets, multimedia, some understanding of how SEO works and of course the fact that this medium removes some of the ‘art’ because you do have to be direct and succinct.
Journalism is changing, and at least from my young and wide-eyed perspective, its pretty damned exciting. Print still has so much to offer, magazines particularly. It will take a person with bloody strong hands to tear away my copy of Vanity Fair each month or even for that matter my (paper) copy of the Observer most Sundays, it would also be a pretty stupid person to assume that because I read my news during the week through my RSS reader that I am contributing to the fall of journalism.
And finally, don’t assume that simply because I write online that anything I write is less informed, not researched or simply wrong simply because it is online.
OK rant over.
3 Comments
It’s so refreshing to read something positive (finally!) about the state of journalism. You are right: it is evolving to meet new multimedia standards.
But how fast is it all happening and are we to expect a constant state of flux when it comes to writing for the net?
Well said. The digital age is changing the game for many institutions in journalism, and that change necessarily brings with it uncertainty about the future, but a brief look at history shows that seminal moments in the methods of publishing only change the rules, rather than ending the game itself.
The invention of the printing press, the first cheap compact camera that anyone could own, the first word processor software - just a few examples of tools that, like the internet, made it easier to be a publisher. At the end of the day, the fact that everyone can easily publish themselves doesn’t make any difference to the fact that good content will always rise to the surface and be valuable.
Here’s a good article by press photographer Vincent LaForet about the effect the digital age is having on his profession - there are many parallels with journalism - http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2014
Chris - just got around to reading the article you recommended, I suppose the media changes are going to impact everyone, there will be less designers as writers drop copy into templates, subs are already feeling the pinch, so I suppose its only natural that photographers would be feeling the same way.
The cream always rises to the top….