What I’m listening to as I type: Wounded Rhymes
Twice a year I give a lecture to journalism students on where I think journalism is going.
For obvious reasons, I rewrite the lecture each time I deliver it. Often minutes before I deliver it. It’s also more interactive than I can show in a post, but this is it, pretty much…
First, two videos – one from 1981 and one from 2011, to illustrate how the technology of delivering the news has changed in thirty years:
Now the one from 2011 – apologies for the music…
What I love most about the first video is that the pioneering souls who took part in this radical e-newspaper experiment had to cut out a coupon and post it back to the San Francisco Chronicle!
But what’s most interesting is that this happened in 1981 – ten years before Big Tim’s worldwide web went public.
The 2011 video focuses on what already today seems a limited range of news gathering tech. However, the changes haven’t just been technical – twenty years on from the birth of the web it’s the social change in the way we consume news that has had the biggest impact on the business of news.
The process of journalism has changed alongside our behaviour. We expect news we’re interested in to be available to us whenever we want it and wherever we are. The business of making money from journalism has had to fit into an open-all-hours, shop of news model.
Remember the picture above from the 2011 video, illustrating what’s happening to newspapers’ profits?
More accurately, what’s happening to the business that journalism depends on – which is advertising. The traditional business model for journalism, hasn’t been to sell journalism but to sell the attention the journalism attracts.
Here’s a better representation:
The chart above, reproduced on Prof. Mark Perry’s economics blog, shows how quickly the money is disappearing – US newspaper ad income in 2012 was the same as in 1950. But the cost of producing a newspaper isn’t the same as in 1950.
The picture isn’t any different in the UK – 2012 should have been a bumper year for selling ads; the Olympics, the Jubilee, yet national newspaper ad spend actually fell by five percent in 2012 and dropped further in 2013.
It should have been a neat equation – money from ads offline – in newspapers, magazines, on TV and radio, goes down but online ad income goes up to fill the gaps.
Except for every new dollar made online, newspapers lost 10.
The issue is that it’s not the traditional media companies making money from online ads, it’s the new kids on the block – Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, etc. But mostly it’s Google:
However, we’ve been here before. The news industry is always changing. Like a snake shedding its skin every few years. Right now it’s changing faster than ever – driven by that technological and social revolution in the way we communicate and share news and information. There’s a another big change we’re living through – the mobile revolution.
Radio took off because it’s mobile – it went with us in our car, our office, our home. When it stopped being a piece of living room furniture; when it became small enough to take to the beach, radio took off and its content changed with its new users.
Now we take our mobile phones with us and what we carry – our phone, our handbag – is part of who we are.
The rise of mobile use is extraordinary – driven faster by its usefulness as a social web device:
- Half the world now owns a mobile phone
- One-in-seven people across the globe are on Facebook
- 3bn hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
- Over 60% of smartphone/tablet owners read news on it
- Up to 24,000 pictures a day were sent to BBC during riots
- 17% and growing of all web traffic is now through mobile
Chetan Sharma’s chart, above, shows how the 6bn mobile accounts globally (not 6bn people with a mobile phone) compares against other things we might need. There are more mobile phone accounts than people with access to safe drinking water or electricity.
We love our mobiles but we wouldn’t love them quite so much if they didn’t deliver things that were more important to us than electricity, or bank accounts, or the internet.
So, will mobiles save the news industry?
Nope. Again, some businesses are making good money from mobile ads but not the news industry.
This is the sum (from Michael Wolff) that’s generally used to explain the problem: $100 offline = $10 on web = $1 in mobile.
The news industry, with its the ad-dependent business model, just can’t make enough money. The value of ads is worn away with each technological iteration.
But if you have a business model like Facebook’s, where it costs comparative peanuts to generate all the content your users want (because it’s your users producing the content) you don’t need to charge much for your mobile ads to make money.
So, the news industry is at this stage:
But why am I telling you all this? Why should profits and charts matter to a room full of student journalists?
- Because you should know where the news industry is going.
- Because you need to know where journalism is going (and how you go with it)
- Because the industry and the journalism may not be going in the same direction.
But mostly because journalism matters and because journalists matter.
There are stories that still need to be told. There is so much news that isn’t getting reported, or not reported well enough.
Here’s a handful of lesser-told stories I picked to fill just one slide:
- Half of all under-5s that die, die in southern Africa.
- Four-in-ten children globally don’t survive their first month; one-in-three children starve to death
- WW2 didn’t stop wars: 51 wars and major conflicts in 1992; 21 in 2002; 38 in 2011… around 34 today.
- More people have been killed in genocides since 1960 than died in WW2 concentration camps
- 17 countries have higher life expectancy than UK
- Over 45k UK homes will be repossessed this year.
The journalism needs to be done. It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the news industry or to advertising profits. We need good journalism. We don’t need rewritten press releases (or regurgitated content with 25 headlines).
And journalists matter. They’re still out there fighting and sometimes dying to bring in stories:
Not just ‘trained’ journalists – citizen journalists and netizens on the ground in conflict zones. The biggest change the web has delivered in news is the range of people delivering news.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger describes it as ‘open journalism’ – a shared activity with journalists, readers and others delivering and developing the story. I love the Guardian ad:
Journalism is still about having the skills and drive to find the story – like the reporter in his pyjamas in the Guardian ad talking to his contact.
It’s not about the technology, it’s about how you use the technology to become a better journalist – how you use all these new tools to help you tell the stories that need to be told.
I’m going to finish with four predictions – the things I think are on the horizon for journalism.
- More news stories originating in computer algorithms, eg Narrative Science
- News will become more personal, more locative, and more recommended – eg Summly, Buzzfeed, Facebook news feed…
- Journalism split further into similar and short-form vs different and long-form – eg Medium, Matter…
- We’ll move away from devices to everywhere access to news and info – google glass, iwatch..
Narrative Science uses computer algorithms to turn data – business information, sports reports submitted by amateurs, into news stories.
We’ve made that easy by writing, and teaching, journalism ‘rules’ and journalese. Every time your player “attacks” the goal or your “sick” youth “knifes” your “OAP”, you – we – have made it easier for a computer to write the story.
We don’t yet have a ‘tripadvisor’ news recommender, but every app or curator that that sorts through existing news to give you only what you say you’re interested in, is making you more conservative, less curious than you should be.
We used to go to our news source. We would walk up to the TV, or go and buy a newspaper, or sit at the PC. Then we took it with us – the radio in the car, our laptop, our mobile phone. Increasingly, it’s wherever we are – waiting for us to arrive and ask for access. By tapping a table, or waving a sleeve, or nodding our head.
Google glass is currently in semi-public testing and will launch in 2013. There are all kinds of issues around privacy and usability but it’s still very new.
As you watch this last video, think about where Google glass and other wearable tech could take journalism? Think about what you will do with everywhere, real-time access to gathering and uploading information. Think about who will see what you do.