Will journalism survive the digital onslaught ?

By Dalim Phukan

Of late, the news indus- try is facing unprecedented uncertainty and upheaval throughout the world. The rise of the internet – alongside developments in news aggregation, online search and social media – has transformed how news is produced, distributed and accessed. It has had a profound impact on the economics of the news industry. Advertising revenue for European newspapers has declined dramatically in recent years, and in Asia a similar downturn seems likely soon.

The ‘death of newspapers’ has long been predicted. Although consumption of news from television had affected sales prior to the internet, the advent of the digital media has taken this trend to new dimensions. In 2012, the Centre for Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism predicted that within five years, only the largest and smallest newspapers would survive. Later that year, Rupart Murdoch predicted that there might be no more newspapers within a decade. Such gloomy prophecies have been common for years, but there are simply too many factors involved to make any credible prediction. Moreover, for all the industry’s much-publicized challenges, newspapers remain a pillar of global news consumption.  Every day, 2.5 billion newspapers are read in print and 800 million digitally. 

Still, there is no doubt that the rise of social media and the ubiquity of online news and opinion pose an existential challenge  to  the  traditional newspaper model  in which professional   journalists  act  as guardians and privileged distributors of  (scarce)  information. The pace and reach of non-organized digital  coverage of major news over the  decade  or  so – such  as  the 2004 Indian  ocean  tsunami,  the Hudson river plane crash in January 2009 and  the  raid on Osama bin-Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011 – demonstrate the growing power of digital media. In the digital age, members of the public act as eye witnesses, publishers, authors and increasingly the breakers of news stories.

This shift is challenging the accepted journalistic notions of factual reporting, accuracy and balance. The so-called ‘news’ provided by social media may not present the full picture. It may give a partial, partisan or deliberately distorted view of an event. The insistence on the factual ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘When’, ‘Where’ and ‘Why’ of any story – which traditionally underpinned reported journalism – is being eroded. The irony of the situation is that the proliferation of free news demonstrates the continued need for journalists of integrity, but also threatens the very revenue streams needed to support their work.

In the market-driven world, in the era of fierce liberalization and globalization, journalism itself is becoming a laughable business before the new age media. The disingenuous terms they come up with to legitimize what they are doing is suppose dto give us pause or solace, native advertising, content marketing and sponsored content. All of it boils down to using journalism to sell a product or service. And it is among the finest and the best in international journalism, like The New York Times and The Guardian, who are leading the way. They have set up what are like workshops specializing in content-marketing, with journalist sugar – coating the sale pitch in the manner and language of news. In India, what are we doing about ‘paid news’? The kind of indignation and outrage it occasioned – when it was discovered that the leading daily of India blithely transacted news in forms and guises that were seen as unethical, non-transparent  and plain misrepresentation, with commercial space-selling masquerading as news – seems nowhere  in evidence when it comes to these heavyweight media legacies. On the contrary, we have a narrative of victim hood and struggle for survival. In a predominantly advertisement revenue dependent news media, and in a recessionary market to boot, the promotion has to be imbricate, embedded in, or itself take the form of the news story itself. It is inevitable; we are given to understand that a degree of market friendliness and all that implies must henceforth lead from the front. For a business, which was raking in the moolah for a few decades and is now faced with declining profits or losses, it is time to shed adamant thought about the uncompromising values of journalism to stay as buoyantly afloat as possible in these troubled waters and explore newer modes of revenue earning by tapping into advertiser interest in more novel ways. Hobson’s choice or Faustian bargain, the die is cast and we are into a new era of merchandising journalism. The digital tsunami that has hit journalism comes like double whammy. The known business model and privileged hierarchy of the legacy media are being rendered asunder as news gets widely dispersed and strongly personalized; as social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) commingles with formal media and reinvent and redefine journalism. The media organizations leaped – a leap of faith really because there are no proven revenue models yet – into the digital world, hoping to emerge intact and better off through it. In the process, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme and instead of the earlier problem of homogenization and standardization of news, we now see the stretching of the same – the consumer-friendly to the consumer-generated.

Social media is disrupting the news industry by allowing consumers to disaggregate their preferences. Newspapers have long acted as aggregators, combining general news with coverage of sports, business, entertainment and so forth. Now, the aggregating role is increasingly being taken over by services such as Yahoo and Google. The news-related profits of Google, Facebook, etc., could compensate for the declining revenue in newspapers. But, if the future is in aggregated data, where will the content come from ?