In May 2008, a summit of senior media executives, journalists, academics and researchers organised by the Media Alliance listened in horrified fascination as Roy Greenslade, one of Britain’s leading media commentators, predicted the death of newspapers.
“Popular newspapers, the mass newspapers, are dying and will die. They have no future whatsoever. I’m sad to see newspapers go. I worked on them for 40 years.”1 Roy Greenslade, Future of Journalism summit, Sydney, May 2008
Greenslade was not the only conference speaker with a hard message: one by one a rollcall of overseas experts spelled out the tough future facing the global news media.
“We have to face some painful decisions,” said New York University’s Jay Rosen, predicting journalists would face struggle and huge competition in the digital world.
“We’ll have to reinvent journalism,” said Philip Meyer, long-time newspaper editor, now Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of North Carolina.
Dispatches from the TV industry were little better – so disruptive has been the rise of the internet, coupled with the development and rapid adoption of time-shifting technology allowing viewers to skip advertising, that the free-to-air model is seriously threatened. There is no doubting the violence of the disruption. The scenario is played out in most mature markets, especially the US and the UK, where - as Emily Bell, The Guardian’s digital media director recently said - the industry faced “two years of carnage”.
We are on the brink of two years of carnage for western media. In the UK, five nationals could go out of business and we could be left with no UK-owned broadcaster outside of the BBC. We could face complete market failure in some areas of regional papers and some areas of commercial radio. This is systematic collapse, not just a cyclical downturn. Even the surviving brands will have to go through a period of unprofitability. Emily Bell, Guardian News & Media, Polis Think-Tank, October 14, 2008
This year, The Alliance launched a major initiative, the Future of Journalism, which aims, through industry research and regular events involving executives, journalists, academics and commentators, to build an accurate picture of the extent and pace of industry change, to manage that change for the benefit of the whole industry and journalists in particular. How will newsrooms look? How will journalists’ jobs change with technology and business conditions? How will journalism itself change? There is no doubt that some new tools, developed almost daily, will allow journalists to tell stories in vivid and exciting ways, using video, podcasts and slideshows, running full interviews online, showing documents and research trails for a richer experience.
Journalists will reach more people more quickly as mobile phones, handheld devices, SMS and twitter feeds enable instant filing from events.
But this exciting new world will require new skills and make greater demands of time and resources.
This report, the first in our Future of Journalism series, is based on discussions at the Alliance Future of Journalism discussions in Australia, and surveys of executives and Alliance members nationally. We also sent Alliance staff and senior journalists to US and UK newsrooms to interview executives and leading thinkers and to compare changes in those markets to upheavals here.
We will continue this research to develop a database of information and insight into our changing industry.
