Challenges for the Media Industry

Hamburg.
The next speaker is Dieter Klumpp, Director of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, host of Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009. Changes in what is considered to be quality content are driven by changes to the entire media sector - old media are perhaps being substituted in part by new media, but the demand for information has not grown as quickly as the availability of content, so this is nowhere near a full substitution. There is a suggestion that the public is being atomised, that it is fragmenting, and what quality means is ever more difficult to identify.

The quality of content in journalism can be assessed perhaps for news, but not so much for commentary; quality content does not necessarily find an audience, either, and this means that there is a need for other forms of support, including government subsidy. Additionally, changes in content use may also be driven by time pressures - not just by changing user needs.

This means that for print media, many more newspapers and magazines may be sold than are actually read; the same is less true for broadcast media. One problem in print news is also that publishers are more likely to save by making journalists redundant than by sacking advertising, printing, or distribution personnel - and with increasing time stresses, even seasoned journalists are no longer able to reliably create quality content. In turn, even news agencies such as AFP are now being subsidised by the (French, in this case) state.

And especially in the context of disaster journalism, many news organisations now depend on a handful of news agencies, and reports are being written very quickly; the drive to currency which is determined by market pressures leads to a lack of critical reflection and of diversity in reporting.

Even before the financial crisis, US newspapers discussed philanthropic or government subsidy content models. The end of the mass media function may be in sight, and even unavoidable. Mass media are losing their influence. Against this, we see the rise of Web 2.0, and the Net itself may be becoming a mass medium - or alternatively, the decline of the mass media may require the development of a fifth estate, perhaps driven by produsers.

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