Same Old, Same Old Challenges for the Journalism of the Future

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Milissa Deitz, presenting a paper on behalf of Lynette Sheridan Burns. She notes the shift from journalism as transmission to journalism as communication, and the rise of various technologies which facilitate this. Much as TV and radio changed the newspaper landscape, so online technologies are changing the news landscape across all other media - and users divide into digital aliens, immigrants, and natives.

Audiences have become active, and no longer like to be told what to think, so they have turned to social media and are active content creators; they are multitaskers snacking on content. This undermines the information gatekeeping role of journalists, and creates problems for journalism's democratic role - and such concerns have been taken up by various journalism and journalism studies bodies, of course.

News in the past was defined as events that were newsworthy and events that were covered by the press, Clay Shirky has written, but the era of crowdsourcing has changed this; media organisations no longer have considerable control over the definition of newsworthiness, however, and struggle to come to terms with this. Australia, for example, has entered a post-proprietorial age of news, which threatens the sustainability of certain media forms as the survival of news publications depends more than ever on the behaviour of audiences who are increasingly less loyal to specific mastheads. Search engine optimisation and per-click advertising models mean that the types of articles which typically attract a great number of ads are the ones which are published more often.

TV news now faces the same threat as mass newspapers, for much the same reason - but if we all watch customised, individualised news content, how do we insure that citizens are comprehensively informed? Citizen journalism adds another complication, and it is becoming obvious that citizen journalism will be able to address only a range of specific areas, and cannot comprehensively substitute for mainstream news. The role of citizen journalism also differs from country to country, of course, depending on political environments and other factors.

Many graduates of journalism programmes today are unlikely to ever work as professional journalists; they may be citizen journalists or work in other media industries, and this requires a change in journalism education, too. Journalism educators need to engage with social networks and other new technologies and revisit their understanding of journalism practice; they need to look forward to the likely convergent media situation in, say, 2025 and work backwards from there. Education must be more about process and less about practices; about the principles attached to available technologies rather than about the technologies themselves, which will change rapidly and repeatedly.

Hmm, again - lots of commonplace statements here, but nothing particularly new... Haven't we known most of this for the best part of a decade now?

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