Features

Charlotte Greenfield discusses the effect that the fast paced internet and the rise of “churnalism” have had on the art of journalism.
Try telling someone you want to be a journalist. In my experience the most common response is “but journalism is dying.” As much as Critic hopes this isn’t true (we need our pay cheques, goddammit), it’s hard to deny journalism is changing. “Dying” might be a bit harsh though.

 
The relationship between technology and journalism is demonstrating the extent and rate at which the replication of information can take place. “News”, whether it’s a catastrophe, an idea, or the revelation that the Beckhams’ fourth baby is a girl, can be picked up, spread around, dissected and commented on at an unprecedented rate on news websites, radio, TV, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter before being translated into word of mouth, the oldest news source of all. Of course, this process has been taking place for a while now, but widespread use of the Internet has meant it is happening on a much larger scale in terms of both the amount of people involved and the areas they cover. The news you read might originate from Dunedin, Auckland, London, New York, Doha, Mumbai or a combination of them all.
 

This proliferation of keyboards throughout the world is also changing the type of people writing our news. We are seeing the rise of the amateur alongside the so-called professional through blogging, social networking and even on the traditional news services by online “commenting”. Instead of a political analyst it’s the “graduate[s] with no future” in an oppressive regime that “have access to social media that allow them to express themselves in defiance of corporately owned media and censorship”, according to Guardian commentator Paul Mason. This phenomenon is happening across the board of topics previously tackled by traditional media. Joining Vogue as the fashion bible is the considerably more cost-friendly option The Sartorialist, which has been selected as one of Time Magazine’s top 100 design influencers and the Observer’s top 50 most powerful blogs. Instead of tuning into Radio New Zealand National or even a news website updated regularly throughout the day, Washington Post journalist Paul Farhi says “for raw-speed and eye-witness accounts, it’s now virtually impossible for the mainstream media to keep pace with the likes of Twitter”.
 

The focus in this relationship between media and technology is switching to new technology, but what is often missed is the interaction between the two. The new Internet-based commentary responds to the traditionally print-based analysis, while the experts and the commentators with experience and credentials are analysing and acknowledging their peers in the world of blogging. It’s a relationship that resembles the model of checks and balances in democracy.
 

The thing about democracy, as put by another journalist, legendary sports writer Art Spander, “is that it gives every voter the chance to do something stupid”. The new form of “journalism” encompasses a lot of voices with a lot to say, and not all of them are going to possess the reflection and intelligence that we wish for in good journalism. The inundation of information, analysis and opinions and assessing the source and quality of the same feels never-ending. It can fast become overwhelming.
 

Erin Everhart of journalism blog Journalistics frames it slightly differently. She sees social media, including blogs, as a “tool rather than an action taken. And if used properly by the right people, that tool can be used to spread journalistic content”. That tool, and the technology that accompanies it, may be the nourisher of traditional journalism, just as much as it is prophesised to be its destroyer. Google, Apple and Amazon are beginning to unveil new platforms to pay for journalistic content in digital form. This would include newspapers and magazines that can be read either online or through devices such as Kindles, iPads and smartphones, in a similar manner to eReaders. Getting people to read news digitally won’t be hard; they already do and news’ shorter length lends it more naturally to this format than literature. Getting people to pay for it is another story.

 
However, Journalistics blogger Jeremy Porter maintains that this time it might actually work. “I think these new devices dramatically change consumption habits. I’m much more likely to subscribe to content on a Kindle or an iPad because it’s cool”. The key difference is the ability to subscribe in an organised manner to multiple sources at once. “Amazon, Apple and Google each now have a payment platform that simplifies digital content subscriptions for publishers and consumers alike…at a price of course.”

 
Blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook of course remain free, but they do so for a reason. Journalists are paid to play a certain role. The archetypal journalist is an objective bystander, or at least a semi-objective one, whereas bloggers can subvert this role. It is acceptable, though not required, for a blogger to write in the first person, to state how they feel as well as how they think, to personalize the process of reporting. It can be helpful to know a writer’s agenda, but equally the lack of objective standard can encourage certain people to indulge their agenda too much, to stop questioning except along set lines that match their worldview. Jefferson Hack, the co-founder of arts magazine Dazed and Confused, puts it like this: “both things [the amateur and the professional] are really relevant, and both things should sit side by side and you can choose. You can decide which voice you want to listen to, you can decide how you want to mix those voices and give yourself a broader, expanded viewpoint”.
 

We may need this watchdog element if some of the charges levelled against traditional journalism are true. All the talk of modern technology makes it feel as though the problems within journalism are a new phenomenon. But even in 1923 Bruce Bliven, the editor of the New York Globe, voiced concerns over the standard of journalism. “The public is always asking about newspaper morals. But equally as important as newspaper morals is newspaper intelligence. And both of them are changing drastically, dangerously, because of the mechanical process”. Prominent journalists, such as Nick Davies and John Pilger, are today echoing this alarm. Ironically, it is the prophetic comments such as Bliven’s that show us what good journalism is really about, that is, as T.D. Allman put it, it “not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right” and thus “stands the test of time”.

 
According to the Media Standards Trust, a group aimed at exposing the flaws of modern media, most articles published in mainstream newspapers would not stand the test of a quick double check, let alone eternity. They have created a search engine to help identify what is dubbed as “churnalism”, the “lifting” - in other words copying and pasting - of large amounts of text from a source with no background checks. More often than not, that source is a press release from a PR company whose aim is far from journalistic accuracy. To prove their point, the Media Standards Groups created a fake press release detailing their new invention, a “chastity garter” that sent a text message to the wearer’s boyfriend if she became sexually excited. The press release was sent to a news agency and quickly ended up as the most read story in The Mail before being picked up by media around the world from Malta to America. The Media Standards Trust claims at least 54% of news are derived from press releases and Nick Davies maintains that highly regarded newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian are not exempt from churnalism (so we’re not holding out much hope for the ODT).
 

It takes time and money to investigate a story and both resources are lacking in the media so churnalism has quickly risen to take its place. With these factors, it seems inevitable that journalism will fail. But Kathryn Shulz argues in Time magazine that failure, including in reporting, is not as serious as you might think so long as it is “not as often or gravely as we currently do”. Instead she claims the focus should be on the fact that “our mistakes have specific causes, and we could develop specific tools to prevent them. The one question we are most obliged to ask — of our sources and of ourselves — is ‘how do you know?’” This skepticism might not solve all the problems of journalism but “the point is to get better, not just better at being right but better at being wrong”.
 

Readers too need to ask that same question and take their preferred news source with a grain of salt. Another Time magazine writer, Roger Rosenblatt, sees it like this; “everyone is a journalist, seeking the knowledge of the times in order to grasp the character of the world, to survive in the world, perhaps to move it”. It’s the new forms of journalism, the blogs and social media, that may allow us to do so.