Media
Facing the fate of builders and decorators
Published 18 December 2006
The unskilled middle classes losing their monopoly
Social scientists usually talk of five social classes, from upper middle class to unskilled working class. I often think they missed one out: the unskilled middle classes, a category into which I would place journalists. True, many hacks were taught, for example, shorthand, newspaper layout and libel law. But nearly 40 years ago my own training - and I am by no means exceptional - began and ended with the instruction to take three carbons.
That was in the days of typewriters, and I suppose the equivalent instruction now would be to keep pressing the Save keys. The difference is that one carbon went to an editor and another to a printing factory, and that was the only way my prose could reach the waiting millions. Now, anyone can press a few computer keys, and their work, whether it's prose, pictures, drawings or all three, can go around the world in an instant for millions to admire.
So is there a future for journalists? Are we about to go into the same steep decline as the unskilled working classes? Is there a future for newspapers, or even for news as we understand it? These questions dominated the media world in 2006 and will do so in 2007 and, for that matter, in 2008. Anybody who claims to know the answers is either a liar or a fool. I would love to fill this column with sweeping predictions that would take your breath away. Then I remember that, 30 or 40 years ago, the most common predictions for the year 2000 were that we would have settlements on the Moon, and possibly Mars, and that robots would do our cleaning. Nobody expected anything like the internet, still less Web 2.0.
That is the most frightening thing for us unskilled hacks. Journalists have got used to the idea that, because advertising is gradually migrating to the web, they need to follow. Filing stories directly to their newspaper's internet site, as they happen and without waiting for conventional deadlines, became commonplace in 2006; click on the Telegraph's website just after lunch and learn of a late-morning tornado in London. But what if nobody on the web is interested in what journalists have to say? What if the global conversation excludes journalists? What if people start to decide for themselves what is news, and what if they think they don't need journalists to report and interpret it? What if readers prefer to hear about that tornado from those directly affected? Those possibilities have slowly dawned on journalists during the past year.
In America, 57 per cent of adolescents upload their own content on to the web. MySpace and YouTube are far, far bigger among British youth than any newspaper brand. Aggregators such as Reddit and Digg invite users to send in news articles from around the net and then vote on what's worth reading. The latest worry is about the future of professional books and arts critics. Increasingly, websites invite members of the public to submit their own reviews and rankings of new films, plays, books and so on - so who cares about the opinions of Peregrine Stuffedshirt on the Sunday Bugle's literary pages?
Perhaps the best example of how the web can blow away old assumptions is Wikipedia. The old-fashioned encyclopaedia was the ultimate in top-down authority; it claimed to offer incontestable knowledge and expertise, and that was how it was once sold to aspirational families.
The idea that anything like it could be produced by a free-for-all, in which anybody could contribute or edit, sounded like a postmodern fantasy. But Wikipedia works, and it has made the conventional encyclopaedia more or less redundant. Sure, Wikipedia has errors and biases, but so does Britannica, and the former can be kept bang up to date and mistakes ultimately eradicated. Wikinews, to which people can send news reports, based on their experience or on summaries of what has appeared elsewhere, hasn't taken off in the same way. But somebody may well develop a better model.
Journalists used to hold monopolies. They had a monopoly of access to information, and a monopoly of access to the means of distributing it to large audiences. These two monopolies allowed them to act as mediators between news-makers and the public. Both have disappeared; the mediating role is diminishing if not yet disappearing. A press release (which was often all the journalist read) can go straight on the web.
So can, say, the Barker report on planning policy (which no journalist will have read in full, anyway). A politician or other prominent figure who wants to share his or her thoughts with the public can blog or podcast them. Witnesses to a disaster can film it on their mobile phones and post pictures that, however amateurish, will be more immediate than a professional photographer can get when he or she arrives on the scene half an hour later. In a war zone or in the eye of a storm, those directly affected may speak with greater immediacy and eloquence than a reporter. The sources journalists go to for context and background tend now to have their own websites.
Journalists can still gather gossip or speculate on how Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned; but so can anyone else.
In other words, journalists, like plumbers, carpenters and house decorators before them, face a plague of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. Come to think of it, that's probably why the DIY shops are suffering falling sales: all those people who used to install their own central heating systems, and nearly always bodged them up, are busy uploading stuff to YouTube.
We keep being told that it's all excitingly democratic and egalitarian, that "gatekeepers" are extinct, and that big business and big government can no longer control the flow of information. This would be more believable if we hadn't heard it before about every other media innovation, not least Rupert Murdoch's switch to new technology at his Wapping newspaper plant in 1986. Because consumers are so reluctant to pay for content, the net is more dependent on advertising revenue than any other medium in history.
Many websites get backhanders from corporate interests, which helps to explain why so much web content is worryingly right-wing. Some of the more successful bloggers are already being paid by sponsors to plug products; and some blogs are expressly designed for that purpose, though readers may not know it. Many Web 2.0 sites are dominated by an elite of activists: it is estimated that 70 per cent of the editing on Wikipedia is done by less than 2 per cent of registered users. The most active users on some sites are being lured with cash to contribute to rivals.
Consumers know where they stand with old media. For all their imperfections, old media have established procedures for handling their relations with commercial interests, and most of their journalists, despite a weakness for freebies, maintain a certain sturdy independence. On the web, you're never quite sure what you're getting.
For those reasons, we shouldn't give up on journalism yet. Nobody dares to suggest that much present web activity might be a passing fad, though that may well prove to be the case. After all, DIY enthusiasts eventually decided they'd rather have their central heating installed by people who knew what they were doing. All we can say for sure is that, barring the cyber attack by al-Qaeda that the papers keep hopefully predicting, the internet is here to stay, and journalism, therefore, faces stiffer competition. With an unprecedented number of words and pictures washing around the world, newspapers have to convince the public that theirs are better than anyone else's.
Don't say PC
"Political correctness" (or "politically correct"), sometimes abbreviated to PC, is now the most boring phrase in the English language. Originally used, without irony, by communists, it was revived by the American right in the 1980s to mock those who tried to avoid language that might offend people of a different race, gender, class or sexual orientation. It is now used to describe almost any statement or action of which the writer disapproves, particularly when somebody tries to reduce ethnic-minority disadvantages. Like "fascist" or "Stalinist", it has become meaningless. In 2006, I estimate, each British newspaper, including the Guardian, used it at least once a day. I propose that they aim for a 50 per cent cut in 2007.
Brian Cathcart takes over the Media column from 15 January.
Peter Wilby will write a new column, "Wilby's World", beginning in February
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