Opinion - News Analysis   

Concern over pressures that hurt the industry

K. Narayanan

Two recent articles in The Hindu highlighted the crisis the media industry is passing through, worldwide. Sevanti Ninan’s “Newsroom blues” in her fortnightly column in The Hindu’s Sunday Magazine (February 1, 2009) said the current recession had brought some grim realities on the Indian scene. The atmosphere in newsrooms was “scary.” The print media were feeling the pinch, going through a rough patch and resorting to “right sizing.” The article gave details of how newspapers in India were shutting down, axing staff, and cutting down costs.

The other article, “U.K. media — the reality behind all that jazz” by Hasan Suroor (January 29, 2009) focused on the deep crisis that the media in Britain were going through with closures and redundancies spreading across the industry. Things are set to get worse. Plunging revenues and readership were forcing newspapers to innovate and diversify into media-related activities.

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These gloomy prognostications made me recall two recent reports on the state of the media in other countries. Both studies pre-dated the current economic downturn and the position has worsened since then. They deal mainly with the challenges thrown up by technological changes, which are yet to be fully felt in India. They indicate what lies ahead, here too.

A March 2008 report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Project for Excellence in Journalism (both under the auspices of the Pew Research Center, Washington DC) is titled, “The Web: Alarming, Appealing and a Challenge to Journalistic Values. Financial woes now overshadow all other concerns for journalists.” Between September and December 2007, news business executives, senior editors and producers, and working journalists numbering 585 were interviewed. They were from the national and local media and included newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, and news and wire services. I do not go into the detailed statistics but look at the conclusions.

Journalists, the Pew report says, are markedly more pessimistic about their profession. More than worrying about quality, their focus is on economic survival. There are also signs of being open to change. They are ready to embrace new technology such as blogs and citizen media, and are willing to split their time across multiple platforms. News people are less concerned about credibility. Cutbacks in the newsroom are the bigger worry than how things are covered. More than six-in-ten journalists and senior executives think journalism is headed in the wrong direction.

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The pessimism is not about technology but about money and bottom-line pressures. Generally there is optimism about timelines and speed which they see as strengths from the new technology. The vast majority sees great value in having a place on the Web where users can post comments. That puts them in closer touch with their audience. There was no evidence of journalists resenting having to split their time between different media. About half say this has improved their work. A majority of both print and broadcast outlets say the main focus of their organisations is still on legacy media and a large number still work only or mostly on the original product.

Journalists in national newspapers expressed the most uncertainty about the Web’s ultimate impact on journalism. Most felt it would weaken journalistic values. Concerns over quality may relate to the problem of resources rather than from the attitudes of professionalism. Eight-in-ten journalists agreed that news organisations had cut back too much on the scope of their reporting and that too little attention was paid to complex issues.

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Concerns about the economics of the business have eclipsed all others and are felt across all groups of journalists. They believe the cutbacks have hurt their organisations — “the cutting has gone beyond fat into the muscle.” While embracing technology for what it can do for their journalism, they are uneasy about what it might do to journalistic values.

While there is a significant divide between those who manage newsrooms — the executives and editors — and the reporters, line editors, and producers who work for them, there is one main area of consensus: financial pressures have increased over the previous three years, and are hurting — not just changing — the industry.

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Similar forebodings are the running thread of a November 2008 report, “Life in the click stream: The Future of Journalism” prepared by the Media Alliance of Australia. Christopher Warren, Federal Secretary, Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, hopes that by researching change in the media and by inviting all sides to take part in the discussion, it will be possible “ to avoid the excesses seen in other countries” where the challenges being faced “are rewriting everything we thought we knew about the news media.” The report is based on a study of the Australian scene and discussions with major U.S. and Western European news organisations.

Doomsday predictions such as “newspapers are dying and will die” (Roy Greenslade), “We’ll have to reinvent journalism” (Philip Meyer), and “This is systemic collapse, not a cyclical downturn” (Emily Bill) have prompted the Alliance to launch an initiative. “The Future of Journalism” will seek to manage the changes taking place for the benefit of the industry and journalists.

In the U.K., the report says, all newspapers have slashed significant numbers of journalists. The Express planned to do away with subeditors, with journalists filing directly on to the page. In Australia, the number of full-time journalists has fallen by 13 per cent since 2001. (Another report has it that there have been 15,554 redundancies in U.S. newspapers since last year.) The trend is likely to continue with the argument that a multi-tiered production process was outdated and new tools would obviate the need for many subeditors. There is also resort to outsourcing of subbing work. But the Alliance has anecdotal evidence to show that the reduction or elimination of subeditors has an adverse impact on quality.

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Editorial managements in the U.S. are also increasingly adopting measures known as business process reengineering. This means application of matrices to determine news space, journalistic output, and staffing, and favouring quantity over quality. (I wonder how journalistic output, an intellectual effort, can be quantified.) One part of modern managerial technique is the centralisation of subediting. In this, subediting is treated as a process where the journalists have to work story-to-story across mastheads, instead of being an integral part of one section.

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The report quotes Dorrie Toney of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as saying: “As an industry we are moving forward without any real idea of where we are going, what the next technology is or who our competitors are going to be.” Juxtaposed to this is Rupert Murdoch’s assertion, in November 2008: “Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe newspapers will reach new heights. In the 21st century, people are hungrier for information than before. And they have more sources of information than before.”

While the debate rages about the future shape of the newsroom, the Alliance feels “the fundamentals remain unchanged … Provide your audience with something worthwhile, informative, attractive, accurate and stimulating, and they will come back.”

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

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