Only sometime last week, I had my light-bulb moment. That came while listening to a TEDx talk, something rather enjoyable and informative at most times. But this one was educative and incisive as well. It offered an insight into how the media is changing, why it is changing, and what (if anything) can be done to face up to the situation.
Clue: the answer might lie in avoiding the current pressures.
Editor Rob Orchard leads the 'Delayed Gratification' (or, DG for short) magazine. Ignorant me had to check online to find out what this quarterly magazine was all about. The UK-based publication comes from The Slow Journalism Company. It is part of the "slow movement".
But first, what is the 'slow movement' itself? In case you haven't heard of it yet, it advocates "a cultural shift towards slowing down life's pace. It began with Carlo Petrini's protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome, in 1986 that sparked the creation of the slow food movement." It spread to other areas, like the Cittaslow organisation for "slow cities". The "slow" epithet has subsequently been applied to a variety of activities and aspects of culture.
Today there are 'slow cities' (Cittaslow), slow art, slow ageing, slow cinema, slow consumption, slow food, slow gardening, slow gaming, slow living, slow marketing, slow medicine, slow money, slow parenting, slow photography, slow thought, slow technology and science, slow travel, slow counselors, unhurried conversations, slow reading, even slow fashion! You get the drift....
In such a situation, why not have 'slow journalism' too? Of course, being "slow" is not an excuse for being lazy, or laid-back. It's just another way of doing things, and seeing what advantages can come from not rushing through life and everything.
A slow journalist, we are told, takes "time to check facts, to gather and process data." He or she works in serious reportage "gathering and producing news, not of recycling or commenting on it."
Orchard is a votary of this. But in the TEDx talk [http://t.ly/t3tuY] he doesn't directly push for this directly. On the contrary, he goes ahead in critiquing current trends in the media, shows where these are taking us, and explains why it doesn't work.
By way of background, Orchard is co-founder and editorial director of the Slow Journalism Company. The latter publishes the 'Delayed Gratification' magazine. This magazine reviews the events of the preceding quarter, and boasts about being the "last to breaking news". [http://t.ly/DFAGj]
In his talk, Orchard criticises the way in which how "the fundamental nature of news journalism has changed for the worse in the last 20 years, almost without anybody noticing." One thing he said struck me: the main things we expect journalists to provide us with, such as accuracy, impartiality, context, depth, are all under threat."
Orchard believes that an "antidote" to this problem can come in the form of "slow journalism" approaches. He goes about making his point by citing some of the biggest newspapers in the world sending out incorrect and completely wrong news on their sites. In the media, he says, being first is far more important than being right. And this trend has got aggravated in local times.
Besides that, the mainstream media has to also compete for news with those who have access to Social Media.
If you want to run a news operation without charging readers for all they read, you need to depend on organisations like Google. As publishers move their attention from print products to online productions, online advertising becomes far more important.
Online advertising has low yields, so one has to be read by millions "to make money". For that you need Google, and Google is your gateway. People mostly use Google to search for news, and those listed in the top three hits usually make a lot of money.
But, as Orchard puts it, "Google really doesn't care if you've spent a month researching the story, if you've checked every fact. It does care if you're first."
Google also cares about volume, putting pressure on journalists to write "more and more stories with fewer and fewer resources and less and less time... it's a recipe for disaster." Virality and clickability are the new mantras.
That's how we end up in a situation where there's less time for original reporting, less time for research, less time for covering both sides of the story... This is a fascinating way to see the new changes taking place in the media.
Agenda-driven PR can push their stories as editors find it more difficult to fill their pages, with limited resources available. Other issues have come up in the media too. In the West, advertising went from printing newspapers to spaces like Craig's List. While the news-gathering costs stayed with the media, the benefits went to the digital space.
For a long time it was thought that the press in India was immune from such trends. But the pandemic situation changed all that. 'Market leaders' in the newspaper space have changed their pricing -- from being abysmally low, to being sharply high. Smaller players have little or no chance but to follow their lead. This hardly helps newspaper readership to grow, and is most unhelpful in the long run.
How will this situation play itself out?
The writing is on the wall, but one cannot afford to be pessimistic. We clearly need to learn lessons from those who have been 'ahead in the queue'. The Western world has faced more such pressures, earlier and more sharply. Google, Facebook and other giant players need to realise they cannot hope to remain as dinosaurs, while the smaller players get trampled underfoot. Serious issues for all to think of here.
