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Journalism: what next?
George BrockProfessor and Head of Journalism
City University LondonMarch 2014
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What links these men?
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…with these?
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Or with this…
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New bits of journalism landscape
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon + Washington Post)• Pierre Omidyar’s: Ebay + First Look
news sites• Vox• Vice• Buzzfeed
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Common denominators• New players without legacy• Serious money• Innovation via experiment • = re-invention• Not easy to embarrass
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How this book came about
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When you hear people moaning about the future of journalism,
remember…• Journalism’s history was mostly like this:
messy, experimental, improvisational and – quite often – not at all serious.
• People working in mainstream, established newsrooms often don’t see what’s going on at the grassroots.
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Late 20th century was unusual
• Plenty of advertising in print• So much in 1990s they thought they needn’t
worry about the internet any time soon• Plenty of advertising in network (terrestrial)
TV• This produced a stability which persuaded
journalists that they had always worked in a well-resourced environment
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UK national daily and Sunday newspaper circulation 1950-2000
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• Words + pix• Reading/watching habits will change because
people are on the move• Open sourcing• User/reader’s frame of reference is wider
because of instant comparison• Data comes alive
News media re-invent where digital creates news possibilities
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There’s a pattern here• Disruption• …is followed by regeneration• But not always immediately• And in the gap between newsrooms close and
jobs are lost• People always notice the loss before the
regeneration
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Stop worrying and enjoy digital
• Be clear about what journalism is for• 4 tasks which still require skill and practice:
– Verification– Sense-making– Eye-witness– Investigation
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What could still go wrong• Words are needed for ideas at length• Local/hyperlocal: very hard• TV hasn’t yet hit its digital crunch• Metadata: already very dangerous
(particularly to journalists)
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Remember what “experiment” means
• Most fail• What happens is not what is predicted• Even if it is predicted, it won’t happen on schedule• Established companies and organisations are at a
disadvantage• Experiments produce winners and winners get
bigger• Look at history: this is what happened in the past
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What will distinguish winners?• They have ideas about what journalism is for• Lean and mean• They scale carefully• Pragmatic, flexible and confident with back-end
tech• Combine aggregation and origination• They organise for high-quality experiment• That usually means very good tech back end +
data
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•THESE are the companies to work for