First off, I'd like to apologise for the lack of posts lately. Awful of me ... To repent, I'd like to share this awesome piece I found online via an Australian news outlet called The Age. It delves into the future of newspapers and what the profession means to us all in this day and age. Enjoy ...
Black and white and all over?Rachel Buchanan
August 25, 2007INK, ribbons, hot metal, blue pencils, spikes, stones, presses, plates, blue collars, scalpels, rulers, picture wheels, wire photos, carbon copies, cigarettes, tubs of photographic chemicals: newspaper offices used to be places where you would always get your hands dirty. Only snobs or big heads called themselves journalists. The rest of us were reporters.
Jim Usher was a cadet reporter in the 1950s. He asked his boss what the difference was between a reporter and a journalist. "He said a journalist had two suits, a reporter only one," Usher wrote in The Argus: Life & Death Of A Newspaper (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), a collection of stories about The Argus, a Melbourne morning newspaper published from 1846 until 1957.
Thirty years later, when I was a junior reporter in New Zealand, I remember being told that one too. I never owned a suit, but I still considered myself a reporter by trade. I was one of the many hundreds of tradesmen and women who used to work with words. We sourced the best words we could from the best people, then we chipped and hacked and polished away at all that raw material to shape our little stories.
We were not alone in our work. Newspapers were also made by copytakers, proofreaders, copygirls and boys, compositors, press artists, printers, photographers, darkroom technicians. Words were worked over by many types of subeditor: down-table subs; top-table subs; wire subs; check subs; stone subs; sports subs; racing subs; business subs; foreign subs; features subs; supplement subs; layout subs; rewrite subs; chief subs; and copy tasters. A wordsmith is "a skilled user and maker of words". Sub-editors are wordsmiths, people who can make a reporter's words into something sharper, better and funnier.
Most reporters were trained on the job. I started making my living as a reporter when I was 18, sports stringing (typing copy up on my white Olivetti portable) while I did a diploma of journalism. The next year I got a job on The Southland Times, an old-fashioned paper of record. If it happened in Southland one day, it was in the paper the next. I know. I recorded golf results, shipping movements and the names, ages and places of every competitor in the province's weekly Little Athletics competition.
But the closed universe of the newspaper office, those trade-based temples to type where printers and proofreaders and journos could all sit down in a staff canteen and eat the same awful food together, is vanishing. Did we journalists miss this story because it is our own?
It is strange for me to be not quite 40 and already have memories and language that apply to working worlds that no longer exist (the afternoon newspaper being one example, seeing unsuccessful stories I'd written being thrust onto a metal spike is another.) Older journalists, such as the men and women who share their stories in the book about The Argus or who talk with Michael Young in Death, Sex & Money: Life Inside a Newspaper (Melbourne University Press, 2007), must feel this disjuncture even more acutely.
I could go on about the old days, but I won't. They're over. The question now is: what is the future for newspaper journalists and newspaper journalism?
Two contradictory forces are at work. First, there is the move towards professionalism, most notably the explosion of journalism degrees in universities. I have benefited from this change because I now have a job teaching journalism in one of these degree programs. Educators aside though, the exponential growth in journalism degrees bears little relationship to job opportunity. Between 1987 and 1992, for example, 16 metropolitan newspapers closed in Australia. A weird counter to this, though, is what I see as anti-professionalism, most notably the rise in so-called citizen or participatory journalism made possible by the net.
While printed newspapers continue to close (The Evening Post, Wellington's wonderful afternoon paper, shut in 2002) and print circulations fall or plateau, the online versions of so-called "legacy media" such as this newspaper, are flourishing.
If the nascent but powerful online news industry is any indication, journalism jobs will be scarcer than ever. Printed newspapers required massive investment in staff and presses but online news sites shift many of these costs to the consumer. Readers have to have their own computers and high-speed broadband access to get their news. Many homes and people still do not have this equipment. A $1.40 newspaper is more democratic and affordable.
One version of journalism's future was uploaded in March when Fairfax Digital launched The Brisbane Times, Australia's first metropolitan online-only newspaper. The "meet the staff" section of the website shows 14 mostly very youthful smiling faces. Surely there were more people than that employed. I rang and discovered that the Times is put out by 12 local editorial staff. Half are reporters and half are producers who copy taste, select stories, do layout, write headlines and edit. Granted they are 12 new journalism jobs but still, the News Limited hard-copy competition, The Courier-Mail, has 215 editorial staff, including about 20 dedicated online journos.
The hard-copy newspaper jobs that remain are vulnerable to the same economic forces that mean you may speak to someone in Mumbai about your phone problems in Melbourne. Also in March, Irish newspaper magnate Tony O'Reilly's company APN New Zealand announced a plan to "source some editorial production services from a specialist supplier". Translated, this means that "some sections" of The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand's biggest metropolitan daily), The Listener (a long-running weekly news magazine) and provincial newspapers including The Northern Advocate, Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua's Daily Post will be subbed and laid out by people in Auckland employed not by APN but Pagemasters NZ, a subsidiary of the Australian news agency AAP.
The first "Pagemaster" pages appeared recently in The Herald. "The proposal reflects global trends in newspaper publishing," said APN executive Martin Simons.
A spokesman told me Pagemaster staff would produce world news pages, but I wonder how long it will be before the editing and layout of national and regional news migrates to Auckland too? Or maybe it could all be subedited in APN's Sydney head offices?
One of the most successful publishing ventures of our time is Wikipedia, the online citizen-created and edited encyclopaedia. Many Wikipedia entries are excellent but many others are inaccurate, stupid or vandalised beyond repair. In the wiki world everyone is an expert whether they are trained or not. The unifying factor is that no one is paid a cent. Wikipedia didn't need to outsource subediting because it was never part of the interactive, social-networking web 2.0 universe in the first place. It will be interesting to see if The Citizendium, a new citizen-created encyclopaedia, will overtake Wikipedia. Anonymous entries are forbidden and work will be "gently edited".
COMPUTERS entered antipodean newsrooms from the late 1980s onwards. I remember these gigantic clunky grey boxes with black screens and fuzzy green fonts, as babyish to look at as a Pac-Man console. Within a decade, computers had destroyed many of the trades associated with newspapers, but the impact of electronic pagination is nothing compared with the impact of the internet and associated mobile technologies, most especially camera-enabled mobile phones, on the way news is gathered, written, read, published and understood.
It has all happened so fast. In the 20th century, media evolved through a series of technological landmarks that seem stately in comparison: first radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901; television invented, 1926; television transmission begins in Australia, 1956; CNN begins, 1980. From there, change is compressed. In 1992 the Mosaic browser made the internet easier to use. By 1998, Matt Drudge's online news and gossip website, the Drudge Report, had broken the story of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, an event that is widely cited by journalism academics as the birth of online news. Google, MySpace, YouTube, wikis and blogs all belong to this century.
Stuart Allan, author of Online News (2006), begins his history of the form with the Drudge Report. Other key events are the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, in which "amateur news reporters" used weblogs to create their own "decentralised media" and the war in Iraq, which resulted in the rise of first-person, raw accounts of life inside Iraq in the warblogs of Salam Pax and Riverbend. Participatory or citizen journalism began, in this account, with the launch of Indymedia (motto "be the media") in 2000 in Seattle during anti-globalisation protests. South Korea's OhmyNews, in which citizens write the stories (and readers tip writers they like best) and citizen "reporting" on the London bombings, Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami are other examples of what Allan says are "the ways in which the very users of online news are rewriting the rules which have traditionally governed journalism as a profession".
Ordinary people, Allan argues, are now pursuing their own news agendas, sidestepping "corresponding notions of 'authority', 'credibility' and 'prestige'."
News is becoming more and more personalised. The "I" rules. Even though there are unlimited column centimetres in cyberspace, online news stories are shorter and pacier than their print counterparts. Many are in point form, like a PowerPoint presentation. Online news is shaped by the conventions of the blog, a form of writing "dominated by the use of the first person", according to Mark Tremayne, editor of the excellent collection of essays Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media (2007).
Tremayne points out that while researchers have been reluctant to define blogs as journalism, readers thought otherwise. Blogs were journalism and their seemingly personal, raw, unedited and informal tone meant readers trusted these "stories" more than reports in the traditional media.
Like many other journalists, I would define news as all the important, surprising, tragic or weird events that have happened here and overseas on a particular day. News is not just things that matter to me. News is information gathered, written, photographed and edited by professional journalists who strive for what I see as the impossible, but still honorable, goal of objectivity and who are motivated by the old-fashioned concept of "public interest".
In Imagined Communities (1983) theorist Benedict Anderson described newspapers as one-day bestsellers. The ritual of reading a newspaper, Anderson argued, was a private event that was also "an extraordinary mass ceremony" that helped an individual imagine themselves as part of a national community.
This analysis no longer works. A community now can be a world made for one. In the 2005 Alfred Deakin innovation lectures in Melbourne, former World Economic Forum program director Lance Knobel talked about an American media project called Daily Me. "The Daily Me is a personalised newspaper that contains just what you want," he said in a speech reprinted in Barons to Bloggers: confronting media power (Miegunyah Press, 2006).
Many people already create their own "daily me" through technologies such as bloglines or RSS (really simple syndication) that feed stories from selected sites into a subscriber's computer. The ABC is now promoting a customised news service called News You Choose. Social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook allow users, such as my journalism students, to both consume and create highly personalised news — coming parties, gigs, album releases, art shows, entertainment gossip — whenever they want. YouTube, the video-sharing website whose motto is "broadcast yourself" lets users post and view videos, thereby broadcasting their own unedited version of the news.
In May, when a student was stabbed at work here at La Trobe University's Bundoora campus, footage was posted on YouTube. A far more distressing emerging trend is for members of the public to use their phones to make news by filming themselves or their friends committing violent crimes, as demonstrated by recent stories on bullying.
The public is shaping news agendas as never before. Online editors can quickly see which stories "click" with readers. News risks becoming a "hit" parade, a top 10 list of most clicked items. How long before Australia gets its own version of Las Ultimas Noticias, Chile's most widely read newspaper? The paper, according to Knobel, has "a system where all clicks onto its website are recorded and displayed in the newsroom. The clicks — and the popular vote they represent — determine the print content of the newspaper. If a story gets many clicks, it will be followed up and similar stories will be written. If a story doesn't get enough clicks, it and its follow-ups are spiked".
Stories about climate change are a "hit" with readers now, but they weren't 10 years ago. News is not just what matters to me or you in this instant. As Tremayne writes: "Unless bloggers begin covering school board and city council meetings, major and not so major crimes, serious and not so serious accidents and fires, weather, issues of importance to the few and to the many and issues of little interest to themselves — all this on a daily basis — they will not provide the services now covered by the mainstream press."
News is not black and white and "read all over" any more, but I still believe in newspapers and in newspaper journalism. These pages you are holding contain more than news and features. They are an inky artefact, a monument to the efforts of a trade, a profession, a type, whose time, I fear, is passing.
Rachel Buchanan lectures in media studies at La Trobe University.
