Inaugural lecture at City University London, March 2010. Title: Is News Over?

2. Second big change: the instant alteration of information. Cable and satellite gave us rolling 24-hour news. The internet allows that to be updated, nuanced, corrected continuously from many different directions. Those who enjoy this say that news has become a “process” or a “conversation”. Those who do not enjoy this say that news is losing at least some of its authority, clarity and coherence.

3. The third change is the most profound. I would call it the decentralisation of news. The production and consumption of news has been decoupled from advertising and its previous sources of income. First and foremost that causes an economic crisis. The readers and watchers of mass media news have never paid the full cost in subscription or cover price. In print, advertising is somewhere between half and three-quarters of the income needed to keep a quality newspaper going. Many newspapers, and particularly local and regional ones, get a big slice of their income from classified ads, usually for jobs, houses and cars. Those small ads have transferred to the web. Not “will” transfer, but “have”; past tense. The analyst Claire Enders estimates that between 2007 and 2013, the value of print advertising coming to UK newspapers will fall by almost half. A similarly respected American consultancy has just predicted that for the first time in 2010 in the US, more advertising dollars will be spent online than in print. One report this week reckoned that in Britain a hundred newspaper titles stopped publishing in 2009.

4. What I’ve called decentralisation does not stop there. The ability for anyone to produce something called “news”, circulate it, discuss it and edit it brings an oligopoly to a brutal end. Until recently, journalists could define what they did as a craft or as a mission, but they could rest secure in the knowledge that it wasn’t easy for anyone to claim to be a journalist unless they owned or operated the capital-intensive equipment to publish or broadcast. That barrier to entry has gone. Over the last 15 years, a lot of authority – not to mention social status and sense of identity among journalists – evaporated.

5. The last decentralising effect is that the large communities of shared knowledge formed by newspapers don’t survive or grow in this new information environment. We have to go back to de Tocqueville, reporting what he saw in the early American republic, to see what a remarkable social reshaper the newspaper once was. He found that

6. “In democratic countries…it frequently happens that a great number of men who wish to or want to combine cannot accomplish it because…they cannot see and do not know where to find one another. A newspaper takes up the notion or the feeling that had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds…at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is necessary to keep them united.”

7. This is journalism which requires psychological insight on a level which I fear many editors may not achieve. And of course now online audiences and communities form, congeal, dissolve and disperse at a speed unimaginable to de Tocqueville.

8. This description of the alterations wrought by the web, email and mobile wireless technology cannot cover all that will happen. The only confident prediction I make is that the unexpected will occur. But the changes that we have registered ask us: do we know what journalism is? Does it have a distinctive purpose? Or does the idea just dissolve in a sea of media?

9. Digital technology allows mainstream news outlets to enrich what they do with a stream of pictures or words from non-journalists. In the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London, many of the first images that reached us were taken on camera phones by eyewitnesses. Few of the images which reach us now of demonstrations in Iran, Burma or Tibet are taken by professional journalists. When The Guardian seeks to fill gaps in the story of the man who died at the G20 demonstration last year or the Trafigura case, its reporters tweet for help – and get it, drawing on a pool of expertise that may always have been there but is now more instantly accessible than ever before.

10. Commenting on what he calls the “mutualisation” of journalism, the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger said:

11. “Is any of this journalism? Does it matter? You could waste many doctoral theses arguing the point but it seems futile to deny that something interesting is going on here.”

12. No doctoral time will be wasted here at City and there’s no dispute that something interesting is going on. But I respectfully disagree about whether it matters. Journalism is the systematic effort to establish the truth of what matters to society. It follows that expertise and experience, for example, should count for something. There is a fascinating debate starting over what Clay Shirky christened “algorithmic authority”. Shirky argues that for centuries, intellectual authority rested with the individual experts and that this is now having to give way to collective, evolving judgements made Wikipedia-style by groups of knowledgeable, interested people. Applied to news, this is journalism as fluid process, always provisional, always being improved – and always open to contribution. In short, the distinction between qualified professionals on the inside of the machine and amateurs outside collapses.

13. This is a competition for trust between two different forms of collective intelligence. This argument is not being openly and clearly mapped by those who run news media. Perhaps understandably, no editor wanting to encourage the highest level of participation online wants to underline that the suggestions, tweets, tips and facts flowing in from this rich new sources are being filtered in a traditional way.

14. But the facts of news consumption on the web tell us clearly that filtering is exactly what people tend to prefer when they have the choice. Filtering used in the old days to be known as “editing”. If it’s done right, it should be for the benefit and protection of the viewer or reader. It should create trust.

15. Editing isn’t uncontroversial: the risks of selection and judgement are required, as well as a practised reflex for accuracy. Editors have to ask old questions. How do we know this is true? How reliable is the record of this source? Can we check this down some other route? What is the level of risk if we run this on one source only? The nature of research may have changed but the responsibilities of the researcher have not. News may not be over but it doesn’t reach you in the same way and the way it is assembled is also altering. But it is equally true and important that buried inside these changes, something essential needs preserving. In the words of the great Harry Evans, at the very end of his latest book:

16. “The question is not whether internet journalism will be dominant, but whether it will maintain the quality of the best print journalism.”

17. The most visible and obvious factors which have brought journalism to an inflection point are technical and financial. But there’s also a half-acknowledged crisis of consumer confidence. If journalism is to be valued – and perhaps even to be paid for – that worth has to be clear to those who are not journalists. Thoreau said that it takes two people to tell the truth: one to say it, another to hear it.

18. Journalists have to start by accepting that they don’t automatically hold the powerful place in the new information system that they held in the old. William Perrin, a local blogger in King’s Cross who was once a Cabinet Office civil servant, says that journalism “as a belief system” is over. Chris Anderson, a professional exaggerator and author of the books The Long Tail and Free, says that there’s no longer any such thing as news.

19. They’re nearly right. Many journalists speak as if and seem to believe that their assistance to democracy is so vital and self-evident that it is up to society to provide a route out of their current problems. At least some people watching the news media’s travails are, rather, waiting for its practitioners to rethink their way of thinking and working. There are already people – William Perrin is one of them – who are rethinking ways of supplying people with the information they need without caring whether anyone calls it journalism or not.

20. Journalists should start by narrowing down the elements which make the core of what they do. There are four of them:

21. First, verification: the elimination of doubt about what has happened, especially as to events which are disputed. When news media began, information of any kind was scarce, reliable information even more so. Today, the reliable information is still scarce; but it is liable to be hidden in a torrent of data.

22. Second, sense-making. Some facts are easier to establish than others but there are very few that are “pure” in the sense that they can divorced from context or values. There never was a golden age when newspapers “of record” just stuck to the facts. There was a past age when dull, formal, deferential reporting got nobody very excited. That is not the same as good journalism, whose tasks include making sense of what it transmits. That involves the exercise of judgement, which involves risk. Sense-making may go under the labels of reporting, analysis, comment or opinion.

23. Third, witness. Irrespective of the hugely amplified power of digital recording, there remain situations best captured, with whatever technology is available, by an experienced eyewitness. New technology has eliminated the need for the vast quantities of blanket, routine reporting that was needed in the past.

25. Above all, what we have here – and journalists find this the hardest of all to accept – is a fall in the perceived value of what mainstream news organisations produce. It’s a double whammy: mainstream news itself isn’t, in a connected age, as useful or interesting as it was. And the bundle that is the news programme or newspaper no longer makes the sense it did. If you can get only the item you want, why pay the cost of the whole package?

26. Imagine a common enough event in any large city. It is a Friday evening and a young woman on her way home after a night out is attacked and robbed. The attack is not fatal, but serious enough to put her in hospital overnight and to involve the police. By the next morning, her social network will have been alerted. She might have triggered this by tweeting, posting on Facebook or another social networking site or simply by sending emails or texts from a phone. Before 24 hours have gone by, anything up to several hundred people will have read and discussed the details. What does the local paper do? A routine police check which might put a few paragraphs on the website on the Saturday and in Monday evening’s edition. It wasn’t a murder after all. In print, more potential readers but less engagement.

27. Conventional news’s disadvantage is not really lack of speed, although it will be slower. It is also that the formal, one-size-fits-all “news” arrives in less satisfying form. For this is both a public event (police, hospital and a possible court case) and a private one belonging to a network. The private version of the news will be swifter, richer and more detailed and authentic, carried by voices who know eachother. As young consumers of news say nowadays: “If the news is important enough it will find me.”

28. None of these developments are being witnessed or described here with much pleasure by me. I spent many years in newspapers. Historically speaking it is true that news media are regularly turned upside down by technological innovation, by competition and market forces. But the fragmentation of channels and instant interactivity is a huge adjustment. There are risks and loss to society as a whole. Elected and unelected powers will be left less closely watched. For the first time in one or two centuries, major cities may soon have no community conversation in print. For there is no law of economics which guarantees that when one business model fails, a replacement one is immediately available.

29. Before asking what we might hope to do about this, let me highlight one issue which gets neglected as we move away from an era dominated by print and broadcast.

30. If, as seems likely, most news consumption is on electronic and wireless devices and not in print, any story can be told audio-visually. The only barriers to portable TV news are ones of technology and cost and they will be crossed fairly soon. Most news websites now carry video and we are well on the way to wireless networks which will carry video easily and at bearable cost to iPads, smartphones or any of the new lightweight touchscreens which will multiply in the next few years.

32. Second, that what should be supported is experiments in any media and not devoted to the propping up of business models that are failing. Help should be “platform-agnostic”, available to whatever scheme or medium looks likely to work.Before finishing, I want to return to those functions which define journalism. In everyday journalism there is a practice so regular, so little questioned that it can almost be called a default mode. Not bias or inaccuracy. They both happen but so do many efforts to prevent them occurring. To witnessing and sense-making, many journalists add a third element: telling us whether something is morally acceptable or not. Usually it isn’t. <br />This is what Martin Bell calls reporting that “cares as well as knows”. Martin Bell may be sparing in his caring but others aren’t so careful. Indignation is now a routine commodity in news. Reporting without the judgement and selection involved in sense-making does little worthwhile. But the style and posture into which much reporting has slipped goes much further – a mission creep on a grand scale.<br />We need to go back to Paul Dacre’s speech to the Society of Editors in 2008 to read the manifesto for moral outrage. The Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday was complaining about the decisions of Mr Justice Eady in the case which the News of the World lost against Max Moseley, who, the paper claimed, had been taking part in “sick Nazi orgies.” <br />(I quote) “Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour,” Dacre argued. “If readers don’t agree with the defence of such values, they would not buy those papers in such numbers.” He then gave the game away. “If mass-circulation newspapers , which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process.”<br />This is self-deluding arrogance. Revealing genuine scandal is right and Mr Dacre has done that. But his claim went much further: that journalists are moral arbiters. This assumption has a catastrophic distorting effect on the mission of journalism and a corroding effect on public trust. There are many people in any society entitled to defend moral standards. Some of them may even be better qualified than journalists to speak on the subject. Many developments, probably starting with Watergate, have contributed to this inflation of journalism’s work but whatever the causes, the result has been an epidemic of attitude masquerading as analysis, emotion trumping reasoning from the facts. No one wants or will read journalism stripped of any passion. But synthetic outrage repels readers.<br />Editors might profitably concentrate on the moral behaviour of their own journalists for the simple reason that they should fear other agencies doing so. Over the past 20 years there has been an enormous quantity of judge-generated law in the UK which affects the news media from the development of the Reynolds principles in defamation to the cumulative creation of what is new privacy legislation. These judgements amount to attempts to define what good journalism might be in law. This has been argued out, piece by piece, by judges because the news media stayed out of the debate. They did so because, influenced by the editors and proprietors of the red-top papers, they feared a new privacy law. They relied on a self-regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission, which lacks credibility because it is dominated by the media itself. And a new privacy law could not possibly be worse than the haphazard jigsaw we have now.<br />But in general, rules won’t help journalists to connect better with their audiences in the changed context I’ve tried to describe. And nothing at all can make journalism lovable, uncontroversial or risk-free. Good journalism lives close to the edge of the rules. Journalism discloses things that no one else gets into the public domain because risks get taken: the Daily Telegraph buys a CD-ROM, running the risk of censure for its methods, but thus ensures that Parliament can’t edit the truth. It’s not even easy to put a professional frontier round journalists. It’s a porous business: people are recruited to it and discovered to be talented, both things happening in random accidents as much as by careful choice. Not even training will guarantee quality: although naturally here at City we believe that it can do a great deal of good and we are hard at work trying to adapt our curriculum to the needs of the future. <br />We’re entering a new communications age and no one can accurately predict what exactly those needs will be. We can only equip ourselves better to navigate change. You can only do that with a clear idea of the value you want to add. And the value is that systematic attempt to get at the truth of what matters. Making the argument for journalism all over again needs a little more self-critical appraisal than we have been used to doing. For the worth of journalism is real and its case will need to be made often in the next few years.<br />end<br />