The Future of News

Topic owners: Dharmishta Rood, Jon Fildes

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Summary

The traditional media industry is in turmoil. Circulation of newspapers is falling. Some, such as the Tribune group, are saddled with huge debts and have filed for bankruptcy. Staff are being laid off, costs are being cut and foreign bureaus are being shut. Audiences are fragmenting, advertising spending is plummeting and the valuations of companies is dropping. TV and radio are experiencing similar problems. Some papers have even experimented with outsourcing local news reporting to India!

Most of these changes have been blamed on the arrival of the web, which has changed how information is produced and consumed. Now, anyone can be a news gatherer, publisher and distributor. The balance of power has changed. Yet at the same time there is a paradox; the web offers organisations a huge opportunity to reach out to audiences and connect with them in new ways.

This class will seek to explore at least two of the challenges currently facing the media industry:

• What will the business model of the future look like? As Richard Sambrook , Director of the BBC's Global News division, says: “Newspapers and broadcasters have lived for decades by selling audiences to advertisers. Now the number of eyeballs per page or per programme is falling - but we have much greater detail and granularity about where they are going and what they are doing online. Media organisations have to find a way to extract the commercial value from that”. Already, groups such as spot.us and Pro Publica are experimenting with new business models. Others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, have ditched the old way of doing things and have gone entirely online. Will these work? Are these the right approach?

• What will the newspapers or media outlets of the future look like? The New York Times is using its website in new and innovative ways. Other experiments papers have been less successful. So, how should papers engage with their audience? Is news reporting now a collaborative process? How should they respond to citizen journalism? Are they competing or should they - and can they - work together?

This class will explore some of the issues facing the future of the news industry. Could they disappear? Does it matter if they do? What values are at stake beyond what the markets appear to be able to sustain? Should governments intervene to save them in the same way as they have decided to prop up the ailing car manufacturing industry? Is this an appropriate intervention? Should it be left to market forces? Ultimately, what is the future for “old media”?

Possible contributors

• Dan Gilmour
• Jeff Jarvis
• Russ Stanton at the LA Times.
• Someone from the NYT behind sites, such as the Visualisation Lab or Times Extra
• someone else from a failing local paper?
• someone from the MIT Center for Future Civic Media?

Possible readings

• Boing Boing post by Clay Shirky: The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers
• A view from the other side: a newspaper journalist ignores the potential of the web
• Columbia Journalism Review article: Overload!- Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information
• The AP report (PDF) mentioned in Overload!
• a short introduction to the newspaper crisis on the Daily Show
• Hey let's write some Journalistic Innovation grants... it works for Jeff Jarvis' class...

Possible tools

Could we a discussion before, during and after the event using tools such as:

• Seesmic: allows video conversations.
• Phreadz: allows threaded multimedia conversations using video, images, text, audio or links. (Currently in closed Beta but we can ask for accounts)