The Future of News

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Topic owners: Dharmishta Rood, Jon Fildes

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Precis

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 are dropping. TV and radio are experiencing similar problems. Some papers have even begun 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. Other seem to be following a similar strategy. 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 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”?

Concrete question of the week

What values are at stake in the newspaper industry and what could - or should - be done to maintain them?

Possible contributors

Our two main ideas are:

And some other ideas:

The Big Think team might be able help secure some of these folks -- hit me up at peter@bigthink.com if you'd like some assistance making contact. PeterH 07:11, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
JZ suggests something called MediaCloud for a demo

Possible readings

Possible tools

Could we have 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)

Possible task

Class to keep tabs of all news that they read throughout the week proceeding class (including source, whether they paid for it, ads clicked on etc). Details and tech to be worked out.

Looks fantastic. Perhaps of most interest would be to bring in someone from a paper who is currently struggling with this and talk it through, along with a policy proposal or two. I think someone from the New Republic just proposed a new "federal writers" program to save journalists (!), harkening back to a similar program during the 30's that encouraged people (some of whom would later become famous writers) to collect oral histories of various regions and subcultures of the US. JZ 16:18, 15 December 2008 (UTC)