I’m going to tell you a story about what’s happening to journalism and news media across the world. There are a lot of variations, differences between countries and organizations and communities being served. But I still think there are some big themes that we can recognize that are worth going out to recognize where we come from, where we are, and where we might go in the future.
Where we come from
So if we start with where we come from, journalism has a lot to be proud of. At its best, it’s an occupation that is committed to seeking truth and reporting. it. It provides a way of telling people stories that can make them understand other people’s experiences, but also sometimes their own experiences in a new light. It can portray the contending forces in the world so that people can relate to some of the titanic forces at play beyond our own immediate circles.
And at its best, it both aims and sometimes is in fact able to help people understand the world beyond personal experience and make the invisible world visible in a way that is profoundly empowering.
One of the reasons I do what I do is that I’ve seen so powerfully in my own family of people who in the past had little access to formal education and few of the structural privileges that we associate with bourgeois citizenship, how profoundly important journalism was in enabling them to connect with the world beyond personal experience and be active participants and shape and reshape that society in line with their own ideals and their own interests.
And there is something special about journalism that’s not unique in trying to help individuals be citizens, but often would aspire to do so in a way that is independent of the powers who actively try to reshape society in particular directions.
Whether you think of that independence in terms of an ambition to be impartial, or whether you think of that independence as being upfront and clear about your point of view or your editorial line, what those different conceptions have in common, I think, is at least a commitment to not do it on behalf of some other organized interest or force in society. This is how journalism can retain its autonomy of the many other forces at play.
This wild and varied set of aspirations gives us a way of thinking about what many journalists would like to achieve. It also gives us yardsticks by which we might judge ourselves when we fall short. Nothing is perfect, and the history of journalism is certainly not perfect either.
I think it’s also important to recognize that these are things that much of the public would like to have from journalism.
This is one of the most powerful themes in years of research that we have done at the Reuters Institute on people’s relationship with the news – much of the public has what might come across as surprisingly conventional, or in a nicer term, classical, expectations of what they would like to have from journalism.
They would like journalism to provide a way to stay up to date with what’s going on in society. They would like journalism to help them understand things that they are not themselves familiar with. They would like journalism to convey the range of different perspectives on some of the issues that we face as societies. These are aspirations that journalists have, and they are things that much of the public would like to have from journalism.
And over the years, of course, professional practice and the occupation of journalism grew up in part in pursuit of these aspirations, and in part grew up inside of media organizations and businesses that made money off of investing in this professional practice. At the dawn of the century in Berlin alone, there were well over a hundred different newspapers.
This is a very different world from the one we live in today. If we move from the profession to the business that employed these journalists, and that many of these journalists were themselves active in – we have to remember that many of the pioneers of journalism, the great reporters and editors of the 19th century and early 20th century were entrepreneurs. They were interested, yes, in the editorial side. But they were also interested in the business side that enabled editorial autonomy from the state, from political parties, from organized interests, and from other businesses.
The environment in which they thrived was an environment that, from the point of view of people such as my family – members of the public – was one where citizens had a low choice media environment, not that many ways in which they could access information about the world beyond personal experience.
As a consequence of that, those who controlled the printing presses had high market power, high market power over the public and high market power over advertisers. And this in turn produced a, in many countries, very lucrative business. Profit margins in the double digits and a sort of a veneer of stability and success that we associated with newspaper companies in particular, till relatively recently.
It is also, I think, obvious to everyone in the room that this is not the world we live in anymore. And it hasn’t been for quite a long time. But I think it’s important to start with that world because it’s so profoundly still shaped the profession of journalism and the media organizations that employ journalists. Many of them are still at least in part oriented towards the world of yesterday even as they have to navigate the world of today and tomorrow.
Where we are
So what is the world in which we live today? I mean in the simplest sense you might start with the relationship between the public and journalism and just recognize that if the world of my grandparents and parents was a world of low choice for the public, high market power for publishers, the world of today is a world of high choice for the public and low market power for publishers.
This means that the business of news is far less lucrative than it was in the past and it means that the unearned confidence that journalism had in a world in which, essentially, journalists wrote and people like my family read, has been blown out of the water because now everyone can raise their voice and many of them do that – including very critically and in ways that contend and sometimes outright attack or harass journalists.
We need to be very, very clear about where journalism sits in this fundamentally transformed media environment.
Because it is not the case that people have turned their back on the ways in which media can help you imagine a richer and more varied life than what you live yourself. In fact, people spend more time and in many cases more money on media than they did in the past.
What is the case is that the role of journalism in this more varied and from the point of view of much of the public, frankly richer and better media environment has shrunk.
We really need to be clear-eyed that every day the public is voting with its attention and with its wallet, and they are not voting for conventional forms of journalism.
The shift from the old world to the new world is not about people not having access to printed newspapers or linear scheduled broadcast channels or linear scheduled radio channels.
It is about them not choosing them when they have found things they find more satisfying and rewarding and valuable to them.
This shift has been incredibly disruptive for the business of news that journalists were employed by, even as a profession sort of drifted away from seeking to assume responsibility for the business that made journalism possible.
And the shift is actually even more challenging than just the financial crisis. Because there’s also a loss of cultural prominence in our societies that we can see in so many ways in audience research.
Every day the public is telling us things and it is up to us what we make of them and whether we want to convince them to see the world differently or whether we want to respond to what they’re telling us.
What are they telling us even as the old business of news is busy dying? Well, we see expressed levels of interest in news is in decline in much of the world. That trust in news is in decline in much of the world. That levels of active news avoidance is on the rise in many parts of the world.
And essentially, if I want to be really pointed about it, a significant and even growing part of the public, particularly younger people, people with lower levels of income, lower levels of formal education, historically poorly served minorities, in many cases women as well, are expressing in our more qualitative research – interviews, focus groups and the like – that they find that journalism irrelevant, depressing, and incomprehensible.
The public is essentially telling us every day and in growing numbers that even though they often want what journalism aspires to provide, they’re not feeling that we’re delivering it in a way that makes it worth their while to engage with us.
Think about what this means – there is a lot of concern in the industry about how can we convince people to pay for news. As a sort of a way of overcoming some of the business challenges that are consequences of these great structural transformations that I have very briefly outlined.
But in a sense, the problem is much more fundamental than convincing people to pay. The problem is that publishers are struggling to convince people to pay attention to news. And that, I would say, logically is a precondition of them before they would want to pay.
This is very clearly a crisis. It’s a crisis for the organizations that employ journalists, yes, that is a concern for their shareholders and owners. But it is also a concern for the profession of journalism, people being laid off, and many companies are really struggling to find better ways forward than just managing decline.
And it is a very real crisis for the profession, as I said, in a more profound cultural sense, of this fraying sense of public connection.
The idea that much of the public does not see journalism as providing the public value that journalism would say it is premised on providing. We may disagree with that judgment. Then there is a persuasion challenge. We may also feel that sometimes people have a sense of what they want, what they need. In those cases, I think we have a product problem.
Because we need to recognize, again, that it is a crisis for journalism and a crisis for the news industry but it’s not at all obvious that it is a crisis from the point of view of the public.
This year in the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report when we surveyed people in 47 markets across the world, amongst the many questions we ask people was how well they felt that their different information needs were being met. You might think in a world in which many of those of us who care about journalism and the news industry increasingly are talking about news deserts and crisis of provision of factual information and the like – all of which are very real phenomena and very concerning phenomena – that the public at large would think about these challenges in similar terms.
But this is not at all the case.
The vast majority of our respondents would say on everything we asked them about that all or most of the information they needed was available to them, irrespectively of whether they paid for news or not. To them, irrespective of whether they paid for news or not. So we don’t know what we don’t know, and sometimes we have needs that we are not aware of, or informational things we would benefit from if they were available to us, even though they are not. But I think we really need to be very clear-eyed, that from the point of view of much of the public, what is happening to journals and the news is not a crisis for them – it is a crisis for us.
Where we might go in the future
That recognition is also where the work to address the crisis needs to begin, and this is where I think we need to turn from the past and the present towards the future and where I think it’s so important to recognize just the enormity of the forces that the people who will join me on the panel have found ways to navigate.
To be slightly reductionist about it, we can stylistically suggest that there are two main ways in which the industry has reacted to this structural transformation. There is what i think of as a rearguard reaction which is essentially is the view that things worked great and the problem is that the world has changed. Then there is a different view which is more of a sort of vanguard approach, which is that essentially the view that whatever things were like in the past, the problem now is that things have changed and we haven’t.
I’m not going to dwell here on whether things really were great in the past, other than just say, that even in what in sometimes in retrospect is seen as the high point of high modern journalism, a period that may look like a golden age from the point of view of those who worked in it and those who owned and ran the companies that dominated it, I think we need to be very clear that many people were very poorly served by that kind of journalism. And that the biggest difference perhaps was that they lived in a world in which most people couldn’t really find alternative sources or raise their voices in public, and now they can. But of course, it also had incredible value, and something very real is being lost as those institutions and those professional practices unravel.
So where do we go from there? I mean, if you think of these two stylized responses, I want to be clear that this is not meant to in some absolute sense judge this. Rearguard action works for some people and some communities and there is real value in the kinds of journalism that are being done and there are still declining but real business built around providing it. So it is sensible from the point of view of those people who do that work those businesses serve those audiences and those shrinking aging and ultimately dying audiences to continue with defending what, crudely put, works for me and older versions of me, what works for the highly educated, affluent, urban, engaged, willing to pay, middle-aged or older, and often in many societies, white men.
But it doesn’t work for everybody and it doesn’t work for them in the future.
With exception of a few winners in a winner-takes-most market consolidation, this form of journalism, this business, is in inexorable one-way decline. And it doesn’t work for many of the parts of the public that are most poorly served by this existing professional practice and business.
It doesn’t work for younger audiences. It doesn’t work for precisely the kinds of people that, as I said, I’ve seen in my own family history, have benefited so much from journalism in the past. People with low levels of formal education, lower levels of income and life, for whom journalism made, in a sense, the biggest difference at its best. It doesn’t work for those parts of the public, and it doesn’t work for historically underserved communities.
What these parts of the public say they want is not something that is not journalism.
As I’ve said at the outset, our research documents again and again that much of what people say they want from journalism is very well aligned with very timeless professional aspirations to seek truth and report it to provide analysis and understanding and arrange different perspectives. The problem is not that people are not interested in these things. It is that a large part of the public does not feel that we are providing it.
So what does one do then in response? I think what some of the most impressive pioneers have done whether they work in legacy titles or in startups is that they have returned to some of the thinking of the origin of the profession, but flipped it around.
So instead of thinking about what we did then, they’ve been thinking about who we did it for. They have put the public at the center of how they think about journalism and the business of news as a form of value creation.
They recognize very clearly that journalism exists in the context of its audience, that the political importance, the social significance, but also the economic sustainability of journalism as a professional practice is premised on the relationship with the public that it serves. If we lose sight of that and ignore what people are telling us, or only super serve the ones we are currently serving really well, then it is not surprising that we are losing touch with much of the public and struggling to make our businesses work. And I think that really is where we are seeing some of the most impressive and innovative work again across sometimes legacy titles and also new startups.
I want to be slightly rude here, if i may, and say that, with the greatest respect to my U.S American friends and that great citizen republic across the ocean – I don’t think the most interesting things right now are happening in the United States of America, because I think the rearguard action there takes the form of a few super successful companies over-serving people like me and then managed decline of asset-stripped companies in much of the rest of the industry. And then really, really interesting non-profit support and initiatives, yes – but initiatives that are so closely intertwined with the unique foundation and philanthropic funding environment of the United States that really does not exist anywhere else in the world. So I really think that people elsewhere should cheer on the US Americans for what they’re doing, but not always look there for inspiration.
I think far more promising and interesting things are happening across Europe, in really difficult markets – Dennik N in Slovakia, 444 in Hungary – as well as in more privileged markets. Lea is here from Zetland in Denmark, we have colleagues from Republic in Switzerland, and we see others like MediaPart in France or El Diario in Spain.
We’re seeing really impressive things. And I think there are some commonalities, and this is where we should really hear from the people who are doing the hard work, not those of us who are sort of admiring them at a distance as we analyze what’s going on.
But I think that some of the things that are happening are really about putting the public at the center of what journalism is and what the business of news is.
It’s about connecting with people. It’s about meeting them where they are in terms of their preferences for platforms, but also culturally. It’s about centering their needs and interests rather than this rather imperial “we-publish-your-read” attitude, this “we will tell people what they need to know” attitude that I think was quite widespread in the past and I think that that is where we will find the foundations from which we can build the journalism of tomorrow, a journalism that is better than the journalism that we had yesterday.
What will that look like? I don’t know!
I don’t think anyone know.
This is where Publix and you all fit into this.
I think the only way in which we can find out all the ways in which that could look is if we try looking for it, and if we wrest ourselves away from this picture that has held us captive of what journalism was and start thinking about what it might be. And I think that’s the invitation of Publix as a house and i think that is where the people who join me on stage now provide ideas, examples, inspirations that may not work for everyone or every community, but work for them and are different from what come before.
So with that, I look forward to the panellists joining me and to the conversation we can all have.
Thank you very much.
(Lightly edited transcript of my talk at the Publix opening conference September 12 2024 in Berlin, with links added to some of the underlying research. Picture by the organizers, with fellow panellists Maria Exner (Publix), Simon Jacoby (tsüri.ch), Lea Korsgaard (Zetland) and Katharina Binder (Media Forward Fund).)
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