WHAT’S HAPPENING TO OUR NEWS
By Andrew Currah
Published by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford.
Andrew Currah deserves to be commended for providing an insight into the rapidly-evolving world of online journalism. He fears the clickstream of consumption for news and information will be used increasingly to shape the content of websites to the detriment of editorial values and the wider public interest. In the multi-media hubs of newspapers which are investing heavily in digital output, the most popular stories are indicated on visual display screens. Real-time feedback is already beginning to determine the allocation of news room resources.
Additional advertising income can be generated if sites can identify which stories, videos and podcasts are attracting most traffic and Currah’s concern is that the “short-term whims” of the news consumer will “hollow out” the craft of journalism. Research for What’s Happening to Our News was conducted by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Currah says their findings show that the impact of the clickstream has forced the leading news publishers to huddle together under “the umbrella of sensationalist and popular stories”. Even the websites of quality daily papers such as the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph have adopted a “tabloid-like style” and are offering entirely new categories of coverage such as “celebrity”, “lifestyle” and “weird”. As broadcasters expand their text-based coverage and newspapers diversify into video and audio, they are converging on a central playing field where competition is likely to be intense. The danger is that news publishers will be reduced to what Currah considers will be the “digital equivalent of a windsock”, buffeted one way and another by the prevailing direction of whichever items attract the most hits. So rapid has been the rate of convergence that the author can be forgiven for having failed to keep pace with the way newspapers have succeeded in recent months in commanding the news agenda not just in the press but also in broadcasting and the internet by posting sensational video footage on their sites. Whether it was Prince Harry’s controversial home video (News of the World, 11.1.2009) or the secretly-filmed interview with an errant member of the House of Lords (Sunday Times, 25.1.2009), it was the news-making ability of the newspapers (and their purchasing power for exclusives) which had the broadcasters dancing to their tune, desperate to transmit their surreptitiously-obtained footage. Currah confidently asserts that the European audio-visual media services directive “will certainly have a bearing” on the content of video-enabled newspaper websites when it comes to determining the effective regulation of their digital output. Again events have moved on, as it now transpires that the press proprietors have made sure their online output will remain out of reach of interference by the European Union. Not only has Ofcom agreed that newspaper videos should be self-regulated under the guidance of the Press Complaints Commission, but it has also sided with the proprietors in accepting that a series of video clips – for example on Sun tv -- do not constitute a “television-like” service within the terms of the directive. What’s Happening to our News will need updating once more evidence emerges of the degree to which the broadcasters’ long-established rules regarding intrusion and impartiality are undermined by the more sensational audio-visual output of newspapers and the almost inevitable lowering in standards that will follow. This review was first published by Free Press March 2009