Abstract
Will the next generation of journalists work with the public to hold the powerful to account, asks
Twenty years ago, US shareholder capitalism, with its emphasis upon advertising revenues and quarterly profits reports, was powerfully argued to be compromising journalism’s public mission.
In the last decade-and-a-half, however, these and other earlier crises have been shaken into relief by what has been the news business’s most genuinely difficult decade in a century with newspaper readership declining dramatically in most countries.
One reason all this turbulence should provoke cautious optimism rather than despair about journalism’s future is that we have now started to experience the new forms of journalism to which the internet is giving birth, enabling us to understand better what has been variously called “the fifth estate” and the “networked public sphere”.
The components of this new ecology, from Twitter microblogs to data journalism, are numerous, diverse and shifting. Philanthropists have stepped in to fund some investigative journalism. Crowdfunding has helped reporters take on overseas assignments. Whatever view you take about the complexities of the Wikileaks/Chelsea Manning/Edward Snowden chain of events, we have seen how individuals, upstart organisations and whistleblowers, none of them professional journalists, can collaborate with the media to challenge holders of power.
We have also seen how hyper-local journalism, some it from “citizen journalists”, has re-shaped news and discussion, and how street-level activism of the kind represented by the Occupy movement has both challenged and contributed to the emerging ecology of global news and comment. Look at the way that the political activism represented by Avaaz or Moveon now intersects with the emergence of cause-based, viral journalism of the kind practised by the likes of Upworthy.com. Or read the memorandum to staff circulated by Jonah Peretti, founder of Buzzfeed, in which he refers to David Halberstam’s 1979 book The Powers That Be. Likening Buzzfeed to the emergence of Time magazine in its ability to attract new audiences with a fresh approach to news presentation, Peretti is building a global network of reporters and editors. As Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler has argued: this “networked public sphere” enables players “to some extent complement and to some extent compete with each other”. For Benkler, predecessor models are the open-source software movement and Wikipedia.
ABOVE: Buzzfeed’s New York newsroom – the site has moved into foreign news coverage as well as humorous lists
Credit: Brendan McDermid /Reuters
If you share this sense of guarded optimism about the emergence of a fifth estate, the online-era news, comment and information environment of which the bruised and battered fourth estate is a non-dominant component, then the most relevant question ceases to concern national regulatory regimes for newspapers. Rather, we need to ask: what decisions do we need to take to ensure that the fifth estate does an even better job than its predecessor in holding the powerful to account?
Our primary focus can only be the internet because the way that it works or is inhibited from working will determine more than anything else the extent to which journalism, in its new, broader, more flexible fifth estate definition, will succeed in serving the public interest, taking advantage of “open access” regimes and big data analytics.
For this fifth estate to thrive, the core priority is freedom of expression for everyone, not only journalists. It follows that even very important other rights, like privacy and data protection, should be subordinate.
The most complex single issue is the conundrum concerning the governance of the internet, which is currently on the agenda of dozens of international institutions but the responsibility of none. Meanwhile, many countries increasingly constrain the way the internet works within their own boundaries. China’s great firewall, along with other more vicious forms of restraint, offers a model much envied among the non-democratically minded. It regulates the internet on a national basis without apparently disabling the technology’s ability to drive e-commerce. The price is less access to information for the public when these governments don’t want their citizens to know what’s going on.
Europe often sounds like a wounded beast, lashing out at the super-species of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple
For Europe, these challenges are the source of much agony. Whether debating the European Union’s apparently unattainable “digital single market” (needed to bring the pro-trade principles of the Common Market to the online world), copyright, data protection or privacy, Europe too often sounds like a wounded beast, lashing out at the dominant and alien super-species of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and the rest.
In the absence of any serious European competitors to these general, and global, internet platforms, the risk is that Europe’s manner slides from anxious to protective and then to protectionist, leading to less rather than more innovation and a further downward twist in Europe’s productivity crisis, along with worrying restrictions on the public’s right to know. It is in this vein that Germany has tried to extend copyright in news to impede the work of news aggregators. The same climate of opinion encourages the European Court of Justice to support the “right to be forgotten” so that somebody somewhere (currently and absurdly, Google) must decide to whom this right is available. Meanwhile, on the edge of Europe, the Turkish authorities think they can close down Twitter and in the countries of the Arab Spring journalists are again being thrown into jail simply for doing their jobs. To the east, President Vladimir Putin, having re-annexed broadcasting to the Kremlin, ponders his options with regard to an internet, which is the closest thing Russia has to a site of free-ish speech.
The US courts, meanwhile, continue to churn their way through cases concerning intellectual property rights, the licensing of broadcasters and the behaviour of internet service providers which also contribute to re-shaping the landscape in which US journalism takes place. These decisions frequently and pivotally return to the First Amendment to the constitution, which says that Congress shall do nothing to abridge the right of Americans to a free press and so to free expression. A good example of such a case is the long-running and still incomplete Google Books case, which sets the technology giant against authors and publishers.
There are signs, however, that “old” media are finding ways to navigate the new world. If the BBC is doing its job – and the figures for usage of and trust in its broadcast and online news services suggest that mostly it is – public alarm about loss of journalistic heft among UK newspaper companies is mitigated. According to Ofcom’s latest research on news in the UK, 53 per cent said the BBC was their most important source of news.
We also now have clear signs that some news organisations with their roots in print are making their way to sustainable positions in the online world. Although Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail’s pugnacious editor, famously said as recently as 1999 that this was “bullshit dot com”, Mail Online is now the most visited newspaper-owned news website in the world.
Every student of journalism knows that Thomas Jefferson once said that given a choice between a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter. In a world in which newspapers and those who own them no longer dominate the fifth estate as they did the fourth, Jefferson’s argument today applies directly and persuasively to the internet. This requires us to ask ourselves urgently and consistently: how free do we want the internet to be? How hard are we prepared to press for this and through what institutional mechanisms? What trade-offs are we willing to accept? For the future of journalism and for the future of democracy, these now are the biggest questions.