On the democratization (or not) of the mass media
posted 3-18-2008 5:25 pm

 
An item posted yesterday on CNet News at News.com was brought to my attention by a friend:

Were we wrong about tech and the democratization of media?
By Charles Cooper

Cooper's blog commentary refers to a huge 2008 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism titled "The State of the News Media 2008: An Annual Report on American Journalism," which is so big — more than 180,000 words long — that it can be found on its own separate Web site rather than on the PEJ site.

[Note: other, shorter bits referencing specific parts of the longish PEJ report will be posted in the near future to my other blog, PoliticalEye's Snark Attack]

Now, it'll take me a while to dig down into the report, give it a thorough going over, and read the more interesting charts and tables ... but a few things do immediately occur to me.

First, to which part of the media does Cooper refer? There's the overall media, including the entertainment end of print, broadcast, and film, plus the entire Internet, and then there's a much smaller subset of that universe known as the news media, in its print, broadcast, and online iterations. What part of that did he expect would be democratized by improvements in or the spread of technology (that tech presumably including the Internet)?

Second, what does Cooper mean by the democratization of the media, and again, to which part of the media does that refer?

If the expectation was that tech would somehow allow the average person to produce media product of any kind and get it before an audience on equal terms with, say, Rupert Murdoch or Viacom or Conrad Black, well then, the answer is absolutely not. The only part of the media in which ordinary citizens can even begin to put content before an audience on a close to equal footing with any other content producer, professional or amateur, is on the Internet. Print outlets, broadcast, and film are still largely dominated by big commercial producers, for a reason: it takes money and resources to get seen, heard, or read because you not only have to produce your message, you have to have a distribution method that is readily accessible and fairly cheap. The only part of the mass media that even begins to meet those two criteria is the Internet, and even that requires some resources.

If Cooper (or any of his techie readers) expected that advances in communications technology would open up print publishing, broadcast outlets, or the film industry to the everyday citizen, they were smoking something illegal. If, on the other hand, they thought that everyday people would find it easier to create and share content on the Internet (which, after all, wasn't created for them but by and for particle physicists who wanted to share information but then got co-opted by others), then that part has already happened. Content created and shared by everyday people represents a HUGE portion of Internet traffic but remains a tiny portion of all non-Internet media. For some sound reasons.

Second, just because you have tech doesn't mean you have 1) skill, 2) content that anyone finds interesting, or 3) content that is credible or reliable in terms of its truthfulness and frequency.

Let's consider film for a moment. Improved technology and dropping prices now allow an average person — even one who can't write — to make a video. Popular software allows that person to edit that video, and access to the Internet allows the video to be posted and widely distributed to anyone who wants to see it — as long as the creator of that video doesn't mind distributing it for free. If you want to make money from a video film, then you still pretty much have to market and distribute it the same way DVDs or theater films are marketed today, which takes money and willing connections.

But so much of what's on the Internet is free that you have to really lobby people to pay for content online and restrict access to it; you're more likely to be successful at getting people to pay for it if the only way they can get it is on DVD, in a theater, or by online download restricted to a paying basis. You're not likely to make any money at it if any form of the work is available for free, because sooner or later (and probably much sooner than later) that free version will make it to the Internet, and then all bets are off.

Then again, not everything presented on the Internet is worth paying for — which brings me to my second point. A lot of what's out there on the Internet is crap. Absolute and total garbage that nobody wants to pay for (and probably shouldn't), or intended for a very small audience, such as family and friends. Most people don't want to see your home movies from your last vacation unless they're technically superior and have interesting content that would appeal to a much broader audience than your in-laws or Grandma Sadie. I, for one, don't want to spend my time looking at baby pictures posted online by complete strangers — that's meant for a comparatively tiny audience, and a tiny audience is what it generally gets.

There is, however, a lot of content on the Internet that its creators think IS meant for a large audience — yet its actual audience is limited by the fact that it IS crap, i.e., esoteric or useless content, not credible or unreliable in terms of its truth, and/or poorly done, and/or in poor taste. Look at YouTube: yes, there's some interesting stuff that gets posted there every once in a while, a bit of it even brilliant — but 99 percent of it, perhaps more, is stuff that nobody should waste time on, and almost nobody does.

If by the democratization of the media you mean that nearly everyone has access and the content presented represents the broad range of citizens, then YouTube has to a significant degree accomplished that — but it also means that YouTube is representative precisely because so much of what's on it is utterly mediocre crap. Only a minority of citizens who put content on YouTube or similar distribution sites produce anything that's worth noting, and even less of that represents true art — but only a minority of people have EVER produced much that is worth noting and remembering, let alone anything that could be called art. Do we really need to argue the merits of clips that show Stupid People Tricks or the latest teenage take on 'Jackass' videos? And we haven’t even touched on the amount of reasoned, well structured argumentation presented as opposed to witless, pointless blather or fact-devoid ranting.

The mass of society produces mediocrity, period. But there is more opportunity to be creative with online media. There are more people today, including artists, who have access to newer video tech and to the Internet, therefore there are more voices/creators than before, and their work is more accessible than it would have been before, and there is greater potential that an artist whose work wouldn't have been seen before might now be seen (again, as long as those creators are willing to distribute their creations for free; if they actually want to make money at it, that is, as it was before, a much tougher proposition).

That last point is even truer of the news media, which is itself a minority of the mass media. Writing is a disciplined skill: just because you have a word processing program with spell check doesn't mean you can write, yet most people are under the delusion that they can. Being able to write in the sense of being more or less able to structure a sentence is one thing; being able to write as in having talent and being able to put together words effectively and persuasively is another. The two levels of ability should not be confused, but they frequently are in the minds of amateur content producers, wanna-be scriptwriters, or would-be novelists. Not every poetry slam produces genuine poetry, as opposed to rhyming doggerel.

Besides, even if you can put together sentences adequately, that doesn't mean you've produced anything of inherent worth. Further, reporting is a much harder skill to acquire than just the ability to write well enough to compose a letter or a lucid memo, and really good reporting is even harder than that. So much for citizen journalism. And much of what citizens create and distribute on the Internet these days doesn't even pretend to be journalism.

It turns out that people still want some semblance of truth and reliability from their news — and, finding it difficult to ascertain the veracity or reliability of unknown producers, they turn EVEN ONLINE to established media outlets because that professional product is still generally more reliable than its amateur competitors. We've learned over the last decade, sometimes the hard way, that you can't believe much of what you see on the Internet. In fact, you can believe a lot less of what you see on the Internet than what you see or hear in the professional news media, be it mainstream or alternative news media. That explains why online readers still rely heavily on 'establishment' media online for news content.

Besides, running a news gathering organization is still an expensive proposition that requires resources; the Internet didn't make that end of the news business any cheaper. Reporters still have to do research, still have to go out into the field, do interviews, report stories. And the more news outlets rely on wire service news or news gathered by someone other than their own reporters, the fewer real voices or sources there are for news. Doesn't matter that those voices/sources get published through more outlets if the origin of the news content is shrinking — and it is shrinking, from what I can tell of my profession just on street level, given the cutbacks and consolidations that are rampant and have been since the dot-com bust a decade ago.

I'll double-check that assertion of mine re: a smaller number of news gatherers with the PEJ study, but my professional perception is that publishers are cutting back on their reporting staffs and consolidating their news gathering among their owned news outlets in the name of 'efficiency.' What that really means to the public, however, is fewer voices among the news media, not more. It means that the real marketplace of ideas has shrunk, never mind that it gets replicated and distributed in more ways and more widely than it used to. It also means that fewer entities control the ownership and distribution of news, and that's bad.

Moreover, if anyone's making real money from online news reporting and distribution, they haven't yet demonstrated how that's happening. Most online news outlets are still parallels of or attached to their print or broadcast iterations — and it is the print and/or broadcast iterations that are making most of the money for those news outlets. Only in a few rare cases have efforts at getting paying subscribers for online news been successful, and even fewer the cases where it's online-only news, without a print or broadcast counterpart. For the most part, news outlets still aren't making any real money from publishing news online, whereas gathering the news still costs as much as it ever has. Reporters and editors need salaries, benefits, paid vacations; that hasn't changed and won't change in the near future. Who will report the news for free? Only amateurs, and not very good ones at that. If you want reliable news, you have to pay for it somehow.

Are the younger generations aware of that, and are they willing to pay for accurate, reliable news? They don't read newspapers or watch the evening news, for the most part, nor do they recognize a need to do so. Do they think they can get accurate news for free? Who do they think will make this possible??? In such an era, publicly funded 'not-for-profit' news organizations such as NPR and PBS become ever more important counterpoints to 'corporate' news media, whose owners are more concerned with quarterly earnings than coverage, and online news outlets of dubious quality and reliability. In that context, is the question of the 'democratization of the media' one that has any real value? Isn’t the more important question one about the continuing breadth, depth, and accuracy of the news?

Good journalism has nearly always been an 'elite' enterprise, in that it requires more than just basic literacy. Yes, the odd citizen reporter gets a truthful, reliable scoop now and then, but for the most part, it's professional journalists who get the job done. Consider: what we today think of as responsible news reporting, i.e., reporting that tries to be accurate, timely, and objective, may be a phenomenon of only the last century, perhaps even more recent than that.

The news media don't always meet the high standards to which we generally aspire in the free world, but at least we have high standards — yet it isn't a given historically that those high standards will continue to be held in high esteem by this society as a desirable value, or that the government of a given era will allow news gatherers to meet that standard. If you want free, relatively objective, accurate reporting as a society, you have to fight every so often for the right to have it and fight to maintain it. Give up the fight or decide that having such news isn't important to you, and you lose the ability to get such news. Which means you lose the ability for effective self-governance, a requirement of genuine democracy.

One wonders if, in their desire to 'democratize' the media, the techies have grasped that tidbit yet.

I'll be spending some time over the next few weeks going through that enormous PEJ report; we'll see what's in it that might flesh out this discussion, which means I'll have more on it in the future. Meanwhile, here’s a slightly different question to think about: is ‘democratization of the media’ as a whole achievable — or, for that matter, worth having?