By Paul Bernish
Content — specifically the content that was once the purview of professional journalism — is the focus of an intense tug-of-war over quality, authority and transparency.
On one side are the remnants of traditional media reporters and editors battling to preserve the quality of news in the midst of drastic change in both technology and consumer preferences.
On the other side are publishers who are desparately trying to find a new business model that envisions content as a commodity that can be used to rescue a traditional industry segment.
There’s actually a third side — social media — which is a hybrid of news, opinion, propaganda, marketing, eyewitness accounts, humor, demagoguery and gentle conversation. Some believe that social media has supplanted journalism totally.
None of this has been decided one way or another. In the meantime, readers and viewers should (as Mae West once declared) strap themselves in for a bumpy ride.
By now, it’s widely accepted that the traditional journalism model — the printed newspaper — is on its last legs. What’s not yet decided is the next vehicle to gather, report and disseminate the news. Decisions are increasingly complex because of the momentous and irreversible shift of news content to the digital realm, where non-stop 24-7 demand for fresh information is altering the very nature of journalism. News gathering also is threatened by a development that raises the hackles of professional reporters and editors: “sponsored content” that purports to be news, but is in fact sophisticated marketing messages.
Amid all these cross-currents, the viability of professional news gathering, and the quality of what’s reported — and by whom — is at stake, no small issue at a time when an informed public is arguably more important than ever.
Traditional publsihers — established brands like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal — are in the vanguard of grappling with this issue, but so too are well-established magazines and broadcast media empires that have seen their circulation and viewship fragment. Marketing and PR firms, seeing a golden opportunity to advance the publicity needs of clients, have already established a beachhead by creating and marketing content that appears alongside regular journalism. A watershed of sorts was reached when the Times — the bastion of traditional news gathering — began accepting sponsored journalism, albeit clearly marked as such.
At the same time, there appears to be a growing demand for what’s being called “explanatory” journalism. This is professional developed news content that includes background, context and explanation intended to help readers better understand what they’re reading or viewing. Such content is emerging through new online publishers.
What’s at stake is page views, the digital term that measures readership (or more accurately, viewership), and is roughly analogous to subscriptions or circulation. More page views mean more people are accessing your content over someone else’s, and because the demographics of who is looking or reading online can be determined, it is an especially valuable measure for advertisers hoping to reach desirable (i.e., moneyed) targets. One consequence of the race to build page views is that the definition of “news” is changing from what professional editors think it is to what viewers and readers want. (At some publications, reporters are now being paid by how many page views their copy generates.)
Right now, market-driven news generation hasn’t quite replaced traditional news gathering. It’s unclear, for example, whether sponsored content is producing the anticipated revenues Wall Street analysts expect. The emergence of explanatory content may be a signal that news consumers will seek out quality journalism, solidifying what was thought by many to be a declining market. One encouraging note in this regard is the rapid increase in reader comments online, which according to some is causing reporters and editors to be more sensitive about how they report. There’s also the quandry of how to provide any kind of content beyond the summary headline to a public increasingly anchored to mobile technology, where space is at a premium.
Eventually, the tug-of-war over content most likely will be resolved by an accommodation that enables real news gathering and ersatz “sponsored content” to survive in a sort of uneasy alliance. What is more certain, however, is that traditional journalism is morphing into a new, hybrid form of content in which it is more vital than ever to know who is reading or viewing the news, instead of how that news is actually gathered.
