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Inaugural lectureProfessor George Brock, Head of Journalism, City University LondonMarch 17, 2010If you pause to look at the state of news media in the developed world, you may well bereminded of the story, alas apocryphal, of the conjuror and his parrot who sailed on theTitanic.The ship sailed with a large complement of bands, orchestras and entertainers. Down at thefoot of the bill was a conjuror whose gimmick or unique selling point was a parrot who sat onhis shoulder and gave a running commentary on where the conjuror was hiding a ball or ahandkerchief. ³It¶s up his sleeve,´ the parrot might squawk, or ³Watch his other hand!´ Andso on.The ship hit the iceberg and sank. The conjuror and the parrot found themselves in alifeboat. The bird was out of sorts and said nothing for four whole days. When the parrot didfinally speak, he asked the conjuror a question: ³OK, so what have you done with the ship?´When we look at news, in the same way as that parrot, we¶re failing to grasp what¶shappening around us. And the failure of journalists to see the whole picture is the worst of all.What I want to do this evening is to use my own experience in the news business to try topaint in the rest of that picture. I want to talk about the trajectory of change in my workinglifetime, as well as trust and alienation. In doing that I hope to achieve my basic aim, which isto rescue the ideals of journalism. For they are in need of help.Debate about news is almost exclusively doom-laden. There is gloom economic: printadvertising income falling in newspapers, online publishing failing to find a business model,the financing of local television news uncertain. There is pessimism journalistic: originalreporting, it is said, has been replaced by ³churnalism´, amounting to the rapid rewriting of press releases by underpaid serfs, wholly owned by unscrupulous and manipulative tycoons.Steve Coogan, in one of those question-and-answer features which magazines love, wasasked recently: ³If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?´ And he replied: ³Genuine journalistic inquiry.´ Other voices don¶t just ask: is news over?They ask if journalism exists or adds any value at all.
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To meet that question head on, we have to start by asking once again what journalismactually is. Perfectly easy to recognise, you might say: a person equipped with anything froma spiral-bound notebook to a handycam reporting events to the rest of us. But anyone cannow do that if they choose. Can anyone relaying news to anyone call themselves a journalist? Journalism has now become a word wandering around in search of a definition.In the past decade and a half, the ability of very small computers to swop, replicate and linkvast quantities of data at high speed and at almost no cost have changed more than news.These technologies push slow transformative shifts in human communication, the publicsphere, privacy, politics, the division between work and play and the distribution of power.Distilling the effects on news, we can separate out three irreversible shifts:
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First, in the quantity of information available. When journalism began, reliableinformation was scarce; despite the inaccuracy of much that you can find nowadays,news is in glut. Perhaps the most dramatic effects of this explosion of information arestill to be felt in regions like Africa and South Asia where the internet¶s riches arriveon a mobile phone, equipping the poor with information which they haven¶t hadbefore. Across the world the internet adoption rate is now eight times faster onmobile phones than it is on PCs. Here is one small example from villages in Uttar Pradesh, the beneficiaries of an experiment being conducted by the InternationalMedia Institute of India. The villages may or may not have access to radio or television, but if they do, little of that news is local enough to matter. But everyonehas a mobile phone. A couple of people in each village, chosen as reporters, gather the stories. They may be thefts, fires, holes in the road, floods, births, deaths, prayer meetings. They record the stories in the local dialect and send them to an editor, whocan filter and perhaps add in region-wide information on crop prices, weather forecasts or even advice on sanitation or childcare. A company in Hyderabad thensends the ³news´ back as a voice call. Thanks to speakers on phones, the twice-dailybulletins have become a social event.
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Second big change: the instant alteration of information. Cable and satellite gave usrolling 24-hour news. The internet allows that to be updated, nuanced, correctedcontinuously from many different directions. Those who enjoy this say that news hasbecome a ³process´ or a ³conversation´. Those who do not enjoy this say that newsis losing at least some of its authority, clarity and coherence.
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The third change is the most profound. I would call it the decentralisation of news.The production and consumption of news has been decoupled from advertising andits previous sources of income. First and foremost that causes an economic crisis.
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The readers and watchers of mass media news have never paid the full cost insubscription or cover price. In print, advertising is somewhere between half andthree-quarters of the income needed to keep a quality newspaper going. Manynewspapers, and particularly local and regional ones, get a big slice of their incomefrom classified ads, usually for jobs, houses and cars. Those small ads havetransferred to the web. Not ³will´ transfer, but ³have´; past tense. The analyst ClaireEnders estimates that between 2007 and 2013, the value of print advertising comingto UK newspapers will fall by almost half. A similarly respected American consultancyhas just predicted that for the first time in 2010 in the US, more advertising dollars willbe spent online than in print. One report this week reckoned that in Britain a hundrednewspaper titles stopped publishing in 2009.What I¶ve called decentralisation does not stop there. The ability for anyone toproduce something called ³news´, circulate it, discuss it and edit it brings an oligopolyto a brutal end. Until recently, journalists could define what they did as a craft or as amission, but they could rest secure in the knowledge that it wasn¶t easy for anyone toclaim to be a journalist unless they owned or operated the capital-intensiveequipment to publish or broadcast. That barrier to entry has gone. Over the last 15years, a lot of authority ± not to mention social status and sense of identity among journalists ± evaporated.The last decentralising effect is that the large communities of shared knowledgeformed by newspapers don¶t survive or grow in this new information environment. Wehave to go back to de Tocqueville, reporting what he saw in the early Americanrepublic, to see what a remarkable social reshaper the newspaper once was. Hefound that³In democratic countries«it frequently happens that a great number of menwho wish to or want to combine cannot accomplish it because«they cannotsee and do not know where to find one another. A newspaper takes up thenotion or the feeling that had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and thesewandering minds«at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought themtogether, and the newspaper is necessary to keep them united.´This is journalism which requires psychological insight on a level which I fear many editorsmay not achieve. And of course now online audiences and communities form, congeal,dissolve and disperse at a speed unimaginable to de Tocqueville.
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