An article about the problem with articles
No news is good news. Initially, this meant that news tends to be bad news. But its other potential meaning also applies here. The news sucks.
Journalism covers a range wider than the Cook Strait. From sports, politics, economics, arts, pop culture, humanitarian crises, to what I equate to boomer memes (you know those cringey articles written by a burnt-out older millennial that could be covered in a single Instagram post). One thing journalism doesn’t cover is itself.
Okay, what the fuck am I talking about here? Pandora’s Box, essentially.
I came into my degree last year studying Communications, a component of this that I am passionate about (as you can imagine) are the wonders of journalism. A lot of thoughts I had about it were soon, to my horrors, proven right.
For starters, journalism itself is weirdly tricky to conceptualise. The less you know, the easier it is to understand and explain. But it’s a whole thing, a really big, really confusing and high stakes thing. One of the things I didn’t expect were the two realms of journalism: the side we see everywhere, the journalists, the news, the videos and articles. Basic. The other side is the academic side: the theory we learn in class, how money and politics changes the game, why journalists write the way they write, what effects this has on our society, and how we can solve upcoming issues in journalism.
There’s a lot of answers to those questions out there, and there are even more questions. But there is almost no connection between the two. There’s journalism in practice and there’s journalism in theory, and no dialogue between the two.
How can an industry of communication specialists neglect this connection? Let’s start by breaking down some of the influences on journalism today before trying to answer a question that I’m not qualified to answer.
Here we are again addressing the capitalist elephant in the room once more: the influence of the MONEY.
Tim Vos, a professor and director at Michigan State University School of Journalism, explains how opposing forces in journalism create the news we are all too familiar with. These are described as poles; ‘heteronomous' or ‘autonomous’. Instead of ‘heteronomous’ we’ll go with ‘financial’, and instead of ‘autonomous’ we’ll go with ‘cultural’. At this point in the year, we’ve all had enough of weird words in journal articles.
The financial pole represents external forces, which in today’s market essentially means ‘how do we get money to keep working’ (this pole isn’t exclusively financial but for simplicity's sake, today it is). The cultural pole refers to what makes journalism unique (it’s cultural capital). An easy summary is the motivation to do good journalism, to tell a good story, to educate the public, to be unbiased and more.
While you’d think good journalism would mean good funding, the opposite is true. Today with digital media and a world that runs on profit, features of quality journalism are being increasingly compromised for profit. Today, getting money means getting clicks.
Before the impact of the internet, news outlets would get their money from ads on papers and TV. However, today most of online advertising revenue doesn’t go to the outlets which write your stories, but to the platforms you find them on.
Picture this, you’re doing a bit of googling to find out more on the war in Ukraine. You scroll through a couple of suggestions, open a few tabs with decent options, pick your story, skim it and close it. As you scroll through articles from different outlets on Google, you’re getting ads. This money goes to Google, and not to the outlet who’s article you were searching for. The same goes with articles you find through social media. This means there’s a whole lot less money going to the outlets who pay their journalists to write.
Over 80 per cent of Alphabet’s (the company that owns Google) profit comes from advertising. This doesn’t just mean 80 per cent of Google, this means across all of Alphabet’s companies.
What about Facebook? 97.9 per cent. Nearly all of their profits are from advertising. This leaves news outlets with barely a crumb of advertising revenue to fight over.
This means competition between outlets is at an all-time high, which means these financial factors aren’t just ‘kinda’ big, it means they are everything. Figuring out the impact of financial motivation on journalism is more than understanding a part of the picture but understanding the entire thing.
The timeliness of articles is a battle. Journalists are trying to get the first story and drop the news before anyone else can. Makes sense, we like to be in the know and the internet makes things happen in the snap of a finger. It means if journalists get their article out first, they get that click, and they get those profit crumbs. But it also means journalists don’t have time to get the background information, interview different people impacted, develop context, and craft stories that are fully accurate. Speed compromises quality, but it means a profit. Time-pressured writers are never going to be able to produce work which matches the quality we, as consumers, expect and need.
Infotainment. We’ve all seen it, we’ve all fallen victim to it, and we all hate it. Stupid catchy titles on stupid stories work. The internet has fucked the shit out of our attention spans and sometimes reading about what Kanye just tweeted about is more appealing than reading two pages on how the UN is dealing with climate crises. Infotainment means clicks but also means already sparse resources are being put into shallow, stupid work instead of stories that could hold governments accountable and inform the public on what’s actually happening in the world.
Exclusivity. Journalists want to get the exclusive interview because we love exclusivity. Remember when Jacinda said the cost-of-living crisis wasn’t a crisis? That interview, exclusive to NewsHub, blew up. Many of us saw it, and it helped spark the agenda of the next elections. Exclusive news gets clicks, and outlets need clicks. Journalists need clicks to keep getting paid. But it also means journalists need to be careful what they write. If they scrutinise politicians and big ol’ corporations too harshly, they won’t get these interviews. Unfortunately, pleasing people in power is necessary to keep your job. While some journalists are as harsh as they should be, they still need to balance the truth and access to powerful interviewees. This means sometimes leaving out the truth or biting your tongue on the important stuff.
This is just a shallow reflection on journalism today. This article could go on for hundreds of pages and there would still be things left unsaid.
Going back to where we started at journalists versus journalism academics, the disconnect is real, but also for good reason. No one has time or money to have these conversations. I’d love to see more of journalism reporting on journalism to begin this. Mediawatch by RNZ is a good example of this, but RNZ is one of our only government-funded outlets, which means they don’t need to worry about profit. To keep their funding, they need to create quality articles. This is why they tend to have articles that lean more towards cultural poles. But if we lived in a world where all media was government-funded, we’d be sitting here with the same root issues in different fonts.
At the end of the day, the best thing we can do to facilitate change is scrutinize journalists more. Yeah, we complain about it and disengage, I do it at least once a week. Unfortunately, those in charge of putting the spotlight on issues aren’t going put their own issues on blast. So, it’s up to us, students and citizens, to have these conversations and look for the news we want. There is good news out there, slow news movements are amazing, and there’s growth in independent journalists, either through a subscription service (such as SubStack) or on platforms that give creators ad revenue (such as YouTube). But yeah, mainstream outlets are not it. If you need a quick summary, yeah go for it, I wake up and check my Apple News section. They do get word out fast, but they don’t ask or answer any of the important questions.