In the gloom before the storm it is tempting to be nothing but depressed. There are many reasons to be sad or sorry. Each friend who receives a call for an appointment with the HR director is another reason. But there are also reasons to be cheerful. Here are five mutually reinforcing points, unscientifically presented.
One
Why we should be cheerful: There’s a growing public demand for serious journalism.
What’s happening: There are signs, real signs, that people are getting more demandingly curious about the world. More people want to understand; fewer people want to be titillated. We need meaning, not just information. This might be because when things go wrong, you look for wisdom. But it might also be a reaction against the past 20 years during which we fell in love with the technologies that undid our capacities to think. In the West we became a trivial culture, preoccupied with the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. Many people became addicted to being constantly amused; and if they were not, they sulked.
Evidence? Intellectually, not only the uncanny truth of some of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but also some of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The essay Overload in the November 2008 issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism. Empirically, the success of The Economist, The Week, The Spectator and Alain de Botton’s School of Life. Also, the galloping sales of non-fiction books that in some way or other “explain the world”.
.
Two
Why we should be cheerful: In the next three years media owners will start to support “good” journalism. They’ll have to.
What’s happening: Media owners are at different stages but they are all going to have to take the following four steps 1) Stare mortality in the face. This is happening everywhere from Wasilla to Lugansk and from Porsanger to Brownsville. 2) Realise the future’s with the web - whatever platform you use now 3) Work out that the only journalism that will flourish on the web will be networked 4) Discover that networked journalism has to be better journalism because a post-modern, post-industrial, multi-faith, neoEnlightenment world demands it. Journalism that remains even a little bit out of touch, cumbersome, prejudiced or inaccurate won’t survive and a business that can’t take these four steps is heading for the turn-off to Valhalla.
Evidence? Intellectually, Charlie Beckett’s book SuperMedia which is the text for networked journalism. The more you peruse it, the more it emerges as a very good book indeed. Empirically, which would you put your money on: Huffington Post or the LA Times?
Three
Why we should be cheerful: It’s an open field. Anyone can be the next Joseph Pulitzer.
What’s happening: In the next few years being a big media company is going to be beyond grim. Costs are going up. The most important source of revenue, advertising, is going down - probably by 25%. The only way to survive is cuts. Shrinking not only hurts, it disfigures. Shrunk businesses are tomorrow’s dead businesses. Meanwhile: the media business models that work are a) cheap to start and b) baffling to mainstream media. If you have been working in TV or newspapers for 20 years and got to the top, you have not had time to pay attention to the new media ecology. It is a great time to be young, to be daring, to be unafraid of failure.
Evidence: A site such as Glam - already huge and based on (relatively) little funding.
Four
Why we should be cheerful: Attractive populism is a real possibility
What’s happening: Populism is good for journalism. It connects journalism to large audiences. It is good for society; it keeps powerful people honest. It balances the pervasive curse of elitism. What interests the public is, in the end, in the public interest. We must learn to love our Daily Mails. But, historically, populism has been so damned ugly, mean, spiteful and nasty. Now, however, there’s a sign that a new populism might catch fire in the West that’s highly attractive: the populism of hope, of reason, of tolerance and of confidence in human ingenuity. Behind this lies a massive cultural shift to a post-materialist sensibility in which values replace stuff and happiness is only tenuously linked to wealth. Did anyone else notice Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair writing this month: “The media business is about the glory of stuff-stuff to buy, stuff to envy, stuff to dream about. But for the first time in modern media memory, stuff is now the enemy. The consumer is in retreat from consumerism.”? What a manifesto for a new Beaverbrook.
Evidence: Barack Obama
Five
Why we should be cheerful: Print has a great future.
What’s happening: It’s just a matter of getting it right. This doesn’t contradict the four steps mentioned above. When I say the future’s with the web and journalism will be networked, I don’t preclude that journalism being published in print. The best newspapers of the next 10 years will create powerful online networks and use them to help create the words and pictures that they put into print. Print is not just a technology to be replaced by a newer one. Print is a genre with a soul of its own. But to survive, it must change. There’s no future for 126 page papers filled with a mix of heavy, light, UK, foreign, business, arts and sporting news. Papers will have to focus ruthlessly on what they do best and leave the rest to others. What they do best is to edit. (Some use the word “curate”). It boils down to this: taking a huge heap of confusing stories and reducing them to a package with meaning. Distilling, synthesising, explaining, designing - that is what papers must focus on. They will have to do it with fewer pages and far smaller staffs. But when they do it right they will usher in another golden age of print. Of course printing machinery may evolve to the point where we have digital paper or e-paper. In my view that still counts as print.
Evidence: “Unlike the doom-and-gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights,” - Rupert Murdoch last week.
The Editor of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre does not need defending. He will never a) read this article or b) give two hoots about what it says. Nonetheless, this is a defence of Paul Dacre.
There is a personal reason for writing it, which is that I spent three enjoyable years working closely with Dacre at the Daily Mail when he was new to the editor’s chair. It was the time when he was remoulding the paper to his own image after the long rule of David English, and I suppose I had something to do with the shape of the paper which emerged and which has continued successfully to this day. So I am in part defending myself.
There is however a more important reason. In the circles where I live and work - typically middle class, non-ideological but educated - the Daily Mail needs a voice. Almost to a man and woman, these people identify the Mail with disastrous and deluded demagoguery. So powerful is the latent antipathy that any position the Mail takes is automatically rejected out of hand.
And yet the speech that Paul Dacre made at the Society of Editors last Sunday (Nov 9th 2008) will, I believe, come to be seen as a landmark in the contemporary discussion about journalism - containing the lineaments of a path to recovery for an industry that desperately needs re-invigorating and, without which, Britain would be massively worse off. Philosophically it belongs to a tradition of emotional populism that has had many champions in the West, from Wesley to Dickens to Philip Roth and the fiercely intellectual contemporary American scholar Martha Nussbaum. It is nothing to be ashamed of and still less to be sneered at.
The reaction to Dacre’s talk has been evidence of a shocking lack of attention, or perhaps just lack of intelligence (and this is from the supposed British intelligentsia).
On The First Post, the writer Neil Lyndon huffed and puffed about coverage of the McCanns and national papers that “traffic in degradation” without any sense that he had listened to Dacre’s argument for a rumbustiously entertaining press.
On his blog, Observer columnist Henry Porter criticised the Mail’s ‘inconsistency’ (the intellectual snob’s favourite word) in defending the right to expose the private antics of Max Moseley and attacking the government’s plans to store data on phone and web use, without appearing to understand the huge difference in principle between the misdemeanours of public figures and the innocent business of private citizens.
Charlie Beckett, the director of the media think tank Polis, merely pointed out that “many people do not think S&M is depraved”, forgetting perhaps that the Mail is not about ‘many’ it is about ‘most’.
Peter Wilby, the Guardian media columnist, says in his brilliantly acerbic style, that it is pernicious to attack the most trusted news source in the land (Beeb) and that without it we’d only be left with the distortions of the Mail. He must have missed Dacre’s previous assertions that he would “die in a ditch” to defend the need for a BBC but that he was trying to take a stand against its incursion into every nook and cranny of national life.
Most vehement of all was Polly Toynbee in her Guardian column. Among other things she attacked Dacre’s twisted logic for saying that Mr Justice Eady, the judge in the Moseley case, might have felt very differently if his wife or daughter had been one of the prostitutes in uniform. No logic was intended. Dacre’s point is an emotional one. He does not think that anybody’s wife or daughter should be treated like Moseley treated his willing accomplices in S&M. Indeed the twisted logic is Toynbee’s argument that there is an equivalence between torturers and newspapers who expose people.
The Guardian letters page today contains a clutch of readers cockily pointing out the difference for the millionth time between ‘interesting to the public’ and ‘public interest’. But whenever Dacre defends the press right to expose public figures he is patently clear. He is talking about public interest. Joe Calzaghe would as likely confuse ‘punch’ with a fruit drink.
The headlines after the speech focussed on Dacre’s attack on Mr Justice Eady and on the expansion of the BBC. But the speech is not primarily about either of these points. It is primarily a defence of populism.
The emotional populist, such as Dacre, believes that ordinary people have instincts and reactions which, if properly tapped, will be sufficient to provide guidance and authority to the statesman. He supports the people versus the elites. Long passages of his speech last Sunday were a tribute to the great populists who shaped his career; a previous generation of newspaper editors such as John Junor and Arthur (We never waste space saying, “On the one hand.” We just state an opinion in a Godlike voice) Christiansen, legendary editor of Beaverbook’s Express and tireless champion of the little man.
Of course any of these editors will take a stand again the pink-cheeked judge and the smug BBC. Of course they will rail against the loss-making liberal-left papers that think that they know best and have a right to stick their views down people’s throats (however good these papers actually are, and they are). What is shocking is that this should offend so many people so deeply. Why? Are we still so class-ridden that we are afraid of the convictions of around one in three of our countrymen? Do we yearn so strongly for the infinitely more elitist culture of continental Europe?
I believe that the press, in its current crisis, is betraying itself. It is so distracted by commercial, technological and cultural problems that it is very seriously missing the point. I bemoaned last week the shocking lack of innovation and inventiveness among newspaper managements. However it is just as important to recognise the shocking lack of ability among editors and journalists to connect with a readership and write with sufficient passion about anything worth caring for. The British press is still among the best in the world. But the steady growth of flimsy, pointless opinion writing combined with predictable, turgid and irrelevant news is the real problem. Blaming the internet, the advertising downturn and the price of paper is a lame excuse.
Dacre’s speech was a call to arms. His paper practises populism his way. There are other ways. Did anyone listen?
If we take ‘our age’ as being the past 30 years, its defining debates have been around the following subjects (results in brackets): capitalism v communism (knock-out victory to capitalism); East v West (East coming up strongly); rationalism v fundamentalism (rationalism winning not without fierce resistance); free markets v controlled economies (we thought free markets had triumphed eh??) and consumerism v slow/green/small/simple movements (more later).
When the histories get written by our great grandchildren I think it will be last debate that is seen to be the most significant. This is the underlying ebb and flow which really governs our lives. Our age is the one in which pockets of people first took to heart the conservationist gospel against which all else pales and whose long term effects supersede all others. In addition, and in my view even more powerfully, our age is the one in which nearly everyone experimented with the idea that sex and shopping could make you happy and found it severely wanting.
This is the philosophical reason why the current story of the markets is so exciting and important. It is much more than a story of human hardship, greedy bankers and panicked politicians although that in itself is a drama that commands attention. It is a story of the turning point in the most important debate of the past thirty years. In future our descendants may look back and say: “October 2008 is when the slow movement won”.
Our age is when the view that life’s main aim was consumption and the purchase of material possessions reached its widest acceptance. It was energetically encouraged by the champions of laissez-faire economics, continual growth and free markets. Against it, has been a growing coalition, united in opposition even though sharply divided on many key matters. This coalition includes conservationists, anti-capitalists, socialists and religious groups.
Even before October, any attentive observer of British life would have noted a steady efflorescence of this anti-consumerist front. But it was this month’s ungainly collapse of the free market economies of the West that really became the tipping point in the argument and the moment when the anti-consumerists gained the upper hand.
Where does anti-consumerism take us? The Future Foundation says we should expect more “smart boredom”. We should expect more log fires (boom time for chimney sweeps apparently); more cycles; more cooking at home; more scrapbooks; more knitting; more board games. Above all we should expect to see a hardening of consumer taste in favour of the sustainable, the rough-and-ready and the real. The highest mark of value? No longer Paris, London and New York but home-made.
Most fascinating of all to some of us is - what does this mean for journalism? Who is it bad for and who is it good for?
The bad news is that it is likely to be bad for the mainstream which currently gives most journalists their livelihood. Most of our mainstream media from ITV on one side to the Daily Mail on the other is both fascinated by consumerism and heavily dependent on it. Keeping up with the Joneses drives much of its content. And advertising, the lifeblood of consumerism, drives much of its revenue.
The pressure on this model is hardly new. Decline has been endemic for several years. But a widespread step change in sentiment such as the one that will follow on from the banking collapse of October 2008 will make this pressure immeasurably worse.
What sort of journalism will it be good for? Slow journalism, honest journalism, sincere journalism. One of the most thoughtful newspapermen I know predicts the rise of something like the Campaign For Real Journalism. By this I believe he means a pressure group that will fight for the right of journalists to spend enough time on a story to get somewhere near the truth of the matter, to do investigative work, to go off the beaten track and to polish the end result.
There has been a lot of interest in the US in a new website called ProPublica. This is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest - supported by donations from several American foundations. British charity law is very different and I doubt the same site could flourish here but the need for it is parallel.
I also think the new zeitgeist will be good for home made journalism, for the individual with something to say and for the small group with a clearly defined purpose - as far as possible removed from the corporate structures and junk superficiality of the mass markets. It is precisely this trend that is giving such energy to journalism on the web. Of course it’s a truism now but no less worth remembering for that: anyone with a Word Press blog can now do their home made journalism and have access to a potential audience of trillions.
This week we at Shakeup tried to apply this thought to print. We tried to produce a prototype newspaper that was as “home made” as possible, without recourse to expensive presses or complex technologies. The result was The Manual, entirely hand-written and hand-drawn, distributed at certain tube stations on Monday morning, complete with ink splodges and errant lines where a hand had wobbled. (See the blog below for more).
We carried no advertising, used 100% recycled paper and printed on simple silk screen presses in a old workshop in Dalston. We consciously tried to convey something of the smell and feel of the materials that the newspaper was made of since we wanted people to keep it as an object of beauty rather than to discard it as junk.
We didn’t print that many copies but if we had printed 5,000 and had paid everyone involved at normal commercial rates we would have had to charge £3.50 an issue to break even.
I guess that means it isn’t a business. However, maybe that’s the unreconstructed mass market newspaperman in me. After all, £3.50 for a work of art that also happens to inform you about the world - that wouldn’t be a bad price.
How bad are things really? I mean for us in the press.
In Britain the answer has to be at least “pretty bad” and many friends would put it in saltier terms than that. The rumour is that in some categories of advertising the numbers are nearly 50% off last year. That’s a serious rate of collapse. It goes without saying that all of the main newspaper groups, local and national, are facing the autumn with as much relish as a wisdom tooth extraction.
And yet, there’s another way of looking at things which suggests that we’re on the brink of the most exciting five-year period since the war: a period that we’ll look back on as a renaissance during which innovation and invention blossomed.
I don’t buy into the common notion that mainstream companies will crumble like the investment banks, while nimble niche companies (most of them www something) and Google soak up readers and ad dollars. I don’t underestimate the British newspaper.
It’s already possible, I think, to take a guess at the sort of changes coming, based on chatter from the strategic thinkers and other subterranean rumblings. Here’s my list of things to look out for.
The campaign for real journalism
There’s going to be a flight to quality. I think this is the inevitable reaction to a period of mass production and focus on price. Just like the food industry, which has evolved from 15 years of price-led marketing to a quality-led period, so people will turn to journalism that explains and excites. The predominant journalistic streams are a) commoditised news b) confessional feature writing c) consumer guides and d) celebrity watching. There’s growing weariness with all this. The revived streams will be a) expert analysis b) long-form reporting c) cutting-edge gossip and d) intelligent aggregation. You can see evidence in the success of The Week and The Economist and Private Eye although no-one is yet producing great British reportage. Of the British newspapers my opinion is that The Times is ahead of the game.
The new patrons
Quality is expensive and by no means do I think people will be prepared to pay for all of it. Monocle, an archetypal quality magazine, costs £5 which is steep. On the other hand, companies have an ever more sophisticated idea of customer relationship which includes corporate social and cultural responsibility. I believe we will see the public demand for quality reading and the successful business model of the customer magazine sector combining to produce titles that are independent, free-standing and largely supported by a new set of journalistic patrons - companies that simply want to do something good with their money. Look out for Mercedes-Benz monthly or Starbucks daily. My pet longing is for a new weekly magazine of photo-journalism. Perhaps Sony or Nike could sponsor that.
The return of the editor
Not the sub-editor, mind you. We may as well face the fact that new publishing technology is pretty easy to learn and many (younger) journalists can already write, sub, draw a graphic, edit a photo, write headlines and design a page. (I know one who can do all those things and write CSS code too). No. What I mean is the return of the directing and selecting brain. Algorithms are wonderful and computers make them gloriously cheap but I’m pretty sure that Daylife and its cousins were the new thing of 2008. For 2009 we’ll have The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s latest enterprise, to be curated by editors and given a distinctive point of view.
The rise of e-paper
Forget the death of print: this is the new print. Everybody’s making them. E-readers that are light, portable, flexible and as easy on the eye as print and come in a variety of shapes and sizes have been launched almost monthly since half-way through this year. Yes, they are still prohibitively expensive but they won’t be for long. It can only be a matter of months - say 24? - before a newspaper offers its readers a simple e-reader that will exclusively deliver their title once a day or even once an hour. If you are spending £50m a year on print and distribution you could give away 250,000 e-readers today and cover your costs in one year. You could produce a well-designed paper that was constantly updated and with unlimited pagination. I believe you could sell advertising on page impressions. And yes, you could customise that advertising too.
The first editorially-based website to get media funding
Rather amazingly, Ashley Norris, co-founder of the British blog network Shiny Media, has pointed out that not one journalistic website has attracted any sizeable investment over the past few years. He ascribes this to the relative paucity of British online eyeballs compared to the US, a conservative British ad industry, a strong British loyalty to newspapers and magazines and overwhelming online competition from the BBC. This is the year that the mould will be broken and the maturing of the online advertising model will begin to make commercial sense of journalism on the web. At first it will have to be low cost. But I believe once the mould is broken, then there’s no stemming the tide of change.
The continued rise of the frees
Much has been written over the summer about the deaths of free papers around the world and it is a fact of course that many of them have not been healthy and have been snuffed out by the crunch. Two points, however, have not been sufficiently highlighted. The first is that free newspapers are a young sector that has experienced explosive exponential growth so you are bound to have a bubble effect, just as dotcom did. The second is that nobody comments on the quality of the papers that close and yet, of course, that must be crucial to their survival chances. It is high time free newspapers did get properly reviewed for quality rather than discussed as if they were more or less identical. One of the best free newspapers in Europe is our own beloved Metro, produced by Associated. Profitable, Metro has added more than £200m to the value of Associated in the past decade. Free papers will continue to encroach on paid-for titles and the free sector will increasingly split into clear market segments, just as the paid-for sector did.
What have I not mentioned? User-generated content. Networked journalism. Interactivity. Social websites. Why? Because I do not believe they are the big story. Of course, I very well know that I may be stupendously wrong.
Not sure if you heard but YouTube got gobbled by Google (proud owner of a gaudy 25% of internet advertising) last week. Its a confirmation of ’sector desirability’ (as are the Universal lawsuit and today’s news about a draft EU directive that would essentially treat every video on the web as a TV station–nothing says popularity like lawsuits and misguided government) and its got me and everyone else thinking again about the best way link advertising and video. Lots of sites are already doing pre and post roll ads but to be useful they have to be contextual (Google does more than gobble, it teaches us too). Of course, its simple enough to search on user-provided tags and descriptions but these are too easy to mess up and too tempting to massage. Clearly, the best way to contextual videos is using voice and image recognition to exactly determine content. Fortunately, quite a few places are already working on this. Pluggd has an amazing piece of actually functional software that allows users to search sound files by concept rather than keyword (so it knows the difference between, say, the Cincinnati Reds and the color red). It even gives you a pretty heat map to tell you when, where and at what relevancy level your concept is being discussed. There are also rumors of an ad platform in the near future. Others are doing the same, including Podzinger and many many others–see GigaOM for a more in-depth look (Where is the AdSense for Video and Audio?).
Now, the question here is what is next? As TV and radio become more and more on-demand services, search via voice and image recognition would be a killer app. Its like applying Google to your TV, or Pluggd to your radio. Want to find out about Blair’s latest press conference? Type in his name and get back programs that mention his name or keywords related to it or even programs that flash his picture. Then jump to the exact spot you are interested in. And this isnt far away, not at all it might even be here already.
Not sure if you heard but YouTube got gobbled by Google (proud owner of a gaudy 
d its got me and everyone else thinking again about the best way link advertising and video. Lots of sites are already doing pre and post roll ads but to be useful they have to be contextual (Google does more than gobble, it teaches us too). Of course, its simple enough to search on user-provided tags and descriptions but these are too easy to mess up and too tempting to massage. Clearly, the best way to contextual videos is using voice and image recognition to exactly determine content. Fortunately, quite a few places are already working on this. Pluggd has an amazing piece of