Is the future of journalism in its past?
I know many of my readers must be tired of hearing predictions — optimistic and pessimistic — about the future of journalism. I myself can no longer stand this alternation between apocalypse (which has been the rule in more recent times) and euphoria (which was once the rule and now survives in small outbreaks).
A good way to try to understand the direction of societies and civilizations is by looking at their past. Whether farce or not, events and trends end up repeating themselves. This does not mean, of course, that they are exact replicas of their predecessors, but some logics do hold.
That’s why I liked the article “Why the golden age of newspapers was the exception, not the rule” so much, published in the Nieman Lab and authored by John Maxwell Hamilton and Heidi Tworek. According to the authors, the “golden” period of journalism — from the 1940s to the 1980s — was an exception in the centenary trajectory of this professional and economic activity.
Press in the 20th Century: Exorbitant Profits
During this period, the press was a big deal. The print media, the text says, was “one of the most lucrative businesses in the world.” Newspapers had annual profits of about 12 percent. Some reached an astonishing 30 percent. The authors offer the comparison: supermarkets offered 2 percent in profits and department stores 4 percent. “Owning a newspaper was basically a license to print money,” Hamilton and Tworek write.
It all fell apart with the arrival of the internet, you already know it. Content distribution, advertising, news consumption, it all changed. And here we are, where the number of people employed as journalists in the US has fallen by more than 50 percent compared to 1990. Bad news, no doubt.
However, as we zoom out of our camera, we see that we may be returning to a once familiar scenario. One in which the press exists, but in which it is scattered, dedicated to niches and supported by various business models that are nothing like those of the “golden years.” The article recounts this well-known but forgotten story in which political parties finance tabloids and the news still has a market, though smaller than we are used to.
Newspapers: Important, But Not for Everyone
Newspapers will still be important, the authors warn, but not for everyone. This phrase may sound elitist at first glance, but Hamilton and Tworek make it clear that such “golden years” are revered mainly by white men because “Many citizens — women and African-Americans, to take just two examples — often did not see themselves in news reporting and had few opportunities to shape it.”
On the one hand, the decadence of the mass media market that peaked in the 20th century is a harbinger of difficulties in finding new ways to make money from journalism. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to create models in which the concentration of capital and attention is an opportunity for previously silenced voices to emerge and influence public debate.
Obviously, many other factors have the potential to affect this equation, such as technology platforms and their business models, government interference, economic, social and political crises. Journalism does not operate in a vacuum. That is why I see the need for reconstruction of this narrative based on the supposed failure and the announced end of journalism.
The birth of new models is possible
Perhaps what we are seeing is the end of a hegemonic model of almost absolute domination of markets and audiences (or at least one where those are the ultimate goals). It is plausible that new logics of distribution and financing of journalism, based on smaller scales and departing from more specific interests, can emerge — although the public service mission will hardly cease to be among the values of this activity by definition.
Here, we enter the realm of possibilities and leave facts for a minute. But there are examples of markets that seemed destined for sunset and managed to survive, albeit reconfigured. And in many of these cases, these markets have become (somewhat) more accessible than they once were. I’ll end this article with one question: who is interested in decreeing the death of journalism? The end of “truth” favors which groups in our society?
I will not answer that at this time. These are complex questions that require theoretical rigor so they do not become an arsenal in the politicized rhetoric of debates about the role and relevance of the press debates. For now, I am content with Hamilton and Tworek’s historical insight and their not at all apocalyptic auspices.
Read the full article here: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/why-the-golden-age-of-newspapers-was-the-exception-not-the-rule
