Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s Special Projects Editor, attends the www.youngpress.eu conference on the future of journalism.
Thursday 27 October 2011By Paul Lewis
What would be the collective story of Europe’s top young journalists, brought together to ponder the future of journalism? The temptation would be for aspiring journalists to portray themselves as the victims in a “bad news” story. The headline? ‘Journalism Is Dying’.
Across the continent, newspaper circulation is in perpetual decline and advertising revenues are falling, prompting may employers to freeze recruitment and cut staff. Young journalists lucky enough to get jobs are likely to find themselves pressed for time, forced to rewrite press releases and agency copy, and unable to invest time in original reporting.
Some may even ask themselves if their job description remains relevant - in an era when anyone with access to Youtube or Twitter can report news, is even a need for paid journalists? Like all bad news stories, the headline may be sound sensationalist, but probe deeper and the reality is more complex. The dominant narrative about the demise of the media industry is not only crude - it betrays a remarkable truth: in many ways, there has never been a more exciting time to do journalism.
When 100 young journalists gather in Antwerp at the end of this month for a conference supported by the Evens Foundation and StampMedia, they should be optimistic. The same technological transformations that have made news free, and prompted commentators to predict the death of journalism, could in fact be its saviour.
It is true that new era of free digital information does not provide any obvious business model to sustain the newspaper model. But accept that change is inevitable, and the possibilities of the digital era are tantalising. For a start, the exponential increase of information means the boundaries of what it is possible for journalists to find out in a short space of time have massively expanded. Information that would take weeks to discover is searchable in seconds. I’m not just talking about publicly records, documents, images and transcripts. Information that powerful institutions would rather was kept secret is routinely recorded online, often inadvertently. Millions of snippets of information are uploaded each hour, providing a digital footprint of every major news event, from political speeches to natural disasters. The authors of the information will be everyday citizens and, often, they’re willing to collaborate in journalistic enterprises. That can mean that journalists can work as the lynch pins, managing wider networks of citizens, many with specific insights and areas of expertise, who want to help the journalistic process.
The digital era could be one in which there may be fewer paid journalists, but far more people actually doing journalism. Already nearly everyone self-publishes, via either Facebook or Twitter. And new breed of journalist is emerging to sift the chaos of ‘news’ that appears online each second. These “anchor journalists” are undertaking the role traditionally occupied by newspaper editors, sifting, sorting and attributing importance to other people’s stories. At the centre of this changing landscape is Twitter, which is transforming journalism. Editors no longer stare at news feeds of agencies such as Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg to find out what is going in the world; many now use the collective insight of the 100 million users on Twitter. When riots took hold in England this summer, with looting and arson spreading throughout London and other cities, it was Twitter that saw the greatest spike in traffic.
Hundreds of thousands of people turned to the micro-blogging site for real-time and reliable information and - crucially - it was journalists on Twitter who they trusted most. For me, reporting on the frontline over four nights, Twitter was the first tool for reporting, as well as the principal source for finding out what was going on elsewhere. The 35,000 new followers I accumulated were not just interested in passively observing Twitter updates. They wanted to be part of a conversation and, at times, even collaborate in the news-gathering process. Like editors, they asked questions, gave feedback and corrected errors. Some people argued the digital era would see paid journalists replaced by an army of citizen reporters. The riots proved otherwise: people might consume news differently, but they still want it told straight, and by reporters on the ground. The civil unrest in England also disproved the myth that journalism’s audiences are dwindling. On just one day, the Guardian’s riot coverage attracted more than 5.5 million users - a record. This, for a newspaper that usually sells 250,000 print copies a day. The audience is no longer bound by who has access to a newspaper stand in the UK, and the desire to depart with £1.20. The readership is now global and constantly changing, with around a third of users reading our content in the United States, and over 10% of our digital traffic coming via our mobile site. The truth, then, is that the digital era could be ushering a golden age for journalism. Today’s generation of young journalists can contemplate a future in which the possibilities of what can be reported are massively expanded.
They will occupy a new space, but one that enables them to elicit the help of thousands of experts around the world, often within seconds. And the sale of printed words on paper may be consigned to history, audiences could be larger and more engaged than journalists would ever have imagined. That, at least, is good news.
Paul Lewis is the Guardian’s Special Projects Editor, he will attend the www.youngpress.eu conference on the future of journalism.