SCOTT- A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism

A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism
Ben Scott
Television New Media 2005; 6; 89
DOI: 10.1177/1527476403255824

Abstract

This article documents the history of online journalism, charting its rise with the internet boom of the mid-1990s and its subsequent decline and stabilization within the present news media market. This history is situated within the larger trajectories of contemporary journalism, paying particular attention to changes in the existing political economic structure of the industry as it assumes digital form, the resultant variations in content and presentation, and the implications for the health of the free press. In the final analysis, this article argues that the move to an online format has exacerbated negative trends that have dogged print journalism for decades. It also extends an existing critique of hyper-commercial journalism by developing the arguments to treat the new institutions and conventions of the digital marketplace.

Conclusion

The picture presented in this article is a grim one. The state of journalism is bad and getting worse. The clash between profit seeking and public service has not been swept away by the internet but rather made more acute. Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001) concluded bitterly about the conflict between market values and public service, “We are facing the possibility that independent news will be replaced by self-interested commercialism posing as news” (p. 13). The technology once deemed to be a possible savior has emerged as a tool of the very interests at the root of the crisis. The boom and bust cycle of the new economy did not produce a democratized media with decentralized news production and a more informed polity. Rather, it resulted in a hard-nosed set of business strategies that is rapidly handing even greater control over public information to an ever-decreasing number of media corporations. Concentration of ownership, consolidation of production, and homogenization of cross-media content have become the orders of the day. Within the industry, the profession of journalism is constricting and altering in its modes of production—favoring a new breed of cross-media talent churning out a slate of prefabricated, repackaged, and multimedia-friendly content. Standards of quality and comprehensiveness are slipping even further, even as corporate directives unabashedly hold editors to account.
As a result, bold infringements on principles of diversity, comprehensive representation, and public responsibility are being passed off as financial necessities and covered over by branding campaigns and more entertaining production values in the newsroom. Meanwhile, the heady promise of free information has also been squashed. Systematically, America’s most trusted news sources are walling off ever-increasing portions of news sites and pricing them in the marketplace. In the digital arena, advertisers have been given even more power to determine the direction of journalism in the future. Though good journalism still manages to appear thanks to conscientious reporters and editors, the economic logic that determines the nature of the system and the trajectory of its future in multimedia, online distribution works to reduce their opportunities and the resources at their disposal. There does remain a great deal of hope and promise in a second tier of independent and alternative information providers—from citizen journalism to web logs to online community organizations—but in the context of a reinstated, strengthened media monopoly, it must be a guarded hope, not a triumphant one.

NOTES (ed. GGA)

This article addresses the impact of digital network technology on American journalism.
It is both
•    a short history of the past decade of the internet news business and
•    an analysis of the current activities in the industry and the marketplace.

In some ways, this analysis is a measured response to the optimistic proclamations about media and journalism that escorted the uneven but unquestionably monumental development of the internet.

[T]he task at hand is to extend the existing critical scholarship on journalism and information technology to seriously and thoroughly examine the influence of the internet—particularly now that it has attained a more stable presence in society.

The answer to the question of what network technology will bring to journalism cannot be answered adequately without a deep investigation of the real complexities hidden beneath the oft-spouted generalities of both critics and celebrants.
To that end, this analysis sits on the shoulders of two separate but related lines of argumentation:
(1)    journalism is in crisis, as told by journalists, and
(2)    the political economic structure of the media system and its commercial architects are to blame, as told by journalists, critics, and scholars.

To begin, it is essential to recall the depths to which journalism sunk in the 1990s, before and during the rise of the internet.

For well over a decade, it has become increasingly clear that the public service mission of democratic journalism has been abandoned by the commercial press in favor of expanding profit margins already swollen to levels of 20 percent to 30 percent.

In practice, this has meant shackling the quality of a news organization to the fortunes of the equity market, almost inevitably sacrificing long term credibility for short-term returns.

As a result, and despite a near constant outcry from disillusioned journalists, most editors have seen
•    a striking decline in costly (though essential) journalistic practices such as investigative reporting, foreign correspondence,
•    maintaining a large and diverse staff of reporters, and
•    performing as the watchdog of the political and economic seats of power—which increasingly underwrite their erstwhile media adversaries.

Less costly and more saleable trends have emerged such as
•    sensationalism,
•    confrontational mock debates,
•    low-budget and
•    single-coverage fare,
•    disproportionate coverage of marketable business news,
•    homogenized content spread across commonly owned media,
•    blurred distinctions between editorial and advertising content, and
•    an extensive reliance on press releases and publicity from government agencies and corporations to fill the news hole.

In the clutter of advertiser-friendly infotainment, the complexities of serious political coverage are often subordinated to entertainment values and squeezed to the margins—where they are more easily shaped into predictably shallow and homogeneous forms privileging image over issue.

Over time, patterns of selective coverage (notably guided by omission) have emerged that project and reinforce as normative imbalanced attitudes toward social institutions, cultural practices, and economic structures.

Journalism has much more in common today with the elites it supposedly regulates than with the public on whose behalf it supposedly speaks.

By the mid-1990s, heavy resistance had developed within the ranks of journalists themselves, represented notably by the Committee of Concerned Journalists and the “public journalism” movement.

But well-intentioned reform efforts have proven no match for the juggernaut of a news industry racing to the bottom line, even in the open-communication era of the internet, though technological developments have played a critical role in this clash.

Both the critics and proponents of the status quo saw the internet as a great opportunity.

•    The former [critics]hoped it would alleviate or redress the conditions of crisis and lift journalism back into its hallowed role as public servant.
•    The latter [proponents] saw it as a vast new market, a streamlined delivery system, and a rhetorically legitimate way to deflect the claims of public service journalism to an enclave in cyberspace.

The web
•    has become a convenient way to silence critics,
•    to pretend to have resolved the crisis overnight, and
•    to advance the newsroom policies that have done the most damage—but this time under the radar of public attention focused on techno-utopias.

In theory, the internet does hold the potential to change the way information is produced and consumed.
•    With an instantaneous, unlimited supply of easily accessible information on every topic under the sun,
•    each citizen may essentially become a self-employed gatekeeper.
•    What’s more, low production costs have inspired millions to self-publish and
•    millions more to read alternative content outside the mainstream.
•    The monopoly on public knowledge long held by elite media outlets could, over time, possibly destabilize and empower individuals and their communities.
•    The public may finally be able to use journalism as it was intended,
o    as a set of guidelines and talking points that
o    convene a discussion among a democratic citizenry.

The captains of the news industry have grown bolder.
•    Because of absent established public expectations in this medium—and
•    using the existence of alternative citizen journalism as a convenient foil.

They have
•    concentrated production,
•    limited coverage, and
•    laid in a course that promises to further restrict the number of voices in the mainstream of the political discourse.


In any discussion of online, or digital, journalism, it is important to begin with an understanding of the context in which it has developed and is developing.

Online journalism is currently a supplement and a complement to the dominant print and broadcast news media (Regan 2000).

There is still considerable debate over whether the internet
•    will prove to be a new medium at all or, rather, more simply
•    serve as a better tool for distribution (Kramer2002).

The digital medium for news proves to be both
•    representative of trends in conventional media but also
•    a harbinger of future convergent forms.


Digitized news has defied all predictions.
•    It has produced innovative new forms of information production and distribution.
•    It has demanded new business models,
•    threatened complacency, and
•    responded to innovation.

It is at the same time
•    the last citadel of the technological revolutionaries and
•    the driving force behind the most alarming anti democratic developments in the commercial media system.


•    Though there were failed efforts at digitizing text-based content in the 1980s,
•    the real explosion of online journalism occurred with the introduction of the first commercial web browsers, Netscape in1994 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in 1995.
•    By 1996, most news outlets, print and broadcast, had a web presence.

At that time, their content was generally limited to what the industry now calls “shovelware,” text/video/audio that have been “repurposed” from the original form for web publication without changing substance. (Most online news still falls into this category.)

However, the online form offered new ways of consuming the same journalism.
•    Content was grouped topically, often presented as a list of headlines and leads with a hyperlink directed to the rest of the story.
•    Toolbars allowed quick linking to different sections of stories from the main page as well as between pages deeper in the site.
•    Users could “drill down” into the depths of a story by following intertextual links to find follow-up and related material from that day or from previous days.
•    Most online sites archived the news, producing essentially a massive database of information easily accessible to users via direct hyperlinks or search engines.
•    Linking between the reports on the same story over a period of time was just as easy as linking between headlines.
•    Using the unlimited space available on the web, context, primary documentation, and original web-only commentary could be added to the standard news.

•    Editors also quickly actualized a twenty-four-hour news cycle, publishing breaking news instantly, scooping print and broadcast sources and their “slow” production process.
•    Other unique digital features debuted, such as
o    web boards,
o    chat rooms, and
o    opportunities for readers to interact directly with the journalists.
•    Options to customize the main page of the news site to individual tastes were also quick to develop, as were features that e-mailed out headlines and breaking news to registered readers. Such a diversity of options appeared to be a user wonderland.
•    Add multimedia to this mix of possibilities, and the digital news looked to be just the revolutionary force its champions had predicted.

•    There were also the enticing little matters of
o    lower production costs and a
o    promising climate for advertising and commerce. Publishing the news on the web costs roughly half of delivering print copy (Harper 1998, 70).



Actually making money proved troublesome.
•    In their enthusiasm not to miss the boat, many news divisions invested in the technology full  throttle without properly considering the fiscal risks.
•    Unlike other commercial ventures in the online world, journalism had no sustainable product in and of itself.
•    News on its own has never been profitable.



Though revenue in the news business comes partly from subscription and sales, it comes predominantly from advertising dollars that are protected at all costs.

News has traditionally functioned as a natural monopoly.
•    High barriers to entry,
•    operation in an economy of scale,
•    centralized information production and distribution, and
•    heavy reliance on the advertising revenues drawn to the biggest players
have always served as the balancing forces in an otherwise unstable market.

This potential instability in the business model coupled with
the uncertainties of the new medium
proved to be deep water for management.

Suddenly, there were
•    almost no barriers to entry into the online news market (anyone with web publishing software could post a site with news content),
•    information production and distribution no longer had an obvious need for centralization (except for the inertia of the status quo),
•    the normative climate of the internet rejected any mention of charging subscription fees for content, and
•    the value of advertising online was hardly a confident truism.

If this was not enough trouble, the traditional news media were facing competition from new and unusual places.

•    First and foremost were the portals, especially AOL and Yahoo. Even though these sites produced no actual journalism themselves, they functioned as “aggregators,” collecting links and leads from other news sources, filtering them into topical categories (e.g., headlines, sports, entertainment, politics, etc.), and presenting them on the main pages of the most high-traffic sites on the web.
•    In addition, traditionally distinct segments of the news industry itself, print (dailies, weeklies, and magazines) and broadcast (networks, cable, and radio), found themselves competing head to head for users and advertisers.
•    Furthermore, the internet is a global medium. …With so many news vendors to choose from, many users opted out of grazing around, preferring the short, simple format of the aggregators that proffer something of everything but not too much of anything.

The news wires blossomed in this market.

Through sophisticated content management systems (CMSs), which could be mapped on to their existing systems, a company like Reuters could take better advantage of their 2,300 reporters in 160 countries.

In the past, only a fraction of the millions of words the wires produce each day could be passed along and used by client news providers. Now, this sea of data no longer need pass across an editor’s desk but is entered by reporters into a commonly accessible, networked database. Intelligent bots in the system then automatically search, tag, and meta-tag each individual article, identifying its topic and content according to preset distinguishing characteristics.


Clients no longer depend on the editors at the Associated Press or Reuters to gatekeep the news.


Of course, the most heralded source of competition for the traditional news providers (though in the end the least impressive challengers) came from the start-up, web-only news outlets.

Alongside these came a huge volume of non-profit, non-commercial enterprises. Sometimes based out of small pre-existing publications, institutions, community organizations, or social groups, these forums vary in style and content, running the gamut of the political spectrum and providing every cultural niche with its own unique voice … hybrid non profit journalism sites that offer alternative perspectives. These range from
•    web logs, also called “blogs”—run by amateur as well as professional journalists—
•    to alternative content aggregators specializing in partisan news commentary that draw contributions from professional journalists, experts, and concerned citizens and provide links to information resources elsewhere on the web.


In the dot-com boom between 1995 and 2000, almost everyone in the news business went online, and almost no one made any money.
By early 2000, the start-up capital that had floated the independents was either gone or going fast. The online divisions of major news organizations were deeply in the red with no end in sight. A mad scramble ensued as everyone hustled to find profitable strategies before they went out of business. The dot-com bust dove into free fall by midsummer 2000.

It turned out that
•    it was almost as expensive to produce high quality journalism online as it was in the brick and mortar world—
•    except no one was willing to pay for content on the web.

Only the most exclusive content could be sold to subscribers, as headline news was all too available for free.
What could be saved in production and distribution expenses was lost in the total lack of sales and inadequate advertising revenue.

In consequence, the market contracted.

By contrast, most of the non profit sites, institutional zines, and blogs not only survived but flourished.
•    Maintained either by volunteer labor or user support, these sites did not have the burden of providing comprehensive coverage alone.
•    Their existence was predicated on the uniqueness of their content or approach.

At the most basic level, the problem with the business model for online journalism is one of supply and demand. Supply has badly exceeded demand (Small 2000).
•    The exact same content that news outlets sell in print publications has been disseminated so widely by so many producers and aggregators that its value has been driven to zero.
•    The media oligopoly held in place by expensive production and geographic markets did not fly online.
•    [W]hen there are two players in the news market offering the same content but drawing revenue from different sources, competition will be uneven and the threshold of scarcity necessary to produce value will be undermined. (…. [one] makes all of its money from entertainment content, user fees, and advertising & provides a customizable aggregated news service to its twenty million customers for free, [the] other pure news outlets try to charge for similar content.)

[The news industry] … was not necessarily worrying to lose subscription-based revenue altogether, considering that advertising already funded up to 100 percent of some news organizations, and the internet was thought to be an advertising gold mine. However, the value of advertising online also plummeted toward zero, particularly on any site not in the top twenty most visited.


Essentially, online news needs some value-added element that it can use to market itself in distinction to the gazillion other news purveyors plugged into the news wires—anything to make a site “stickier” to surf-numbed eyes.

The content that is valuable enough to sell profitably is “disaggregated” from the bulk of coverage that appears in similar forms across countless web sites. It is walled off in content niches such as porn, financial advice, or consumer reports.

In the second tier of news providers, those non-profit or non-commercial outlets based around issues, communities, social groups, institutions, and individuals … it is the reason for their existence—to provide a service that was not already there. They do not carry the burden of redefining the value of their content to justify their existence in the marketplace, say nothing of their purpose in regard to public service.


Considering the forces that have driven them to the brink, it is a great irony that the monopoly news providers—media giants of enormous political and economic power—have been forced to redefine the condition of their hold over news production.


•    On one hand are other media properties, particularly the entertainment-based web portals (sometimes owned by the same parent as news outlets), which have undercut the value of mainstream news by highlighting its uniform banality, reducing it to a set of ubiquitous headlines.

•    On the other hand are the legions of small -to medium-sized web-based news sites, providing commentary from professionals and citizens alike on a whole range of specific topics. They draw popularity by explicitly foregrounding the value of particular insights, political opinions, or entertainment appeal that they uniquely provide.

… the movement afoot in mainstream online journalism is
•    toward further consolidation, convergence, and
•    innovative ways to cordon off portions of the news world
•    to sell products and services
•    that attract audiences and then in turn to
•    rent those audiences more lucratively to advertisers.

Essentially, what is happening in the world of online journalism today is a shakeout.

The search for a profitable business model that will ensure long-term security is no longer a mad scramble; it is a grinding resolve.

However, the purveyors of free news still pose a problem for those firms that want to sell similar content.

Consequently, step 2 is a firm rejection of the long-standing notion that consumers will not pay for news content on the web. Regardless of the fact that polls consistently return majorities denying they will pay up, news providers have decided the future will be otherwise, like it or not.

The new media business model that has turned the trick relies on two central elements:
(1)    restructuring the production of news to use technology to cut costs and
(2)    the development of multiple micro-revenue streams that are insignificant on their own but sustaining when taken together.

Tellingly, neither of these changes has anything to do with improving quality.

The consensus in the business office seems to be that the editors have failed to produce content that people will buy, so marketers will have to be sent into the breach to dress the line and move it forward by any means necessary.

The first of these strategies, systemic restructuring, operates through a pattern of changes loosely known as “convergence.”

Convergence in journalism does not refer primarily to the technological reduction of all communication to a digital form. It refers to a new strategy in the economic management of information production and distribution.

The direction of the changes is administrative, and its raison d’être is profit. Positive or negative results in the quality of journalism are largely externalities.

The most obvious of these structural changes for journalists is the convergence of newsrooms.

•    Though each property retains practical editorial independence, they are managed from a centralized multimedia assignment desk in the middle of the building.
•    Editors passing information across media channels are able to minimize the number of reporters sent to the scene of an event.
•    Features written on one medium can be repurposed to appear on another.
•    Consumers of the television news can be directed to the newspaper or the web site, and vice versa.
•    Scoops are handed across media depending on the timing and type of the story to maximize market value.

Many journalists and editors on staff maintain that more good journalism is reaching more people because of convergence (Carr 2002a, 2002b).

The central tenets of this wave of convergence are a greater degree of cooperation between the editorial board and the marketing department in the promotion of stories across media and the streamlining of distribution and presentation in multiple media from centralized production facilities (Breckenridge 2000).



Since competition seems only to have brought financial misery to everyone in the dot-com bust, “news outlets are forming content-sharing partnerships at a dizzying clip, each trading on its own strengths” (Shepard 2000, 24). …  beyond intrafirm cooperation to interfirm combination.

The central ideas are the same:
•    established media companies blend and cross-promote content and brands,
•    mutually reduce production and labor costs by reducing duplicate reporting, and
•    achieve greater leverage at the bargaining table with advertisers.


A related form of convergence in the news industry more closely resembles the technological definition of the term. This is the development of digital news networks within media firms with multiple news holdings. …

Internally,
•    a company plugs all of its holdings into a common CMS, software that
•    swiftly aggregates, collates, and distributes
•    digitized text, audio, and video
•    between the nodes on the corporate network.

The virtues of this common production platform
•    allow for cross-media content sharing,
•    the elimination of duplicate reporting, and
•    cross-promotional opportunities.

All of these manifestations of convergence represent the recentralization of content production—swimming upstream against the natural facilities of a decentralized network technology that has weakened monopoly control over the news.

Convergence strategies are also attractive because they reintroduce an element of scarcity to types of news coverage that were formerly commonplace. Shared content means fewer voices covering important events stretched across the network of coordinated news providers. These providers, no longer in direct competition with one another, might then choose to bond together into a coalition of news providers whose content might be worth paying for because of its removal from public access.

(1)    Newsroom convergence,
(2)    cross-media content sharing, and
(3)    digital news networks

are thus mutually supportive developments as they broaden the reach of media properties while decreasing expenses.


Another potential strategy of structural change in pursuit of long-term profitability would be partnerships with content carriers. Securing a partnership in advance with these wired landlords might ensure that upload costs were discounted or waived, providing an essential advantage in the news market by permitting lower prices without lower profits.
 In such a system in which regulation of the network itself served as a gatekeeper of online content, it stands to reason that the number of providers would dramatically drop—much like in a comparable scenario playing out in the realm of digital television.


The second and simultaneous path to profitability involves the cultivation of multiple streams of micro-revenue. In a strategy known as “modulated experimentation,” companies are walling off content piece by piece and offering up creative new services, testing with calculated trial runs to see which veins might be profitably tapped (Lasica 2002a).
The idea is
•    to draw visitors with free content under a well-known brand and
•    then “tempt them with paid material” (Mangalindan 2002).
•    This premium content is offered up for a relatively small fee (micropayment) and
•    charged by credit card over the internet.
•    All of these tiny streams of income are
o    either forms of micro-payment (subscription or pay-per-view), paid services,
o    or creative advertising.

•    The first involves shelling out cash for access to particular pieces of content or particular services on a pay-per-use basis.
•    The second involves registering with a flat fee for general access to an entire site or selected portions of a site.
•    The third involves a growing number of new ways marketers have dreamed up to sell audience attention.

Trends in the industry make it clear that the days of totally free web content are rapidly coming to a close.
•    Some content will remain open access on news sites, such as headlines, breaking news, and general interest— nonexclusives.
•    Everything else will be classified as premium content and sold on a per-item or subscription basis.

Revenue from micro-payment operates on the assumption that what the editors want readers to read will be free, but anything the reader wants to read will cost money.

[A form of micro-payment involves PAY-PER-VIEW]

•    Often, this pay-per-view content is financial information, sports analysis, or feature journalism.
•    But it can also be “historical feature packages” constructed from subscription-only archives, “op-ed collections,” or simply access to the full text of all the articles on a site (Dizikes2002).

•    Consumers who can be persuaded to buy access once are then hit with promotional e-mails to become a subscriber.


A second form of micro-payment involves EXCLUSIVE SERVICES.
•    Eg. subscriptions to a service that will transmit content onto a mobile, handheld device. This content will, of course, include advertising, which in the context of a well-defined (because of registration information), affluent user group (i.e., those who own mobile platforms) will draw a premium rate.

•    … broadband technology opens up new avenues of revenue generation in the form of unique content provision. Sophisticated graphics, audio, and video files can now be sold to consumers on a per-download basis—alluring to multimedia-savvy consumers using technology heavily tilted in its user base toward affluent demographics willing to spend on gadgetry. CNN, ABC, and Fox Sports web sites have begun to charge for some of their video clips (Dizikes 2002; Mangalindan 2002).

•    Other services such as
o    downloadable PDF versions of newspapers,
o    e-mail updates,
o    breaking-news alerts via instant messaging,
o    links with personalized web logs,
o    forums,
o    games, and
o    local news
o    searchable databases of classified ads

have also proven very lucrative, even if they do draw funds away from traditional print sources.


The final stream of revenue is not new, though it is the largest and the most difficult to stabilize: ADVERTISING.

Moreover, instead of coming in large-scale deals, ad dollars are trickling in on a case-by-case basis.

Sites now feature more than just banner ads;
•    they have animated banner ads (called “beyond the banner” ads) that move and dance, sometimes together with the logo of the news site. In addition, there have been
•    experiments with pop-up window ads that fill the top of the screen with an ad window whenever a particular link is activated. As users have become inured to these,
•    the pop-under window has made its debut, filling the bottom of the screen— sometimes directly after the pop-up window has been closed.

Though many users consider these tactics invasive, these types of ads dramatically increase the click-through rates.

Other attempts at advertising integration include
•    using commercial images and messages as wallpaper for news content pages,
•    bringing commercial sponsors into the headline space of feature sections,
•    saturating toolbars with links to e-commerce outlets, and
•    placing an advertising screen between the links that connect a headline and the body of a story (Finberg and Stone 2001, 45-57).


A number of new sites have begun to package many of the latest features of the new micro-revenue streams into very lucrative online news enterprises. Jonathan Klein (2000), a longtime CBS executive, has left the network and started Feedroom.com.
•    Feedroom has no problem gathering the video content from more than thirty television partners.
•    Content is fed into a CMS, which automatically digitizes, encodes, and tags each clip with seventy-five distinct identifying pieces of information before it …
•    … logs them into the database.


Its service allows a user …
•    to search video feeds for topical news items
•    from any broadcast carried by the site.
•    Everything is archived and ready for instant playback.

Consumers typically spend three times as long on the video site than on a conventional news site. Furthermore, extended use puts into play Feedroom’s version of
•    “collaborative filtering,”
•    suggesting which stories might be of interest based on past usage habits and the usage patterns of other customers with overlapping tastes or demographics.


More accurately, however, these personalization services are customization services.
They are designed to sell, not to serve.

Feedroom is
•    a hustling, customized interface that
•    does little more than shuffle around the bits of mainstream news
•    in anticipation of consumption patterns and
•    advertiser preferences,
•    never straying from a carefully limited set of stories.

Intelligent agents that scan the web and collect stories regardless of the source that matches content criteria, they are nowhere to be found on mainstream news sites (Lasica 2002c).

It is this fact, coupled with the trends in multistream profit seeking, that points to the most probable future of personalization.

Like Feedroom, the best in personalization options will rapidly become customization services, which is to say they will eventually cost money.

The economic logic of providing consumers with more and more precise, comprehensive, sorted, and searchable information using sophisticated web crawlers leads to a price tag. The better it works, the more it will cost.

[THE OTHER OPTION]

More sophisticated personalization options.
This would involve
•    allowing users to access every web site with news content that permits search and retrieval—
•    porting content that
o    potentially competes with,
o    contradicts, or
o    undermines the news provided by the portal itself or its primary partners.

Naturally, this option would be good for citizen consumers of public journalism, but it would be very bad business.

The citizen-consumer and profit motive–public service dichotomies are hard not to notice.

Powerful economic forces at work in the news industry are set to make sure that at critical points like this, the technology and the normative uses that follow from it follow the corporate strategy.

There seems to be little chance that such a lucrative business opportunity as personalization services would not be put to work for the bottom line, regardless of the potential value to the citizenry squandered in the process.
Exacerbating the Crisis

…. Edward Herman’s (1998) prediction concerning these developments that excoriated any utopian thinking about democratic media and digital technology:

There is no evidence to support this view as regards journalism and mass communication. In fact, one could argue that the new technologies are exacerbating the problem.
•     They permit firms to shrink staff
•    while achieving greater outputs and
•    they make possible global distribution systems, thus
•    reducing the number of media entities.

 Although the new technologies

•    have great potential for democratic communication,
•    left to the market there is little reason to expect the Internet to serve democratic ends. (p. 201; see also McChesney 2000, 176)

What follows are some of the specific causes for concern implicit in Herman’s general prognosis. Though most of them overlap and reinforce one another, I have attempted to tease them apart for the purpose of more careful analysis.

The first place to start looking for the positive or negative impact of the internet on journalism is in its content—what are editors putting on their webpages?

Recalling that current trends are toward infotainment, news for the affluent, corporate and government publicity, and inexpensive, image-over-substance features, the online environment appears to worsen rather than redress the problems. For starters, the vast majority of online content is merely “shovelware,” reproductions of content that appeared in a news organization’s primary distribution channels. Though it is true that the bottomless news hole can support all manner of primary documentation and related content to enrich each and every story, it typically does not. Most commercial providers are hamstrung in their abilities to offer comprehensive coverage because they do not do that as a rule, and it would mean pointing readers toward other media outlets, the last thing a capitalist news organization wants to do.

Second, the economic and political forces that push journalism toward impoverished content in conventional media are just as prevalent, if not more so, in the digital mode.

•    The pressure from the bottom line is so fierce that original content decisions are fundamentally business decisions, not editorial ones.
•    If the stark push of this financial logic were not bad enough, the technology itself makes it worse. Page-view counters allow editors, managers, and advertisers alike to see exactly how many readers visit each story and how long they stay there.
•    Consequently, each topic, each story, and each journalist are subjected to a ruthless market calculus.
•    To that end, the default position learned from decades of commercial news experience is toward sensational fare that brings the titillated and their audience-hungry advertisers or toward pay-per-view premium content that draws affluent subscribers and their target marketers.
•    What is left out is what has always been left out, news and public information affecting the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum.

•    Online news content is very often market-based journalism of the rankest order.
o    Not only does it rebroadcast the existing (very poor) journalism,
o    it often resorts to featuring and expanding on the most outrageous, eye-catching headlines.

Thus, the promise of volume and diversity offered by the internet has turned out to be largely a false prophecy.

More is not better when it is more of the same:


A third major factor that influences the production of online news (and that has played a grave role in the crisis of journalism) is commercial ownership and the business strategy of a management staff responsible not to citizens but to shareholders.

In the online context, the most important issues in this domain are
•    content sharing
o    via corporate partnerships,
o    intrafirm digital news networks, and
o    multimedia newsroom convergence—

practices most common to a handful of impressively large companies with cross-media holdings.

It is a true testament to the power of the big commercial media firms that they are able to reverse the course of network technology—a medium that favors decentralized production and consumption points—and build business models based on recentralizing information production.

However technologically illogical it may seem to use a global network to homogenize rather than diversify news production, it is economics 101. The value of a commodity is directly proportional to its scarcity. To be scarce, a commodity must have characteristics that distinguish it from others like it in the marketplace—or it must have marketing that persuades consumers to imagine such characteristics. Furthermore, the characteristics that define the scarcity must be proprietary to one firm to ensure profits are monopolized.

The dream endgame would be to engineer a cartel of every major branded news provider. This cartel would then coproduce similar or identical content and sell by subscription to consumers persuaded by marketing to believe that this common product was unquestionably superior in quality and value to that of the multitudes of independent online publishers.
These mass audiences would then be used as leverage to corner the market on advertising and ensure that no competitor could glean sufficient advertising revenue to break the monopoly.
Essentially, the idea is to produce the same situation online that exists in conventional media.

Diversity and uncontrolled abundance, the hallmarks of network technology, have therefore become totally anathema.

The internet momentarily threatened to destabilize the media monopoly by undercutting scarcity. Every partisan stripe, every issue of public interest, every social group, and every cultural niche had its own journalism—unorthodox though it may be.
{The media monopoly launched]… counterattack and … the ways in which it could best be carried out: convergence, micro-revenues, and the reconstruction of the media monopoly.

As I have noted,
•    the sweeping wave of corporate partnerships,
•    the rise of digital news networks, and the
•    convergence of multimedia newsrooms within the largest news organization
have together resulted in an increasingly profitable on line news industry.

On the surface, the companies present these changes as if they were a great thing for journalism.
•    What a great thing it will be, they say, when television, radio, newspapers, and digital journalism owned by a single company are all plugged into a common CMS, passing news, features, and opinions back and forth across a global network.
•    What a great thing it will be, they say, when the nation’s best newspapers and broadcast news programs can share content, doubling and tripling the amount of outstanding coverage they can provide in the bottomless digital newshole.
•    What a great thing it will be, they say, when the news rooms with in these proprietary networks and corporate partnerships are condensed into only a handful of multimedia super–news production centers—allowing journalists from every media to learn one another’s trade, share content, and enrich the lives of the public.

To make economic sense (which is the only kind of sense that commercial journalism seriously attends), these changes are not likely to produce positive results for the public, unless it is by accident.

Let’s start with newsroom convergence. …
•    the reality so far is that convergence has not run so smoothly.
•    Journalists have been resistant, and coordination has proven labor intensive.
•    Jobs have not necessarily been cut, even in an economic downturn. … the transition to multimedia newsrooms has meant more work but not more journalists.
•    Even as the quality of the journalism begins to suffer—as reporters saddled with multimedia duties have less time to investigate, check facts, and write good stories—no further staff should be expected. … 
•    At the very least, job descriptions will change. Fewer staffers will be journalists; more will be repackagers.
•    This will mean heavy hits for online staffers whose ranks were already thin.

•    The sensible business move in this context would be to gradually cover fewer and fewer stories that do not lend themselves to convergent distribution.
•    Stretching content across multiple media lends itself easily only to particular types of stories.
•    Journalists focusing more time and energy on cross-media production rather than good reporting can be expected to follow this path of least resistance.
•    Consequently, production values may descend to the lowest common denominator of television news, encouraging more of the same profit-driven content decisions that are exacerbating the crisis in journalism.
•    There will be more crime, sex, scandal, disaster, and regurgitated press releases from official sources in the news… less in-depth coverage on any topic that requires time, effort, and money to produce or that does not play well on all media channels.
•    Web sites will likely be discouraged from producing any extra content that is not of purely sensational or advertiser-friendly value.
•    Moreover, with the focus on immediacy in the digital age, fewer journalists concentrating on speedy delivery in a twenty four-hour news cycle will tend to produce less accurate, more speculative news.

•    … despite the lower production costs and the higher advertising rates leveraged out of an integrated media market—that is, ad space will be sold in more pricey packages across the media platforms that together offer better ratings—higher profits will likely not translate into a reinvestment in content.

The trends toward speed, content repackaging, and superficial topics facilitated by the web make a mockery of the “contextualized journalism” promised by prominent new media analysts.
Multimedia, hyperlinks, dynamic updates, and interconnection with archives of related contextual content have great potential in the abstract but amount to very little if the logic behind business operations runs against the grain of such innovations.

Intrafirm digital news networks operating on sophisticated CMSs can be thought of as devices of newsroom convergence without regard to geography.
•    Instead of cutting/repurposing staff,
•    lowering production costs, and
•    repackaging multimedia content out of
•    a single pool of cross-media friendly journalism
•    in just one market,
it can be done
•    on a nationwide network.

Owners of
•    newspapers,
•    television networks,
•    radio stations, and
•    news web sites
can play to the strengths of each individual organization in their portfolios.

The best stuff from each outlet can be plugged into the network and served upon all the other sites in the system, not to mention feeding back into conventional media production.


In the beginning, as the waters are tested, the strongest journalism (i.e., the most popular and profitable) will be syndicated and served up across the network alongside the existing content in that news sector produced by the local outfit.

The drive is
•    to minimize local production and
•    confine it to those stories that cannot be adequately covered by journalists in the large-market super newsrooms.

Costs are lowered across the board by expending minimum labor and resources to cover all the stories once, rather than pay for diversity or, rather, overlap—as the industry terms it. The very real danger is that this will result in “a sterile, homogenized product lacking soul, personality or purpose” (Lasica 2002d). [of a] standard [that] will inevitably be as low as the public will tolerate. This is because the standard of public service is set according to the demands of private financial interests, both economically and politically.


These corporate networks will service the public only by “diluting the diversity of views in their communities” is impossible to ignore (Lasica 2002d; see also Canadian Journalists for Free Expression 2002).

Production costs for basic coverage must be minimized. This free content must be heavily brand marketed to paper over its homogenization and supplemented by premium services or content with some element of value added that can then be commodified and sold to audiences and indirectly to advertisers. Once again, it means less news covered by fewer journalists stretched over more media channels. … standardization and homogenization are smuggled in under the banner of democracy by focusing only on the expansion of the raw number of outlets, not on the quality of the content that each of them provides. Quantity does not add up to quality. This is not about enriching the public sphere; it is about reducing diversity to such an extent that it can be controlled by a limited number of market players and invested with price-valued scarcity.


Cartel may be an ugly word, but it perfectly describes the logic behind the cross-media corporate partnerships that are springing up between the biggest players in the industry in hopes of capitalizing on synergy.
Not only do partnerships reduce competition, they also open up further opportunities for increasing profits by slashing production costs, content sharing, cobranding, and joint negotiation with major advertisers.

Furthermore, this degree of corporate concentration—involving the intermingling of digital news networks and converging newsrooms— allows for unprecedented scope and power in the media industry.

Further cementing this relationship will be elements of e-commerce that become integrated into news sites. As the wall between business and editorial decisions morphs into a bearhug, selling the news will become a tool in the digital world for selling other things—from books under review to flowers on the obituary page to myriad other possibilities such as movie tickets, music, stocks, and techno-gadgets.

At the micro-level, the power of commercial logic will shape much of the value-added content into carefully target marketed fare. … The much heralded customization services are already turning into premium packages of content appealing mainly to affluent consumers …

… the great problem with the system of micro-payment—it lays a frame of market calculus over each citizen’s political interests in the public democracy. ..
However, journalism exists to serve the public and not an aggregate of the individuals within the public. …
What may be right for me in the market may not be right for us in the democracy, and any system of journalism that privileges the market decisions of the wealthiest “me” without any regard to the collective democratic needs of the “us” has totally skipped out on its public mission.

It is critical that political news remain a public good, not a commodity in the entertainment/information market.
The economics of protecting market-unfriendly hard news from the tyranny of retail offer up the positive externality of a common information pool on which to base public deliberation.


The economic realities of digital journalism also create a number of paradoxes in relation to the technology itself.


Already mentioned is the major contrast at the structural level: centralizing content on a medium that radically facilitates decentralization. As Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001) eloquently put it, “The paradox is that news organizations use expanding technology to chase not more stories but fewer” (p. 141). But there are other glaring deficiencies in the current state of mainstream online journalism vis-à-vis the celebrated predictions of what the technology would allow it to become.

First, there was a great deal of talk about nonlinear story telling.

This technique would allow journalists to link their stories with contextual content, related stories, multimedia additions, customized features, and dynamically updated corrections and updates (Pavlik2001,xiv).
•    This set of e  opportunities—though they have been incorporated in the second tier of journalism sites and to a smaller extent in the best of the main stream sites as simply not panned out, and for obvious reasons.
•    For starters, more content takes more labor and resources to produce. This runs flat up against the trends in the industry toward cutting staff, costs, and extraneous content.
•    Layered, contextualized journalism with adept hand breadth possible only in the limitless expanse of cyberspace has only made an appearance in the mainstream as a specialty feature that is offered for micro-payments, or when additional content is provided already produced and free of charge by corporate or government publicity agencies.

What few extra features are still in the market for free will be removed as soon as a way to squeeze money out of them is discovered.

In addition, users have become accustomed to sampling online news in only the most cursory fashion.
•    This is a direct result of the homogenization of basic news and
•    the disappearance of value-added features into subscription-only enclaves.

It is a self-perpetuating circumstance whereby
•    people do not spend enough time reading news to prompt news providers to enhance the experience, and
•    so long as they fail to enhance the experience, users will not spend much time with it.

The reduction of news headlines to an item worthy of nothing better than window-shopping fits well with the portal sites where news is most often viewed.
•    These sites are little more than digital shopping malls, and
•    the news is just window dressing for the real retail goods on offer.


The paradox of the devaluation of journalism in the midst of the information society on the technology of the information economy is simply stunning.

Instead of actual rich content and thick layers of multimedia data backing up and surrounding every story—features that would actually improve the quality of journalism but cost money to sustain—users are offered gimmicks, stand-ins for actual enrichment pumped up through marketing to seem better than they really are.
•    Chief among these is the ubiquitous, self-congratulatory service of “interactivity.”
o    Chat rooms,
o    discussion forums, and the
o    e-mail addresses of journalists are offered up as the transformative element in digital news.

The argument can easily be made that these forms of interactivity are weak (if not fake), symbolic forms of the true interactive potential of the technology.
•    The phenomenon of real-time instant gratification in chat rooms, message boards, and web forums compromises the true purpose of journalism, which is to guide and facilitate a public deliberation of depth and duration through time and across social strata.
•    The fascination with “real time” has come to elide the glaring lack of community “through-time.”
•    Instant messaging and knee-jerk feedback do not often produce a reasoned debate over important social issues but are far more likely to result in what one critic has called a “barroom brawl” (Sorid 2002).
•    Several news sites have had to close down their chat rooms and message boards because of hostile remarks and low-quality discussion (Finberg and Stone 2001, 63).
•    Journalists rarely respond to reader e-mails at large organizations, even if they bother offering the option. The New York Times actively discourages its journalists from responding to reader e-mail (Finberg and Stone 2001, 10).

That chat rooms have in some cases managed to develop a true sense of community among users is a result of cultivating aspects of the interaction that go beyond the most simple (and most common) application of this techno-gimmick.

•    Building associations with other citizens around
o    values,
o    concerns, or
o    shared information
•    occurs in cyberspace in the same way it does in the real world,
o    by investing time,
o    energy, and
o    commitment.

If online news organizations were serious about fostering community interaction, they would have to abandon the digital shopping mall mentality of how to organize a site and discover the virtues of the digital community.

… one such effort at the Record, a local paper in northern New Jersey.
•    … linked up with as many community organizations as were willing to come on board,
•     offered citizens self-publishing opportunities and
•    carefully maintained and monitored discussion forums, and
•    produced
o    high-quality,
o    multimedia,
o    contextualized journalism.

But such a move would be expensive, a risky business venture for a national conglomerate, contrary to the strategy of concentration and homogenization, and not high on the agenda of any smart business manager.

Moreover, true interactivity makes the journalist’s story the beginning of the public discussion, one that continues through time, challenging, altering, and adding to the original commentary.
This sort of ideological give-and-take does not mesh well with corporate editorial prerogatives.
Jim Hall (2001) concluded,

It is the reason why many branded on line providers offer news in multimedia formats which are as far from being interactive as their newspaper precursors. They neither provide links to their own sources and to other views of the story nor do they offer their readers effective ways of responding or intervening. (p. 38)