McNAIR - Existing boundaries in journalism already dissolving, will be eroded further.

Journalism in the 21st century   evolution, not extinction
Brian McNair
Journalism 2009; 10; 347
DOI: 10.1177/1464884909104756

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NOTES (ed GGA)

• The dominant model for journalism in the 20th century was a trained professional delivering objectively validated content to a reader (or viewer, or listener). There was also room for a journalism of analysis and opinion delivered by an authoritative public voice, where authority was determined by consensually accepted forms of organizational, professional and cultural status.

• This model began to break down in the latter half of the 20th century, with the rise of 'New', literary journalism in the 1950s and 1960s, and the popularity of subsequent forms of first-person documentary on TV and in cinema, where objectivity and subjectivity were deliberately blurred in the text. Linked to this was the hybridization of journalism seen in the rise of the docu-soap in the 1990s, followed by the proliferation of reality TV formats.

• Generic and discursive instability did not replace the standard model of objective journalism, but challenged its methods, and its truth claims, by advancing alternative modes of accessing the real and translating it into public knowledge and understanding.
  They were rooted in epistemological advances, and the 20th-century discovery, made first in natural science (physics) and then in the humanities and social sciences, that Objectivity and Truth were not absolute quantities which could be extracted by the application of the correct procedures.

• That model is now fragmenting entirely, as we move further into a 21st-century media environment which is to an unprecedented degree networked, globalized and participatory.
  Not only is the dominant model of journalism changing dramatically, but the big 20th-century carrier media - print and analogue broadcasting - are heading for extinction, or at least marginalization, like vinyl records in the age of the CD (or, in times to come, the CD in the age of the digital download).

• Journalism will not die out in this environment, because it is needed on so many social, political and cultural levels. Journalism has a future. It will evolve, as it has evolved already, from the antique styles of the early newsbooks to the gloss and sheen of the modern primetime news bulletin. But how will it change, and will change be for the better, or for the worse? Could liberal journalism as we have known it die out in the century to come, and would that matter? It would, but I don't think it will.

• First of all, the future of journalism is often conflated with the future of a particular journalistic medium, currently print.
  Newspapers are in crisis, it's said with good reason, and thus so too is journalism. But print is merely a vehicle for delivering content, associated with a particular stage in technological development.
  .....

• Journalism... will have to adapt and evolve, and this process is not without pain, but it will survive. Journalism is about entertainment, recreation, pleasure, but also and centrally about the maintenance of good government, environmental surveillance, citizenship, and just being in the world. 
• Journalism is not a luxury item dreamed up by media barons in the 19th century, but a key ingredient in the social cement of liberal, democratic capitalism ever since the bourgeois revolutions. You cannot have one without the other, and for as long as democracy is accepted as a governing principle, liberal journalism will coexist with it.

How is it likely to change, then? A series of transitions are by now well underway: 

• from analogue to digital; 
• from passive consumption of content to user-producer interaction; 
• from stationary to mobile platforms (newspapers and magazines are mobile media par excellence, of course, and for this reason will survive longer than some predict, but more people are consuming more of their journalism on the move, through laptops, iPods, mobile phones); and 
• from local to global (a process which began decades ago, but is now accelerating with the coincidence of internet and 24-hour transnational news channels).

• As a consequence of these trends, and the related effects of the technologies underpinning them, the production of journalism has been decentralized and diversified. The authority of the traditional trained professional is under challenge from gifted amateurs, be they bloggers in Gaza or Twitters in Mumbai. The control of the centre (and central political authorities too) is undermined (China is wrestling hardest with this trend), and a more chaotic communication environment is coming into existence.

• This is positive, because chaos can be creative and liberating. It can also be confusing, and destructive of things we might wish to preserve. In the 21st century, when so many are producing so much 'journalism', most of it free online, how will we recognize quality amidst the quantity of information available? 
• If the professional-amateur boundary dissolves, who or what will do the sense-making and the sifting of complex reality which has been one of journalism's key functions? 
• Put simply, how will we know who to trust? ...

• No one knows, and many news organizations are going to go under before answers emerge. We can predict only that advertising revenue will follow the audience, and then hope that the online environment will generate its own methods of quality control. There are signs that the internet has a way of doing that, which is encouraging. Journalistic organizations, at the same time, must invest in making their brands synonymous with quality in the globalized information marketplace. Content will be king in the century ahead, but content associated with a quality brand such as the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, or the Wall Street Journal will be that bit more regal.

Meantime, existing boundaries - 

• between professional and amateur, 
• between platforms, 
• between sub-genres of journalism, 
• between the journalisms of information and entertainment - 

already dissolving, will be eroded further. 

Navigating this emerging cultural chaos will be confusing, and disturbing at times, at least for the generation which grew up in the more settled times of the late 20th century. But it will be exciting, and rich with possibility.