Democratization of News and the Future of Democracy

Neuman, W. Russell, Caruso, Denise, Ureneck, Louis, Fouhy, Ed, Wilson, Jean Gaddy, Nieman Reports

I really appreciated Allee's talk because she and I agree on one thing, which is that one of the biggest mistakes media companies are making today is to look at the on-line environment as just another package for them to distribute the information that they already generated.

Although the information itself may be the same to some degree, interactive media, it's really important to notice, is fundamentally different from mass media. I'm going to not quote McLuhan again because I know we're getting a little tired of that. But very simply put, the message of this new medium is I want what I want and nothing more."

A low estimate of more than 20 million on-line consumers today choose and control the information they want. They assume interactivity and an active role in selecting precisely what they want to read or see. So you might say that interactive media is transforming our democratic marketplace of ideas into a shopping list of topics and key-word searches. Now what does that mean? Is the interactive media buying public better informed than we shlubs who still read newspapers? I don't know, and I don't think that they know either.

But, since I do believe that the successful practice of good journalism in whatever media is one of the best ways to ensure an effective democracy. I'm going to address only three issues, although I'm sure there are at least 20 more, about electronic media that I believe will have a profound effect on how successful journalism can continue to exist in a networked world.

The first thing I'm going to talk about is the proliferation of information on networks. In order to keep this brief, I'm going to assume that we agree that the means of media production and increasingly electronic media distribution, are in the hands of the people, as well as the media companies. So, desktop publishing, fax machines and modems and increasingly desktop video and audio editing tools are really within reach of almost anyone, whether they buy them themselves or borrow them.

The result in print media is hundreds of new magazines, newsletters and alternative weeklies, as well as all the things that you get at Christmas and around the holidays from everyone who has a Macintosh and a laser printer with 4,000 fonts all used on the same page.

Now, the news business was one of the first beneficiaries of electronic production. But, ironically the efficiencies of electronic distribution have already shrunk its street value. By keeping an eye on the national wires you can take great advantage of your time zone and your competitor's scoops and easily get your version of their story into the same day's paper or broadcast.

Take the wire concept a step further into the on-line world, and it's an even grimmer picture. On a network that carries news wires from several news organizations, as most of them do, news has virtually no brand recognition. You type in the key word "news on America" on-line, for example, and you see screen after screen of headlines with no source ID. PR News Wire, The Mercury News, and a column by one computer columnist or another all look the same on the computer screen if they contain the correct topic or key word. In today's popular electronic news environment there's no equivalent of a newspaper's distinctive flag or typeface or a TV network's logo.

Last, and perhaps scariest I think to people in here and scariest to me for other reasons, is the exponential increase in raw information that's being created by regular non-journalist le. Reams of this so-called news are being posted everyday in news groups on the Internet and on various on-line services. Ordinary people can expect to be deluged with increasing amounts of this pseudo-news and it will become increasingly difficult for real news organizations to be heard above the din.

The second thing I want to talk about is on-demand information. As the sheer volume of information continues to increase, people automatically recoil from the overload. increasingly, they are dealing with it by using on-line technology to make contact with only the specific topics that they request. As you know, this is called information on demand. This has some troubling components for those of us who believe it's dangerous to let the people choose their news.

If I want only to know the latest about Barry Diller and Time Wamer, or the very latest about AIDS research, I may not ever see what's happening in Rwanda or the Supreme Court if on-line is the only place I'm getting my news. And even if I did want to be more broadly informed today, I can't really ask the network to tell me about something that I didn't know happen. Natural disasters. Would I have known yesterday to ask whether there was an obituary for Jackie Onassis? Probably not. Breaking news is the same thing. You don't have any way to know something is going to happen, so how do you ask to receive the information?

And it raises many other questions as well. One of the sales pitches that consumers get for on-line news is that you'll be able to get more information on the stories you really care about and less on the ones you don't. Well, that's great. But in news organizations, how do you support this non-trivial extra cost of reporting, producing and editing every news story to feature length? Same goes for broadcast.

There's another interesting problem for publications that I think Michael Rogers mentioned earlier. For publications that have chosen to go on-line, one of the big selling points to customers is that they can have access, via their computers, to the publication staff. Well, that's really a great idea too, except for one thing - who has the time?

I personally don't know anybody in journalism who isn't working flat out just to keep their heads above water. And now we're asking them to hang out on-line with people who have been known to be incredibly vocal and pretty unabashed about their ignorance. And I really wouldn't be surprised if this became a guild [newspaper union] issue.

Then there's the question of how you ask your customers to pay for on-demand information. The prevailing model for the future is that each of us will pay per view, will buy stories piecemeal, whether in print or broadcast, instead of getting a pre-set package of news for the price of a subscription.

Though this model might be useful for entertainment products on-line, it has the potential to put news organizations at great financial risk. So what happens if your staff has a bad run and nobody reads or chooses to view your stories for a few days in a row? What happens if your server goes down? What happens if your competition sabotages your network? Any break in your popularity on a daily basis and you take an immediate financial hit. You don't have any cushion of a subscription.

And the pay-per-view model makes news organizations as volatile as the stock market, if that is the model that holds. I don't think that makes anybody very excited. And I'm not even addressing how you'll assign value to stories, or how you'll collect the money, or how such a model changes the content of what a marketable story is. So, this on-demand model presents some pretty interesting problems.

The last issue I want to talk about, and certainly not least, is advertising in the death of subsidized mass media. On-demand interactive media flips the traditional economic structure of mass media on its back. It removes a key component of what …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Democratization of News and the Future of Democracy. Contributors: Neuman, W. Russell - Author, Caruso, Denise - Author, Ureneck, Louis - Author, Fouhy, Ed - Author, Wilson, Jean Gaddy - Author. Magazine title: Nieman Reports. Volume: 48. Issue: 2 Publication date: Summer 1994. Page number: 33+. © 1999 Harvard University, Nieman Foundation. COPYRIGHT 1994 Gale Group.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.