Oops I accidentally the whole civil society...

I thought I'd post my thoughts on the recent spate between "new" and "old" media.

In the last 2 weeks we've seen an unprecedented level of attacks on "New Media" from politicians and newspapers. Seems fair enough you might say, we've orchestrated unprecedented levels of protest of against them after all.
But facetious humour aside, there is an important discussion here which is being lost in the bun fight.

There are two issues here, both are complex and multidimensional. In this piece I will try to address the current "Old Media" vs "New Media" row. Later I'll write about the political issue.

"Old Media" (read: Printed newspapers) are suffering financially. They are increasingly bought by fewer people and consequently command less advertising revenues, not to mention less income from direct sales. The largest circulation newspapers in the state reach a couple of hundred thousand people by their accounting (which is arrived at by multiplying sales by 2.5 readers per copy they estimate.. hmmm). Compare this with an ABC certified 2.2 Million unique readers of Boards per day and advertisers, keenly focused on "bang for buck" these days, are voting with their budgets.

There is price pressure from online competition, which doesnt have to create a physical product and so has less production overheads. Online cuts into this advertising 'pie' and it is a pie which has shrunk recently due to recession. Add these together and you can see its a real squeeze. I could almost feel sorry for them.
But I dont. I'm not inclined to have any sympathy for "old media". You might say "well you wouldn't, would you!" but that does me a disservice.

You see, I love journalism. I'm a big fan. My grandfather was head printer for the Irish Times and when he lived with us the Irish Times would arrive, wrapped tight as a drum and we'd all read it voraciously. I would sit and wait for the post man to be the first to it before my father would assert patriarchal priority. I gorged myself on information until my young finger was black from tracing lines of text. The Times was spoken of with reverence in our house. It was "The paper of record". But its unfair to lay all of print media's faults at its door and just as unfair to accord all of its successes to its industry as a whole. My point is, I'm not an enemy of good journalism. In fact, given my history with Boards, you could say that honest civil communication is kinda my thing.

So why no sympathy for their plight? Because they abandoned us first. In the last decade I have watched newspapers be derelict in their duty in my opinion. Alan Crosbie recently said that "New Media" has the "capacity to destroy civil society and cause unimaginable suffering". Dreadful hyperbole and in the height of irony it was quoted by lots of Old Media out of context. http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0206/media.html

Alan Crosbie makes some interesting points in his speech, a speech which Tom Crosbie exhorts everyone to read in full. (The irony continues in that the only way to do so is with ease is online). If you are interested in his point of view on modern journalism, I recommend you do read it.
I agree with several of his general points about the health of a society being tied to a free and questioning media. Where I begin to diverge from him is when he rather loosely draws the conclusion that that function is being performed by the current crop of dead tree peddlers. And that we should support this via taxes! It isnt. We shouldn't.

Our current media is not questioning anything by and large. There is an illness in modern media, an illness everyone is happy to suffer from. It is one of easy comfortable alliance. If you are a work-a-day journalist you dont bite the hand that drip-feeds you. Where was the incisive, brave reporting during the FF years? During the "boom"? During the bailout? NoW??? This malaise has been refined by modern PR companies into a viral epidemic. "Journalism" has drifted too far from its role of seeking the truth, publishing it and being damned. No one wants to be damned after all, do they?

Not all journalists should be tarred with this brush. It must be bloody hard to do anything approaching journalism in an environment which is not aligned to support a writer searching for the truth. "Hey boss, I just discovered a juicy story which implicates our biggest advertiser along with a politician who regularly gives us the inside line (when it suits him to do so)". Yeah... not a fantastic career move.

Could Woodward and Bernstein report on Watergate in today's "Old Media" environment? To steal a phrase from the Haughey years... could they ****!
One of the primary reasons people are turning from Old Media is because it isn't servicing their needs any longer. Newspapers are supposed to be The Watchmen. The whistle blowers alerting us all to danger, keeping the corridors of power honest. They've failed in that duty and they are suffering now because we no longer see them as relevant enough to be worth the asking price. Worse, many feel they have been bought and sold, such is their unwillingness to so much as tweak a nose.

It would be unfair to them to leave it at that. Education has failed us too. How many boys sit waiting for the paper to be delivered these days? Hell, how many people read anything to do with current affairs? You cannot consider anything relating to X-Factor or Madonnas latest child-acquisition to qualify... How many people are engaged by the political landscape enough to sit and read about it? You can hardly blame "Old Media" in playing to its paying audience! The people who are interested in Celebrity News don't read, they look at. In this regard Alan Crosbie is right. Sometimes what a society needs is not what a society wants or is willing to pay for.
But I champion a different solution than his suggestion that we shore up a medium which has failed us with explicit financial support from those they should be questioning. How he feels that will lead to anything but a worsening of the situation I cannot see and it smacks to me of "I want a bailout for my media empire". I prefer to democratise the ability to discuss, broadcast and publish. Believe me I feel Newspapers pain when faced with our common enemy of the defamation laws in Ireland. An enemy we should join forces and fight together.

Recently "Old Media" has been bemoaning the practise of "New Media" stealing their news and reheating it. This is the lie which hides in plain sight. Last night I watched twitter and uServe and Boards and blogs of the Greek parliament inside and riots outside. I was fed links and sources of information from a wide variety of places. The my inner "young lad" gorged again. I now know more then I ever thought possible about the inner workings of Greek political life. I watched live feeds and read honest on the ground accounts of real time news from people who were there. Sure, some had their own agendas, but you cant stop the signal. When there are so many sources of news, the blur bubbles up the truth more objectively than any editor possibly can.

And I sat there and thought "Tomorrow, who will steal from whom"?


(also on my blog: constainstracesofnut dot com)