Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » democracy

mySociety publishes analysis reports on its own sites

Rachel McAthy — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:25:06 +0000

MySociety, the organisation behind some of the biggest democracy projects in the UK, has today made public two reports which it commissioned to gain greater understanding of two of its sites – TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.

As the site itself says: “We think transparency is a good thing for many reasons, but one of its rarely mentioned virtues is how valuable transparency can be for the people within the organisations which are transparent.”

And there have been some interesting discoveries. According to MySociety one of the reasons that both the sites were set up was to make representatives accessible to newcomers to the democratic process. So it was “heartening” to find, for example, that 60 per cent of visitors to TheyWorkForYou had never previously looked up who represents them, and two in five users of WriteToThem have never before contacted one of their political representatives, was a positive sign.

But, as you would expect with any properly neutral evaluation, it’s not all good news. Our sites aim to reach a wide range of people, but compared to the average British internet user, WriteToThem users are twice as likely to have a higher degree and a higher income. It also seems that users are disproportionately male, white, and over 35.

Find the reports here…

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#Jpod: Why we need to view the news industry on an international scale

Rachel McAthy — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 14:58:10 +0000

The newspaper industry “is not going to dry up overnight” – these were the words from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s new director of research Robert Picard, speaking at the launch of the institute’s new book ‘The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy’.

The book itself offers a series of essays on seven countries, looking at recent developments and trends in the news media. It was introduced at the launch event by Picard and the book’s editors, institute director Dr David Levy and research fellow Dr Rasmus Nielsen.

Nielsen told the audience that the industry and business of journalism is today widely seen as in a “potentially terminal crisis”, spurred on by some imported American debates. He said the book aimed to make better sense of how these generalisations hold up.

While many of these are common challenges, there are also persistent differences in how the industries developed in different countries. We need to understand not only the common challenges but persistent differences.

For example, according to the book’s comparative tables featuring the most recent figures, newspaper revenues were down 30 per cent in the USA, compared with 10 per cent in Germany. “Germany weathered the storm and can turn its attention to strategic challenges,” Nielsen said.

Fellow editor Dr David Levy said one of the benefits of the book is that it provides a portfolio of different policy approaches and highlights those which need to be considered, shown in summary below:

Stimulating supply – tax breaks, new funding
Terms of trade – aggregators and copyright, ownership/plurality rules, public service media and commercial media
Demand – (only raised in one area of the book)

Before handing over to a panel, Picard said there was a great business misunderstanding in the journalism industry.

The last quarter of the last century was unusually enriching for media. Large firms were created through consolidation, which created a great deal of wealth and produced enormous profits.

There were far fewer financial resources than today in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. We have to think in broader terms when looking at the health of the industry.

There is a good deal of reason to be concerned. Revenues are leaving and not coming back, there are shifts in how people are using information. But the newspaper industry is in fact a very wealthy industry and producing more money worldwide than other forms of media.

It is not going to dry up overnight.

Listen below for Journalism.co.uk’s podcast, including interviews with the book’s editors and members of the launch event panel, Professor George Brock, head of journalism at City University and Professor Natalie Fenton from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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A journalistic limbo until we reach The New World

Benji Lanyado — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:20:47 +0000

According to many, the perfect storm is approaching. The winds have been whipping for a while. But there’s a problem. The Old King is dying but the New King, apparently, isn’t quite ready yet.

Clay Shirky, internet theorist and the harbinger-in-chief of newspaper death, encapsulated the problem at a recent Harvard Shorenstein Center talk:

“We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models will be put in their place.”

He’s right. But, intriguingly, he also slings in a caveat. Shirky imagines a time in the future when everything is hunky-dory, and a broad conglomeration of multiple news organisations will ‘overlap and provide a small percentage of journalism individually, but taken as a whole, represent the same position of accountability held by newspapers in the 20th century’.

Perhaps. But until then, we’ve got a problem.

So what’s going to happen in this imminent limbo stage; when journalism enters an intermediate ‘state of nature’?

Allow me to imagine…

1) The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges

Paywalls and micropayment schemes begin to appear on news websites. A few of them make a decent stab of it: News International in particular, as they have a competitive advantage.

As Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy suggests, Murdoch’s sites begin corralling in Sky News, Sky Sports, Fox as well as umpteen other publications and broadcasters that it owns, offering an attractive package behind the wall.

Jason Wilson, writing at NewMatilda.com, suggests that News Corp will ‘draw on its corporate experience with pay television to leverage audiences and money using niche content of various kinds’ kicks in, and, for a while, it all seems to be working.

Desperate to lure readers beyond the paywalls, the organisations that enacted them scramble for scoops. They get dirty. They hunt for drug scandals and nip slips like never before. Investigative journalism becomes feral. They get some real goodies.

Infuriatingly, the exclusives start being screengrabbed and hijacked on pop-up sites.

A black market for scoops emerges, but readers don’t care if the scoop they are reading is 14th hand and poorly delivered, because they’ve still got it.

Shane Richmond notes in the Telegraph that ‘it doesn’t matter that versions of the story on free sites ‘won’t be as good’ because they’ll be free, which offsets the loss of quality considerably’ (and Google’s Eric Schmidt agrees).

In their death throes, the news organisations desperately extend the paywalls, harvesting as much profit as possible while waiting for the web fairies to work out how to monetise content differently.

They start collaborating, agreeing on micropayment schemes across a broad spectrum of organisations, hoping to regain a semblance of market control. It’s too late. The black market is growing exponentially (in the same way as news stories used to, before the walls stripped them of any possible magnifying effect).

As Mike Masnick suggests in a brilliant debate at PBS Mediashift, with the media heading over a cliff, paywalls become an anvil rather than a parachute.

2) The non-paywall sites are damned because they didn’t

Those organisations who resist the paywalls enter a brief honeymoon period. They have a whale of a time as readership goes through the roof following The Great Paywall Migration.

As Masnick imagines, ‘many of their biggest competitors just took themselves out of the market. If I’m running a major newspaper the night that everyone starts to charge, I’m dancing for joy because my competitors just stepped out of a huge market and left it to me’.

But there’s no plan B. After the initial migration surge, the profits of the non-paywall organisations resume their downward spiral, albeit from a higher peak.

They try building their businesses around an events model, but this quickly runs out of steam, and distorts their raison d’etre – news – into a poor-quality loss leader.

They experiment with membership schemes, but find that in an increasingly mobile, classless age, there just isn’t a demographic for them to rely on.

3) The fall of ‘quality’ news

All the big news organisations find themselves in a major pickle. They have century-old reputations to maintain, and a decimated budget with which to maintain them. But their readers expect the same volume of content. So the news organisations begin churning out rubbish.

Freelancers are axed, in-house editors and writers are forced into frantically doubling their output, and original reporting is replaced by regurgitated press releases and wires.

As Roy Gleenslade already sees, ‘the press is no longer acting as a watchdog. It does not bite or bark. It has muzzled itself and retired to the kennel to live off PR scraps.’

Scandals begin to go un-investigated by the big organisations because of a lack of funds and a burgeoning, necessity-driven penchant for boobs and celebrities. Regional controversies are deemed not ‘mass-appeal’ enough to be pursued by the nationals, and there’s no regional paper left to fill the void.

Society flounders without a thriving journalistic watchdog. Clay Shirky’s dystopian prediction, voiced at Harvard, of an increase in ‘casual endemic corruption’ in small communities comes to pass, writ large.

4) The rise of ‘all blogosphere’, and the government subsidy solution

Meanwhile, in tiny office-bedrooms across the country, thousands of new online news organisations are doing nicely. The black market scoop-jackers die out, and a new, mature breed begin to emerge.

The vast majority are rubbish. But some aren’t. They start getting the local scoops that the big organisations don’t have the resources to cover.

Occasionally they get something big. The good ones build enough of a readership to start cashing in.

Without the giant newsrooms and overheads, they begin to turn a modest profit. The blogosphere becomes what it has always threatened to be (and in some places – notably the US – already is, almost) a fantastically broad, fragmented organic news source.

But the quality still isn’t quite there. Obama’s prediction of an ‘all blogosphere’ news environment becomes dangerously close to realisation. The old news organisations that are still clinging on for life have one final play left in them, and turn to the government en masse.

In the face of widespread industrial pressure, and public pressure born of a desire to see journalism saved from the realms of populism and boobs, governments begin to bail out the bigger news organisations. In Britain, the BBC subsidy is chopped up and dished out to a handful of stripped-down organisations in return for a stake and light-handed influence.

5) The New World

Shirky’s vision of a conglomeration of multiple news organisations begins to take shape. A handful of old media names, dramatically reduced in size and scope, survive thanks to government propping. This ‘new BBC’ competes with the vastly augmented blogosphere, and journalism becomes healthy once again.

A version of this post first appeared on BenjiLanyado.com. Benji Lanyado (@benjilanyado) is a freelance journalist based in London and a travel writer for the Guardian and the New York Times.

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BBC The Editors: Helen Boaden on citizen journalism and democracy

Laura Oliver — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:00:43 +0000

For many of our audiences, this has opened their eyes to something very simple: that their lives can be newsworthy – that news organisations don’t have a monopoly on what stories are covered.

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