THE MEDIA REVOLUTION

Angelo Fernando cuts through the old world of the media and says he
sees the new hybrid changing our habits – the revolution has begun!

You’re reading this magazine… it falls into the category of ‘The Media’, so here’s a quick question: do you think the media’s role ought to be one of ‘watchdog’ or ‘amplifier’? It’s a simple question; but it can be a tricky one to answer, depending on your experience with media people. And since many of you contribute to or rely on the modern media in some way or the other, you may have strong opinions on what a media organisation’s responsibilities ought to be.

The watchdog vs. amplifier issue can boil down to two conflicting responses. When a journalist digs up a story that has been covered up for years, he or she is instantly dubbed a ‘muckraker’. This tends to be the view of those who pontificate loudly, asking why the media can’t stick to covering the news – meaning, cover events that lie above the surface. When another journalist goes after the story that has already broken, and the pack (in media) follows, this is soon termed an ‘echo chamber’.

This epithet is often aimed at bloggers and ‘pretend journalists’ who don’t spend time analysing the facts. But we can’t have it both ways, can we?

We seem to want the watchdog (and rail against attempts to curtail media freedom). Yet, we can’t help subscribing to the amplifiers, through participatory, decentralised digital-media channels. Have you noticed how often one medium amplifies the other? CNN echoes Reuters, and the latter cites blogs, re-tweets stories repor­ted by citizen journalists who are (surprise, surprise!) often employed by mainstream organisations such as the BBC or Inter­news.

In other words, the media has become a little muddled. Or maybe it has been forced to grow up. Or just maybe it has begun to reinvent itself, and the media shift is making us uncomfortable. 

NOISY HYBRID Not that it’s a bad thing to be unsettled. As information swirls around us, we cannot – and it would be foolhardy to – hold on to the same expectations of those who manage these channels, and who feed them with content. In 1999 (before many of us began thinking deeply about the role of the internet in all of this), USAID foresaw the need for citizens to be able to “make informed decisions and coun­ter state-controlled me­dia”. It talked about nurturing alternative media, which made many people uncomfortable. Main­stream journalists thought that this would be lead to an erosion of standards.

USAID may never have dreamt that social media would deliver this alternative onto our laps. Later, in 2005, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (it tracks newspaper-reading habits) observed a curious shift – that people were turning away from traditional news outlets, particularly those “with their decorous, just-the-facts aspirations to objectivity”. And what were they gravitating towards? They were turning towards “noisier hybrid formats that aggressively fuse news with opinion or entertainment, or both”.

News infused with opinion?

That sounds like hearsay!

Not anymore. Dozens of news organisations have begun using a combination of social networking, citizen journalism and traditional reporting to roll out those ‘noisier’ formats. I mentioned Internews. It may not be noisy, but it is definitely a hybrid format. If you’re not familiar with it, Internews is an international ‘media-development organisation’ that empowers local media worldwide – meaning, it not only becomes a distribution channel for global voices but gives people the tools to connect… and thus, be heard.

As Internews puts it: “Media play a critical role in fostering transparency and accountability in governance and society.” It hopes to help people circumvent bottlenecks to information. The organisation has also helped countries it operates in (some 21 nations that were formerly totalitarian or autocratic states) move towards a more democratic model. So does it fit under the umbrella of ‘The Media’?

EMPOWERMENT A similar organisation, Global Voices, is a non-profit foundation comprising an international team of volunteer authors and others who are active in the blogosphere. In fact, one of its divisions (Lingua) sort of plays the amplifier role. Lingua, it says, “amplifies Global Voices’ stories in languages other than English with the help of volunteer translators”. It translates content into more than 15 languages.

And then there’s Witness, an international human-rights organisation that provides video training (and equipment) to local groups involved in human-rights advocacy campaigns. Its role is to be a “broker (of) relationships with international media outlets, government officials, policymakers, activists and the general public”.

So if you can add empowerment, transparency and brokerage to the debate on muckraking vs. amplifiers, you’ll notice that the word ‘media’ has undergone some rapid costume changes in the past decade. The interesting thing is that there’s more to come – we ain’t seen anything yet!

To add to the complexity of this shift, media organisations are recognising why they must step into this uncomfortable arena. Indeed, journalists and those who own and operate ‘The Media’ are now under pressure – to adapt to the media shift, to find ways to remain profitable and the most contentious part, to find a model that goes deeper than the ‘he said, she said’ style of objectivity.

Jay Rosen, who writes about these things, likes to credit blogs for creating this environment. A journalism professor at New York University, Rosen says that the stress has five sources, all coming from bloggers: “One – a collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes. Two – new competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive technology, the internet, does its thing. Three – a shift in power, [whereby] the tools of the modern media have been distributed to the people formerly known as the audience. Four – a new pattern of information flow, in which ‘stuff’ moves horizontally, peer to peer, as effectively as it moves vertically from producer to consumer. Five – the erosion of trust (which started a long time ago, but accelerated after 2002) and the loss of authority.”

Interestingly, Rosen is a former journalist and media critic, and a big-time blogger.

Others believe that some of the new media pressures, and media shifts thereof, will ‘re-imagine’ journalism even further.

Note the word ‘re-imagine’ here. This is not the same as saying that new media will replace the old version. My view is that a major refurbishment has taken place. In keeping with the definition of this word, it means the process involves some renovating, replacing broken or missing parts, even restoring a new operating system.

Need examples? Consider news organisations such as Patch.com, Next Door Media and Block By Block. Never heard of them? Many people haven’t.

Patch.com is a community-specific news and information platform set up and run by former professional editors, writers, photographers and videographers who are attempting to replace the old ‘dual-core’ operating system manned by an editor and a publisher with a decentralised one that is run by hundreds of community members.

Next Door Media (it was also founded by former journalists) is interested in community-powered journalism that is local and relevant to its readers and advertisers. Spot.us (in the US) and YouCommNews (in Australia) are two news-reporting outfits that use ‘crowdfunding’ to get the com­munity (rather than big-name inves­tors) to fund investigations and assignments.

The former has more than 10,000 contributors who donate anything from US$ 7 upwards, so that a community reporter can investigate and cover a story. Anyone can become a reporter… first, by pitching the idea via the website, so that others can decide if the story is worth funding.

It’s interesting how these new models address the five ‘stress points’ that Rosen describes.

MOBILE MEDIA There’s one other stress point to consider, though – and that’s mobile. No matter which part of the world you live in, it’s clear that mobile will further re-imagine these media models. We’re not talking only about smartphones and the new-media habits being cultivated by people who use them (people often place too much emphasis on the iPhone and Blackberrys).

Portable media also means that eReaders and digital tablets are opening a door to a future generation of media consumers. The output of media organisations will undoubtedly flow across these devices as well.

NEW WORLD A recent State of The News Media Report (of 2011) notes how organisations that produce the news are beginning to increasingly rely on independent networks for their revenue (to sell their ads), and also depend on the so-called aggregators (such as Google) and social networks to deliver these new digital audiences. “As news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content,” we’re told.

Yes, indeed, this stuff moves horizontally! And as it does that, it will cut through our old expectations and change our media habits. Welcome to the noisy, brave new world of hybrid media!

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