In 25 years’ time:
1. The gap between the gloom and doom endlessly debated by journalists and the happiness felt by the consumers of news will widen – at least in the short term. Consumers of news currently enjoy the proliferation of sources of news more than they worry about the accuracy or integrity of its source.
2. A credibility crisis will sooner or later remind people that not all sources of news are equally trustworthy. Most probably, an authoritarian or totalitarian will, by smart manipulation of a fashionable new digital platform, fool a lot of people. Well-known faces will be red.
3. A combination of the behaviour of red-top newspapers and worries about social networks will combine to increase pressure for new legislation on privacy. The politico-legal negotiations will be long and bad-tempered. But in the end we will have a new privacy law in Britain.
4. Journalism done in words will struggle to survive, given that audio and video are now so easy to create and consume on digital platforms. But words – capable of containing more complex ideas and meaning than broadcast – will survive and prosper.
5. Some newspapers will go bust. This is more likely to happen to daily papers than to weekend ones, let alone to magazines (which will go on flourishing) and fatalities are more likely to occur outside the M25. Predictions of doom for print may sometimes have been both premature and overdone, but the advertising model for daily papers has been fatally weakened by the fact that younger readers rarely acquire a regular paper-buying habit.
6. The next 25 years will be a period of extraordinary innovation and creativity in platforms, techniques and the wholesale rethinking of journalism. Data journalism and the creation of online communities are only just the start.
7. The 2010 drama of Wikileaks will be followed by governments all over the world shutting the stable door to prevent other horses leaving. The source for the biggest Wikileaks disclosures will go to prison for a long time. Leaks on the scale of two sets of warlogs and the US diplomatic cables may not occur again any time soon.
8. Transparency will improve journalism. Software is now available to spot plagiarism and, by extension, churnalism. Naming and shaming will occur and will gradually have an effect.
9. Journalism will remain glamorous and important to a minority and, to a much larger segment of the population, suspect, morally dubious and either controversial or disappointing.
10. People will regularly ask whether in a world in which anyone can publish instantly to anyone, anything called “journalism” is needed. They will discover that trying to discover and describe the truth is best done by people trained to do it well.
Professor George Brock is head of journalism at City University, a post he took up in 2009. Previous to this, Brock worked for The Times as a writer and editor for 28 years. He chairs the British committee of the British Press Institute and is a board member of the World Editors Forum. Brock also writes a regular blog, which you can read here
You can also read Paul Bradshaw’s predictions for the industry here
Interesting list, but I am not so optimistic that the gap between the doom merchants and their readers will be narrowing any time soon. As Eli Pariser, formerly of MoveOn.org, told TED this week, it’s about the algorithms that determine the automated information environment most folks are coming to inhabit.
Have you noticed, for example, how one’s Facebook wall will weed out the plurality of information it presents as it reacts to one’s own click bias. The more you “like” liberal friends the less the illiberal ones come knocking at your door. And that is the click-by-click logic that is increasingly replacing editorial judgment as to what is relevant.
Once you add the self-selective nature of internet consumption to decades of corporate media and then tweak it with whatever keeps your seratonin levels on an even keel you have the recipe for a gap that can only lead to balkanisation and ever more polarised world views. [ more ]
I’m sorry Mr. Brock, for this comment; I’m not a journalism student but I attended the City University Debate with Julian Assange and David Aaronovitch.
I was stunned to say the least at the lack of perception within the audiance of students attending this event. Here I was thinking that I was alone in sensing a huge disconnect from the students to the debate, yet others across the world hanging on any tweet that could come from this event, were of the same opinion, yet quite frustrated, because all that the students were discussing was his hair style and criticising his demeanor.
This is now more relevent today than it was when you probably first heard it and sad to say for a journalism class school.
@tomi01uk
I am a City journalism student and attended the event, but before I reply to your main point I’d like to plead not guilty to disappointing the vast worldwide Twitter audience, as I didn’t Tweet during the debate. But I would also note that the audience listening to the debate was not solely made up of City’s students – there were journos from the world over, including an enthusiastic team of broadcasters from a Japanese station.
Anyway, I would be interested to hear what insights you took from that evening’s discussion. Perhaps you definitively nailed the WikiLeaks phenomenon on the night? Maybe you gained a great insight into the mind of Julian Assange?
If you did, it would make you a far smarter and more insightful person than any media commentator I heard at the time, and I would be interested – even this far after the event – to read any of your analysis from the time.
A lot has happened since Assange was at City. But what I took away that September evening was this: Julian Assange did something highly valuable in publishing the Afghan War Logs, but he did so in what was probably an irresponsible manner (if held to the same standards as the mainstream media). He told the audience that he had more up his sleeve (and he did, namely the Iraq Logs and the Diplomatic Cables). And, crucially, I left with the feeling that he was difficult to pin down (note his refusal to answer questions directly), that he had slight delusions of grandeur (or as I ineloquently put it during a conversation with Jonathan Dimbleby afterwards – a ‘god complex’) and that he was probably therefore pretty difficult to work with.
So broadly speaking there were three significant topics:
1. The Afghan war logs and the way they were published
2. Future leaks and the nature of WikiLeaks itself
3. Assange himself; his character, etc.
He was pressed by a number of people (including, I believe, City students) on the first issue of the redaction of the Afghan war logs. He repeatedly refused to give a straight answer, loosely defending himself by saying the end justified the means (and that no one had been harmed as a result of his publishing them).
As for the second point, well, from what I recall, he was, understandably, fairly tight-lipped about future publications.
So, the third point. As I see it, his ambling answers and his tendency to avoid the tough questions were worthy of comment. Any Twitter activity bemoaning ‘his demeanour’ (as you put it) should have been of interest to anyone following the WikiLeaks story. It has since transpired that everyone from Bill Keller to bigwigs at The Guardian found him virtually impossible to get on with. These early Tweets from my astute students at City will have perhaps given an early inkling of the path Assange would choose for himself and his organisation.
In another recent talk at City, David Leigh (Investigations Editor at The Guardian) told us in colourful detail how the relationship between Assange and his one-time collaborators had broken down.
Maybe those who were complaining about his conduct were being more perceptive than you imagine. Just a thought.
That should read: ‘astute fellow students’ (before anyone assumes I’m a member of staff at the University).
Brock’s ending passage: ” They will discover that trying to discover and describe the truth is best done by people trained to do it well.”
Is only going to be true if there is someone actually doing that and what the wikileaks disclosure shows is that there isn’t.
A long thread (takes time to load) because of the deeper perceptions: http://nicholasmead.com/2010/08/21/how-to-smear-a-hero/#comment-2724