This assumes ‘photojournalism’ is an accepted category of photographic practice.  It is an essentially contested category – there are a number of different accounts of what is or isn’t photojournalism, many photographers are happy to wear the label and may are not. I’ll call photojournalism the photographic practice where someone tells a story about some aspect of their world, where this story is compiled first using lens-based imaging technologies that have a relationship with that world. This encompasses what others call documentary or editorial photography, but excludes works of visual fiction produced with computer-generated images.

Of all the journalistic forms said to have died, none have had their demise declared more often than photojournalism. The recent Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan was previewed with articles lamenting a “dying field” because of the revolutions in the media economy, but such warnings have been frequent throughout the recent history of photojournalism (as in a 1999 editorial in The Digital Journalist, which was revisited in recent articles here and here).

Many of the concerns about the health of photojournalism have been well placed. The financial fragility of agencies like Eyedea and the liquidation of Grazia Neri show traditional business models are faltering badly.

This is the beginning of the end of a long decline. The traditional model of print distribution and direct editorial funding has been unravelling from the 1970s onwards, ever since weekly pictorial magazines like Life folded. This demonstrates photojournalism that required an editorial paymaster was in trouble long before the Internet was an issue or the global recession added to its woes.

How do photojournalists view the contemporary media revolutions?

As a community of practice photojournalism does not have a single voice with a consensus view. There are photographers attuned to the new media economy and working in new ways. But there have recently been a number of notable comments that indicate the world of photojournalism is paying minimal attention to contemporary debates about the revolutions in the media economy, or resorting to some commonly circulated but ill-founded views on how to proceed:

• The photographic press is yet to explore in any detail the impact of the media revolutions on its constituency. For example, Photo District News had a blog post in June 2009 that devoted a mere two hundred words to wondering (without discussing, let alone answering) “if the journalism business fails, who pays for photojournalism?” but it and similar organs are yet to offer more detailed accounts.

• One outlet that has offered a view is The Digital Journalist, which published two remarkable editorials in August and September 2009 – remarkable, that is, for containing some of the least considered commentary available. The August editorial held the Internet largely responsible for the current problems, made the mistake of conflating newspapers and journalism, and plumped for pay walls around news sites as the answer. In manner that would have befitted the East German regime in its dying days, it cried out – “Let us build that wall before it is too late.” It is very odd to see a major player parroting the same flawed arguments of the traditional media outlets that have done photographers no favours in recent years.

• The September editorial of The Digital Journalist then demanded that foundations hand over large sums of money to multimedia publications (including itself), who would then distribute those funds to individual photographers with “projects that deserve coverage.” I’m a fan of the named companies who are a big part of the future (or, more accurately, the present) of photojournalism, but are the foundations really likely to part with large wads of up-front cash? Importantly, why would we want a system of new gatekeepers, and what about the fact that many of those digital producers are already partnering with photographers and getting foundation funding for specific projects? These arguments and proposals seem fundamentally out of touch with what is or likely to happen.

• In an interview with John Temple, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Cheryl Diaz Myer endorsed paying for on-line content (“I’m a fan of micropayments for the web”). In a demonstration of how unfounded examples gain an aura of truth simply by being repeated, Diaz argued that if the news media followed the iTunes model or the Financial Times subscription system then things would be better – ignoring the arguments cited in my first post of this series that demonstrate Apple’s model cannot be copied because music is a different commodity to news, and that the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are atypical news outlets that distribute economically valuable information.

• Leo Hsu’s foto8 post on “The End of Newspapers” takes a novel tack on the debate by asking, “Without newspapers, without the received standards of print publications, what expectations will we have of photographs and their ability to speak “truth”? In the wake of renewed concerns about photographic manipulation (which I have discussed here) Hsu is worried about how norms that contest fabrication will be governed. It is an interesting argument with respect to the veracity of images, but its assumptions about newspapers repeat the common mistake of seeing information and its mode of distribution as the same thing. It is the community of practice around photojournalism that establishes and governs standards, and that is independent of any particular mode of distribution, as the on-line debates about manipulation this year clearly demonstrate. Most importantly, contra Hsu, it is the practice of journalism and not the institution of newspapers that have, in some moments, sustained democracy. We must not confuse the two and their different roles.

There have been some good analyses of the new media economies from within photojournalism – Aric Mayer’s review of the publishing crisis and the crisis in editorial photography come to mind – but overall there needs to be a better recognition in the field of what is going on and what it means.

What inspiration can photojournalism take from the media revolutions?

Many of the recent debates within photojournalism have concerned the coverage of issues and the aesthetics of that coverage. In the wake of the last two World Press Photo competitions there have been insightful and provocative comments on how photojournalism pictures the world by Stephen Mayes and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, which prompted some heated feedback (see here for the comments on Mayes lecture and here for a response to Broomberg and Chanarin). Mayes observation that his years as secretary of the World Press Photo jury led him to regard the submissions to the contest as primarily “romantic” – that is, “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized” – chimed with other critiques, such as Jörg Colberg’s thoughts on the visual language of photojournalism, which prompted an extensive discussion on the Magnum blog.

These are vital debates even if there is no single resolution. My concern here, however, is with how the revolutions in the new media economy provide photojournalism with new opportunities for the future. These opportunities are made clear by thinking about what the changing structure of information does for photojournalism, and this changing structure of information will undoubtedly assist photojournalism in responding to the concerns about aesthetics and coverage of issues. Inspired by the themes of my previous post, we can say at the outset:

• The web is where it is at. Photographers must not ignore the full range of outlets (print media, books, exhibitions etc) but the Internet is the only platform with a growing audience for news stories

• To be on the web means producing multimedia stories. ‘Multimedia’ can mean many things, from simple photo galleries through to stand alone topic sites with stills, audio, video and text together, but it is the combination of sound and image which offers the basis for the most compelling form for storytelling

To say as much is to state the blindingly obvious. Photographers have been using the Internet for years, but what is at stake here is something more than having a shop window on the web. It involves seeing oneself as a publisher of content and a participant in a distributed story, the form of which helps reshape the content of the story. Rather than just producing a single image or small series of images to be sold into another person’s story, multimedia on the web has numerous advantages for visual storytellers:

• It allows photographers to focus on a story, and produce more content with greater control over how those pictures are presented

• While the meaning of visual stories can’t be controlled, they can be directed through the construction of a narrative that draws on sound and text as well as photographs and video

• It potentially overcomes restrictions on getting longer and more complex stories published for a global audience, especially younger generations who do not consume traditional media

• It is an effective response to the conceptual challenge of how to provide context for a photograph

• It can overcomes photojournalism’s objectification of people by giving subjects their own voice

This gels with the changing nature of the atomic unit of the news media discussed in the previous post. Running parallel to a shift from ‘article’ to ‘topic’ will be the move from ‘single picture’ or ‘photo essay’ to ‘visual story’ as part of the multi-dimensional narratives that make up a ‘topic’. Moreover, the visual story will be set in context, linked, updated and distributed across the web.

There are increasing numbers of photographers beginning to work in this way, as sites like Interactive Narratives or KobreGuide demonstrate. However, what I am trying to highlight here is more than a shift from taking stills to producing videos. It is about rethinking the capacity to tell stories in line with what Fred Ritchin calls a “new visual journalism,” which he outlined in greater detail here.

Ritchin has long been a leading proponent on these changes. Back in the early days of the web (1996) he produced what is still one of the most innovative multimedia stories, “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” which was organized around Gilles Peress’ photography and published by the New York Times. Ritchin analysed this production in a significant essay called “Witnessing and the Web: An Argument for a New Photojournalism” and has recently developed these ideas in his important book After Photography where he outlines, conceptually and practically, a new practice called “hyperphotography.”

Hyperphotography is a “paradigm shift into another medium, or more precisely into an interactive, networked multimedia, which distances itself from conventional photography” (p. 70). For Ritchin this means “an entire photograph can…serve as a node, a hyperphotograph, an ambiguous, visual, uncaptioned, tantalizing segment of a developing conversation leading, if the reader is willing, to other photographs, other media, other ideas (p. 71). Far from being abstract, Ritchin’s concept has practical pointers on how information can be embedded in images, offering viewers the option of deciding which links they follow in a non-linear fashion.

This move from ‘photojournalism’ to ‘visual journalism,’ from ‘photography’ to ‘hyperphotography’ does not involve either giving up on the still image or abandoning the documentary function of photography. It might employ a variety of new media formats, such as those used by FLYP magazine or the In a City flipbook curated by DJ Clark for the British Council. Whatever its exact form, it uses the power of photography to help structure a multi-dimensional story that through its links, context and openness can be a strong form of evidence for the story it wishes to tell.

How are photojournalists going to get paid in these changing times?

We have to constantly revisit this conundrum, but each time we get back to this point we have to remember something very important.

We can’t approach this issue via some misplaced nostalgia for a golden age that if it did actually exist certainly no longer survives. Photographic stories or documentary have always been difficult to fund directly. If there was a time when the majority of photojournalists simply waited for well-paid commissions to produce important work, that time is no more. We have to doubt though whether the past was like that, because in reality few if any photographers have been able to sustain a career entirely through editorial projects they chose to do. Even Sebastião Salgado had to do corporate and advertising work to cross-subsidise work on the social issues he wanted to explore, and Simon Norfolk sells his prints to a wealthy clientèle through a fine art gallery in order to support his visual critique of the US military.

That means, as mentioned in the previous posts, funding is increasingly going to be indirect. This was confirmed by Stephen Mayes of VII in a an interview headlined “Inventing Twenty-First Century Photojournalism.” Mayes began by stating “as long as any of us thinks that we’re going to make money from selling photographs, I think that we’re going to be in trouble.” Instead he proposed this shift:

[The biggest clients] have been the magazines and newspapers, and I still think that newspapers and magazines will continue to be incredibly important to our profession, but I think where previously we’ve seen magazines and newspapers as clients, I now see them very much as partners. At VII we’ll work with the magazines for distribution, but we’ll work with another party for funding, we may work another party for access and expertise, we may work with another party for technology. So what I find we’re doing increasingly is working on these multi-partnerships, amongst whom it’s hard to see who is the client.

Mayes’ thoughts were reasonably conventional in so far as magazines and newspapers were his primary distributors. Nonetheless, they attracted some outraged comments, with two people alleging that journalism dies the moment one enters into a partnership with the subject. To which Mayes replied, “it amazes me how this question comes up only when discussing non-publishing partners as though the integrity of the news industry is somehow unquestionable. Like fish in water we often fail to recognize the constraints of our existing media…”

I couldn’t agree more. If some of the great photojournalists had adhered to this absolutism we would have been deprived of great pictures – think, for example of how a Larry Burrows needed the US military to get around Vietnam, or a Tom Stoddart required assistance from MSF to travel in Sudan. Of course partnerships vary and anyone concerned about integrity will have to work hard to maintain independence, but that applies in all situations. Aside from the fact the old editorial paymaster model is all but gone, the idea that taking money from corporate media funded by advertising, so that one can create content which will attract more viewers for that advertising, is free from all moral issues is…well, rather daft.

Nobody works in an ethically pure zone. VII has to face those issues with its sponsorship by Canon, anyone working with an NGO or foundation needs to confront them too, and in accepting a commission from a newspaper or on-line site the same applies. Negotiating those issues requires transparency and reflexivity. Operating in the networked world of social media is one way to achieve that openness and integrity.

In the end, creating unique, quality content in a myriad of multimedia formats is the best way to produce value. We know great imagery on the web can drive traffic to sites and around particular stories, and where there is traffic there will be networks, relationships and the opportunity to find ways to fund that content. This does not mean multimedia, visual journalism or hyperphotography will kill off books, exhibitions and the printed image. But those forms of distribution will comprise only a part of a successful photographers portfolio of activity in the new media economy.

Next…what the new media economy might mean for universities and academic publishing…

It’s worth repeating what I think should be the guiding light for any discussion the new media economy: “the social media revolution…is all about the separation of information from its means of distribution.”

Following this means understanding journalism as information and newspapers as the means of distribution. As such, the death of the latter does not equate to the death of the former. Richard Stacey put it more bluntly – “hitch your fortunes to the information and you will prosper, chain yourself to means of distribution and you will die.”

If we are focused on the nature of the information there are opportunities. If like many of the traditional media companies we are preoccupied with the means of distribution, then there is most certainly a crisis. How, then, can we think about the opportunities and what they mean for the structure of information in the new media economy?

The web changes everything

The revolution in the media economy has few certainties, but one thing is crystal clear when it comes to news coverage – the Internet is the only platform with an audience growing over time.

This growth comes from the new ways people consume information. While traditional sources such as newspapers, analogue TV and radio have declining audiences, the amount of time people spend reading, watching and listening is increasing.  This is driven by the way – as American data shows – “people are relying more heavily…on platforms that can deliver news when audiences want it rather than at appointed times, a sign of a growing ‘on demand’ news culture. People increasingly want the news they want when they want it.” And satisfying that desire can only be achieved digitally.

The revolution, though, involves much more than making information available in a variety of accessible digital formats, as a recent German manifesto on the challenge of the web made clear. (Interestingly, this manifesto was a direct response to the Hamburg Declaration in which traditional news organisation sought to tame the internet through new intellectual property rights to restrict fair use, make people pay for quotes and withhold the ability to link to content).

The web revolution changes the structure of the information that is being provided, and it changes the relationship between the producer and the consumer of that information. As an article in the Columbia Journalism Review recently noted, “the Internet is a medium in the word’s truest sense. It is something that exists in the between. It is connective tissue.” And far from undermining the institutions of democracy, these transformations could be the basis for a more democratic culture.

How is the structure of news information being transformed?

Traditional media deal with news as an information relay. On a daily cycle reporters gather information, construct a story (as an article or an item) before a fixed deadline, then transmit this to readers/viewers/listeners who some time later passively consume the information.

Of course, modern newspapers and television stations compress this cycle with their web versions, electronic comment facilities or rolling news networks, but the overall idea of a story as a discrete thing produced by a deadline remains. As the CJR declared:

News organizations have had trouble adapting to the digital world because they operate under a broadcast sensibility. They produce discrete bits of content—finished products meant for passive consumption.

On-line media changes all that. Some have argued that the “atomic unit” of news media is changing. Marissa Mayer of Google told a US Senate inquiry on the future of journalism “the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article.” This shift mirrored that in music when consumers moved from albums of music to individual downloads, and is driven by the fact that 80% of on-line users find their articles via search engines rather than through the home pages of particular sites.

The web’s challenge to traditional information structures might be more radical than a move from newspaper to article. The atomic unit might be no longer fixed in space as the article, the item, the page or the publication – it could be something that evolves over time via the post, the tweet, the link as a flow or wave of iterations that together produce a story that – like the world it is reporting on – is never finalised.

The changing nature of temporality means that a plural and inherently more democratic approach to news information is now possible. As Charlie Beckett argues, “with the death of the deadline comes multi-dimensional narratives.” Rather than the tired old formula of “he said, she said” journalism we can have competing perspective at the heart of every story.

This means journalism becomes a process rather than a product, and the developing topic rather than the finished story is the new fundament of reporting. As Jeff Jarvis argues, this requires much more than having a list of links to other people’s stuff at the bottom of an on-line article:

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something… It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

There are some small but important practicalities that can achieve this – such as media organizations treating stories as topics under a permanent URL, which Google’s Mayer recommended as a way of constructing a “living story.” With the recent introduction of Fast Flip, a new user interface (UI) for news that aggregates individual articles and web pages via subjects, Google is leading innovation in this area. As Scott Karp argues, this demonstrates once again how traditional media companies are failing to address challenges – new formats for presenting news – that should clearly by their concern:

Most publishers are focused on how to charge for news. But there’s very little talk about how to innovate the packaging of news, much less a new UI for news. There’s very little talk about how people consume news on the web, about the value of aggregating articles from multiple sources, about solving consumers’ problems rather than publishers’ problems.

Most importantly, rethinking the ‘atomic unit’ of information goes beyond any technological issue and changes the nature of reporting.

What does this mean for journalists and editors?

One of the fears flowing from the ‘death of newspapers’ and shift to on-line news platforms is that our capacity to sift important information from unsourced trivia will be lost. In typical fashion, commentators see the end of one thing (stories by authoritative reporters) leading inexorably to its polar opposite (rumours by amateur gossips). It’s dreadfully easy to come up with examples of trash on the Internet and argue that it is therefore an unreliable medium. But, apart from the fact that the traditional news outlets produce more than their fair share of rubbish, there is nothing automatic or inevitable about digital media dumbing down standards of inquiry or reporting. As Taylor Owens and David Eaves make clear in their excellent review of the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media (Missing The Link), the rise of blogging is a boon for good journalism, in part because of the way it makes fact-checking an open source phenomenon that draws on the wisdom of the crowd.

The new structures of distribution affect the structures of information, but they do so by changing rather than eliminating the role of the journalist and editor. This is because the number of people who can write and publish without being filtered out by the mainstream media (as in this blog) is increasing all the time. But even for full-time journalists and editors in established news organisations a change is coming, and understanding their role as being a “curator” is what marks this change.

Instead of thinking as journalists and editors as the privileged insiders revealing secrets in a one-way relationship to their audience, they become those whose experience and knowledge allows them to give context and order to an ever-developing topic. Mindy McAdams has listed seven different practices that might make up this process of curation. In addition to these will be commitment to real openness, in terms of encouraging a real-time dialogue with feedback from the audience, ensuring transparency about sources (without compromising confidents), and tapping into the power and wisdom of readers through “crowd sourcing” exercises (such as The Guardian’s encouragement of its readers to sort through the raw data of politician’s expense claims).

The role of transparency in this new structure of information is vital. Showing how you get the story, and linking to others who have different but relevant aspects of the topic, is the best way to establish credibility and legitimacy for this mode of reporting. Indeed, David Weinberger has gone as far to claim “transparency is the new objectivity.” In the past, media accuracy was achieved by a handful of editors and fact-checkers who verified data, but with thousands of interactive readers function as open source reviewers, this accuracy can only be enhanced through thoughtful curation.

What might a new media organisation look like?

These ideas can guide the structure of a new media organisation, and if we summarise the points above and blend in the thoughts of Emily Bell and Chris Brogan, with a dash of Jeff Jarvis, we get the following pointers:

• The future of journalism is networked not silo’d, it has to be distributed not static, everything is modular, linkable and fluid
• Everything must be portable and mobile-ready, and it has to be appropriate for the platform, using any means available which, in the days of Audioboo, flip videos and social networking sties, is pretty much every way
• Stories are points in time, and won’t end at first publication, but become a flow of edits, links, updates, and extensions that together make a topic
• Journalists and editors work as curators, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff. Contributors come in many shapes: paid staff, partner, guest, and conversational
• Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow
• Everything must have collaborative opportunities, and journalists and editors need the help of communities to build and engage audiences and to break stories
• To be effective and trusted information has to be transparent and open to engagement
• Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue. Value-add services are another source of funding
• Paper isn’t dead: it’s on demand
• Above all else, produce unique content with clear value – that is, clear social as well as economic value

A final thought about how to fund it

Funding new media organisations remains, so to speak, the million-dollar question. But think about this slide from the Daily Telegraph’s digital editor Edward Roussel, presented at a CUNY conference last November:

It underlines the point from my previous post that if we think about funding in terms of paying for editorial content rather than the entirety of traditional media organisations, where the bulk of the cost goes on printing and distribution, we start with a much smaller need. If an existing news organisation like the New York Times was to be reshaped for a purely digital future, there would still be a major shake-up and much heartbreak, but it wouldn’t be the much-prophesied ‘end of journalism’. Because we are in a revolutionary moment no one knows how the media economy will shake down, but the outcome can be positive for the process of journalism.

Next – what all this might mean for photojournalism…

In a series of four posts, I want to consider the revolution that is reshaping the media economy through which we come to know about the wider world. This first post deals with the reasons for this upheaval and how it is changing the economics of news. Because of the ground to be covered in providing the context of these changes, this will be quite a lengthy discussion.

The second post will look at how the structure of information is changing in this new economy and what it means for the practice of journalism; the third post will ask what these transformation mean for photojournalism; and the fourth post will consider some of the implications for academic publishing. [Update: in December 2009 I added a fifth post on "the pay wall folly for photographers"].

What crisis?

In the US the transformation of the media economy has been mapped on Paper Cuts, which records company closures and job losses in journalism. With high profile newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor and Seattle Post Intelligencer giving up print and moving on-line, and the Rocky Mountain News shutting for good after 150 years, the decline of traditional news outlets has been hard to miss. In the UK, the local and regional press has been equally hard hit, with half of that sector facing closure in the next few years. These changes may not be repeated globally, but it is clear the established outlets of the print media economy are vulnerable.

Structural changes or cyclical problems?

Because the upheaval in the print media has coincided with the international financial crisis of September 2008 onwards, we have to ask whether the global recession is to blame, or whether there are larger structural problems in the media economy that are now coming to the fore?

Newspapers have been in decline for a long time. In America, overall circulation (when adjusted for population growth) is “about half of what it was in 1946 and is declining rapidly”. That decline has been constant since the 1960s, when other media, especially television, overtook papers as the primary source of news. The decline in readership by age has been constant for all groups, but given younger generations have always used papers less, there is no prospect of this trend being arrested in the future.

The way papers have been in competition with other forms of media such as television shows that the impact of the Internet on newspapers is not a qualitatively new phenomenon, even though it might be an especially important development. These changes were obvious after the 2008 US presidential election:

For the first time, more Americans are getting their news online than from traditional ink and paper, although the popularity of television still eclipses all other forms of media. In an apparently sharp shift in habits…the number of consumers using the web as a main news source surged from 24% to 40% in a year, overtaking the 35% who rely on newspapers. Television slipped from 74% to 70%.

These structural changes in audience behaviour intersected with changes in media ownership beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. City and regional papers in America were purchased by corporations trading on the stock market, which meant shareholders rather than readers became the primary concern of management. Balancing the books to ensure profit meant that journalism was cut, which in turn accelerated the decline in readership as people went elsewhere for news. In recent times, these corporate strategies have produced a further decline in journalism because servicing the massive debts undertaken to finance new acquisitions has required cost cutting on a grand scale.

The collapse of print advertising revenues during the current recession is regularly cited as a reason for the death of the newspaper. But as Nichols and McChesney have written, this revenue stream has been in long decline too:

Print advertising, which still accounts for the lion’s share of newspaper revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to ‘90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year [2008].

Long-term declines in audience and advertising, constant challenges from other media such as television, all hastened by debt-financed corporate strategies that put profit ahead of journalism, show that changes in the media economy will not be reversed even if the current global recession is followed by a period of renewed economic growth. They also show that the constant sniping at Google and craigslist for ‘killing journalism’ are way wide of the mark, even if both organizations have added to the current pressure on traditional news organizations.

Save newspapers or save journalism?

The current crisis in newspapers has led people to speculate at every opportunity about what strategy, product, technology or unknown revenue stream will “save journalism.” There are two things going on here that need unpacking, because how we approach this question conditions the sort of response we can imagine.

First, there is the assumption that journalism, as routinely practiced in traditional news organisations, is a public good essential to democracy because of its history of challenging authority. To put it mildly, this is viewing things through rose-tinted lenses. It’s easy to think that each and every news organisation is run by people who see Bernstein and Woodward’s pursuit of the Watergate scandal as a template for daily reporting. But recent history suggests that much reporting promotes the interests of those in power (think about The New York Times cozy coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which subsequently prompted an apology of sorts from the paper) or recycles PR material (see Nick Davies critique of “churnalism” in the UK, and the “10 ugly truths about modern journalism.”). For sure, we need critical journalism more than ever, and there are some good existing examples, but overall it is something to create as much as it is something to protect. With survey’s showing Americans barely trust what they read or see, journalism’s belief in its inherent social value is ill-founded and needs to be re-established.

It is important to note there that this faith in the assumed relationship between journalism and democracy comes in part from what Daniel Hallin calls the “high modernist” understanding of journalism as “objective” and “socially responsible.” This journalism ran from the end of World War II until the 1980s, when more partisan and ideological coverage emerged, yet it is now being resurrected as the essential ethos of journalism rather than a historically specific form of the practice. Equally, we should not forget that the idea of objectivity as the defining characteristic of journalism was also central to corporate strategies in the post-war period – the best way to maximise audiences for advertisers was to draw readers in via a promise of non-partisan reporting, because the advertisers’ clients did not want to be associated with controversy.  All of which underscores Hallin’s argument (revisited recently by Jay Rosen) that journalism in recent times has been less about fearless objectivity than producing the “sphere of consensus” for political debate.

Second, there is the assumption that newspapers and journalism are the same thing. While we certainly want to save the good, critical, contextualising bits of journalism, we need to understand the difference between the practice of journalism and the particular modes of its delivery. Saving journalism is not the same as saving newspapers. As Robert Picard has argued:

Many…misunderstand the nature of journalism. It is not a business model; it is not a job; it is not a company; it is not an industry; it is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform. Instead, journalism is an activity. It is a body of practices by which information and knowledge is gathered, processed, and conveyed. The practices are influenced by the form of media and distribution platform, of course, as well as by financial arrangements that support the journalism. But one should not equate the two.

Journalism was synonymous with newspapers so long as there were no competing media. The advent of radio news in the 1920s and television news in the 1950s broke that link, but the current debate proceeds as though journalism cannot exist without traditional print media organisations. Yet the financial analysts Moody’s have called newspapers a business suffering “structural disconnect” given that only 14% of their operating costs are dedicated to content creation (i.e. journalism) while 70% of costs are consumed by printing, distribution and corporate functions. There is no doubt that legacy organisations like The Guardian or The Washington Post carry important cultural baggage when it comes to producing credible reporting, but their journalism can be delivered to audiences much more cheaply and effectively through a variety of media, as is now the case with web sites, podcasts and the like.

This highlights what is most significant about new technologies in the evolving media economy. As Richard Stacey has observed, “the social media revolution…is all about the separation of information from its means of distribution.” Journalism is the information and newspapers are the means of distribution. The death of the latter does not equate to the death of the former.

How do we fund the good stuff?

The Internet has solved the problem of distribution and collapsed the cost of printing (assuming widespread access to broadband, which is not something that can always be assumed), making almost everyone a potential media outlet. Plenty of people are making money from the web (especially pornographers), but how can this new technology of distribution be used to fund the public information we need? While good journalism has been under financial pressure for the past thirty years, how can the social media future be leveraged to support investigative work?

The first thing that is necessary in answering this is to resist the temptation (again) to look back on an allegedly golden age that has been lost. We have to recognise that news and probing journalism has never made money by itself in order to pay for itself. We should not, therefore, be judging the social media future for reporting via the flawed assumption that we are looking for a business model that will do what has never previously been done.

We have to recognise that the media in the twentieth century has always been corporate, and that journalism has always been funded indirectly. Oliviero Toscani once noted that editorial was “the advertising of advertising,” the content which drew in the readership to view the material the advertisers paid for, thereby indirectly subsidising that information. The idea of a newspaper as a publication containing everything from comics to sport scores to political analysis to clothing advertisements was simply a function of those ads requiring a large print format that was expensive. Clay Shirkey has put it succinctly by noting:

The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

The search for new business models for news is occupying the minds of people much more knowledgeable than me. However, from reading recent debates it is pretty clear that the new model will in fact be a series of diverse models producing revenue indirectly. As John Temple, the last editor of the Rocky Mountain News has declared, news organisations do not make money from news; news is the ‘brand’ for the organisation and the money comes from relationships and services only indirectly related to journalism.

When it comes to the question of how to ‘monetise’ journalism on the web, everyone is talking about “pay walls” – especially now that Rupert Murdoch has flagged his intention to introduce them on all his publications in the next year. However, a large number of commentators and publishers believe they are not the answer. Why are pay walls not the future solution to funding journalism?

This has been a raging debate in the last year – see this huge selection of recent articles and posts from a short time – but there are few if any examples of enterprises successfully restricting the openness of the web. This is because the Internet, and the link in particular, has fundamentally changed the structure of the information economy, enabling a distributed and collaborative conversation happening in different places at different times (think about the composition of this post and the links it employs, for example). If people using the web by following links come up against a pay wall – part of a site that demands a small payment or subscription for access to a piece of information – nine times out of ten they will go somewhere else where information is free and accessible. The result is that the information behind the pay wall is cut off from the audience and the developing conversation, and the author of that restricted information has had their public impact curtailed.

How do we know comprehensive pay walls don’t work for most news journalism? Take the web site that emerged in the wake of the Rocky Mountain News closing. InDenverTimes.com needed 50,000 subscribers paying only $5/month to support their operation. The RMN had 210,000 subscribers before it closed so this seemed reasonable – yet only 3,000 of those individuals were willing to go on-line and pay for the new site’s content. In contrast, think of how The New York Times ended its TimesSelect subscription in October 2007 and saw its web traffic increase by 40% as a result (thereby making its columnist’s views part of the public conversation and boosting advertising revenue through a larger audience).

Even if we leave aside the larger questions of participation in the new link economy, a rough analysis of a pay wall for Murdoch’s paper The Times suggests the economics don’t make sense. A common assumption for any business offering free versus paid versions is that only about 10% of the customer basis will migrate from the free to the paid. If 10% of Times readers were willing to pay, it is estimated they would generate between £4-8 million/year (excluding the administrative cost of running the on-line payment system). Given that the paper probably earns about £45 million in digital advertising, and that this amount would decline sharply with the lost audience who refuse to cross the paywall, thereby wiping out the revenue generated by the subscription if not much more, the value of the exercise seems dubious. And for a media company that has £445 million in revenue and £51 million in losses, the gain of £4 million+ seems hardly worth the effort even if there were no associated losses. On a different scale, a recent review of small-town American papers that have instituted some form of on-line charging, usually to protect print editions, shows mixed results, with declines in on-line audiences. It is therefore no wonder that most publishers “fear they could lose 75% or more of their traffic and banner revenue if they started to charge for content.”

Comprehensive pay walls might work if every single credible news organisation erected one at the same time, but that isn’t going to happen. In the UK The Guardian declared it will not follow Murdoch down the subscription route (partly because they recall the American audience they created while TimesSelect was in place), the BBC will always have news free for global users (albeit paid for by the indirect subscription of the license fee in Britain), and National Public Radio will continue to offer its 26 million listeners quality programming without direct payment (NPR’s executive director recently called the desire for pay walls a “mass delusion” of the media industry).

The desire to make pay walls a key strategy in the new media economy is historically odd given that news organisations have never relied on subscriptions for the majority of their revenues. As a rule only 20% of newspaper revenues have come from subscriptions with 80% from advertising. That means even if pay walls were somehow successful it would only ever be a very small success on the road to funding journalism. And as the only beneficial pay walls are likely to be small and partial – as part of a “freemium” strategy that leaves general news open to all while restricting access to premium content – the revenue they produce is likely to be even smaller.

A common response to this argument is to highlight the small number of successful instances of subscription, such as the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal or a consumer publication like Which in the UK. However, what these outlets have in common is that they offer subscribers sensitive information with financial benefits (often paid for by corporate expense accounts) or, in the case of Which, they provide impartiality through advertisement-free reports. And if someone argues that micropayments for individual news stories might be a better approach than a comprehensive pay wall then — aside from questioning the idea there can be an ‘iTunes for news’ — we should ask if this is a good scenario: would journalists like their proprietors to judge the quality of their work by the number of consumers who had purchased their writing? Would serious investigative journalism compete well in an environment where pageview bonuses (like those at Gawker) were in operation?

That leaves funding journalism back in the troubled world of advertising, which as noted above, has been declining in print media for a long time. In the early days of the on-line revolution, it was hoped the vast amount of web traffic (“unique users”) going to sites would provide the basis for a new advertising model for the Internet. In part this has occurred, and on-line advertising remains a growth area in percentage terms even during the current recession. The trouble is that the values of this advertising is small, perhaps one-tenth of the print sector it is replacing. Except for Google and its distributed mode of advertising, “print dollars are replaced by mere online dimes” [Jarvis, What Would Google Do, p.125].

So neither pay walls nor advertising are the answer; what then? As noted above, instead of a single business model for journalism emerging, we are going to see a series of diverse models producing revenue indirectly (see the example of one profitable blog, Techdirt, here). And that will bring journalism into line with other digital industries. Take music for example – it is rumoured that only 10% of U2’s revenue comes from its songs/albums. The bulk comes from concerts, merchandising, video games, advertising, sponsorship and any number of other sources. It’s going to take some creative accounting, but funding good investigative journalism will only be as difficult as it has always been, and largely achieved indirectly.

Next…what all this means for the structure of information and the practice of journalistic inquiry in the new media economy…

(These thoughts stem in large part from my presentations on ‘the political economy of multimedia’ made to the MA Photography programme at the Dalian College of Image Art, China, in June 2008 and July 2009. I am indebted to Dave Clark for making those presentations possible, and for our on-going conversation on these issues.)

This convergence is not without its problems. The mainstream media is using ‘clickstream’ data on what drives digital consumers to their site in a way that could see more of the same superficial journalism in more outlets. According to Andrew Currah of Oxford University;

“A paradox of the 24/7 media environment is that – owing to the integration of newsrooms, and the duplication of stories across print, broadcast and online – the news agenda has become more homogeneous, despite there being more channels through which to access it.”

The work of The Guardian, and independent producers like MediaStorm, shows that creative and challenging stories can be produced and distributed. It’s up to the mainstream digital media to use the technological opportunities to do something similar.

[See Andrew Currah’s full report on the future of news publishing in the UK in the digital age, What’s Happenning to Our News, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, January 2009].