Horse 1414 - Slow News; The Future Of Print?

On Monday night, in the slot vacated by #qanda in the summer, the ABC cleverly ran a documentary called "Who Makes The News?". This looked at the relationship between politics and the media, particularly in Canberra, and also how the physical change in both technology and location affected the reporting and manipulation of the media.

Barrie Cassidy from ABC Radio National's Insiders program made the point that newspaper circulations are decreasing due to the fact that people's methods of consuming news and media generally are changing rapidly. On this subject, I achieved a personal milestone in that I had a tweet retweeted by more people than ever before.

#WMTN I think that the obvious thing for newspapers if they want to increase circulation, is to write better quality journalism. Slow news!

I find it almost a bizarre sort of paradox that with the internet being (for the moment) a primarily text based thing, with people writing posts in chat rooms, on forums, social media like Facebook and Twitter etc., that the quality of journalism right across the world is falling.
Partly this is due to the immediacy of the 24 hour news cycle and the need to feed the beast, a bit like shovelling more coal into the fire of a steam locomotive. In the old days of a daily or even weekly bulletin, writers had the 'luxury' of checking and rewriting their work. Just like a gem cutter polishes their stones, journalism used to be a polished craft.
Partly this is due to profit margins being squeezed ever tighter and editorial staff being shed, leading to more articles being left unchecked. More rough is being passed through because there's no-one to proof read and suggest changes anymore with the same degree of pedantry.
Partly it is because the readership is more stupid than it used to be. I suspect that there is a symbiotic relationship between functional literacy and what people regularly read and since newspapers have embarked on a race to the bottom, they're finding that it is really quite a long way down.

So then, if you look across the landscape, what peaks do you find? Curiously the Financial Review which costs more than four times that of the Telegraph in Sydney, gives us a possible answer.
People are prepared it seems to pay for quality journalism provided that's what they're getting. Maybe the answer to the question of the survivability of print media isn't a race to the bottom but the top.
Maybe there is hope. You'd sell less items but people would pay more for those items. If people perceive value in a slower form of reportage, maybe they'd be prepared to engage with it more.

The thing is that unlike building a motor car or a piece of furniture, the materials used, which are the tools of the English language itself, cost no more to employ. There is no such thing as a ten cent or fifteen dollar word, even though the quality of the prose that you finally assemble from those words can be worth ten cents or fifteen dollars.
Per capita, Australians are still the most voracious readers of magazines. Magazines either tend to trade in even less newsworthy subjects like gossip, or in more specialist subjects such as gardening, cookery, politics or technical things. They still tend to fight the internet in terms of breaking news to the public but they have the advantage that for new releases, they can spend the time to properly review their subjects in detail.
Journalism need not just be the art of sensationalist piffel. A picture paints a thousand words but equally a thousand words can paint a picture with as many shades as a great master.

One of the constant criticisms of modem politics in particular is that everything is reduced to a few sound bites and that the politicians themselves have a ridiculous need to stay 'on message', if newspapers themselves stepped back a little and created the space, maybe just maybe, discourse would widen.
As it stands, News Corp in particular and Fairfax as a willing co-conspirator play the game of stamping on every single toe that ever steps out. Both of them being right of centre have a tendency to stamp on more Labor toes than Liberal ones and I suppose that there is an argument that a free press does put a check on government but when the press sits outside the hen house with a giant mallet, you can't very well blame the chooks for not wanting to come out often.
I really want to see more of the whyfore and wherefore of the news. Governments and Oppositions do not develop policy in isolation but because they want to achieve outcomes based on their political beliefs. The reasons for why policy is formulated and how decisions are arrived at are more interesting and newsworthy than the 'he said, she said' hack fest which we're often treated to.
Moreover the stories and characters in the news often form a large part in how the news itself is created.

The act of buying a newspaper itself is by inference a contract by the reader to spend some time engaging with the printed word. If newspapers are to evolve into a new space in the twenty-first century, it seems to me that they'd be better off if they acknowledged how valuable their readership's time is.
I remember the days when the Saturday paper was a big massive thing of 9-12 sections. To properly read the Saturday paper took most of Saturday and part of Sunday. The Times of London was  especially chunkified and often would rival people's cats for sheer bulk and volume. Those same cats would often do their utmost to sit in the middle of said newspaper, which was often useful as they covered over Maggie Thatcher, Francois Mitterand or Helmut Kohl's face. The Berlin Wall didn't come down because of the end of Communism but because a giant cat's bum sat square in the middle of it. Obviously the Berlin Wall probably came down because of other factors but the point remains that newspapers themselves calmly reported things and the still, frozen, black letters of the printed word still had more authority than the fleeting words of television or radio. The way forward it seems to me if newspapers are to avoid being thrust into digital oblivion, is to make use of that authority and write words which can not be tossed aside so easily.

I also don't think that moving to an exclusively online platform is a particularly useful or helpful answer. I very much understand the desire to abandon major pieces of plant because it is hideously expensive to maintain but the printed copy itself provides its own advertising. Murdoch found out first hand with the experiment of 'The Daily' that without physical content and hiding behind a paywall, casual readers bounce off pretty easily. Issuing some sort of temporary pass might work, provided its sold along similar lines as Apple's iTunes. The big problem with news compared to music is that music is a multi-use product, even in the electronic state. I know of no-one who would read the same article for fun again; not even I am that sad a person.
Again we arrive at that paradox. Falling sales lead to falling revenues, which makes news gatherers wonder why they're still in the game. Falling sales leads to lower quality journalism which turns the wheel again.

There of course a business model which appears to work (and I say "appears to" because I only have visual evidence to go on) and that is the theory that if you charge literally nothing for the journalism to the consumer, then they can't very well complain about the quality. Mx works on precisely this principle and whilst I don't really like to complain about things I don't even buy (or even pick up for that matter), just the headlines which you get to glance at because we're all jammed in like sardines, are enough to tell you that the IQ required to read Mx is that of a Tic Tac (other breath mints are available). I suppose that Mx must keep a few people employed but they're required to exercise their journalism skills no further than Ctrl-C Ctrl-V. The advertisers are the ones who carry the bill for Mx and they're happy as long as their logos and adverts are thrust in front of Johnny Q Public. Just because the public is prepared to take a newspaper for free, doesn't mean that they engage with it that deeply. Many copies of Mx do not make the trip from the pile in the Westpac Centre to the train and find themselves in the recycling bins outside the ticket barriers. This means that they've been in someone's hands for less than three minutes total. That's hardly enough time to convince people to change their minds about very much.

If you look right across all media, the most popular books which are sold are novels, the most popular TV shows are dramas, comedy and sport; and the most popular radio shows in terms of sheer numbers are talkback shows; the most popular websites are social media like Facebook and Twitter. All of these are driven by peoples' innate desire to listen to stories and to tell stories, especially about themselves. I can't even claim to be any different this regard because really this blog (as indeed any other) is still basically concerned with telling stories, one way or another.
For newspapers to properly embrace the change into the twenty-first century and the digital word, their best bet I think is to slow down and take time to tell the stories of the news; leave the speed to someone else. Paint the pictures by using those thousand words.