Changing face of news

PAOLO KERNAHAN

WHAT’S news to one person is oftentimes trite drivel or naked propaganda to others. Journalists walk a tightrope of honouring the nearest definition of news – current events, information on happenings in a local and/or global context.

Audiences complain that old-school news written in legacy newsrooms is tainted by money and political influence. Legions of apostates invest their faith in new media and so-called independent journalists, thinking somehow that they’re a new species of human immune to the impact of money, politics and personal bias.

Social media, podcasts, blogs, comment threads – the rise of the “citizen journalist;” all these factors tweaked our perceptions of what constitutes media. More dramatically, the definition of news has had an upgrade as fragile bastions of journalism – the papers, television and radio – buckle beneath the weight of an information revolution. These changes are being driven not just by the internet, but consumer trends and perceptions.

A Reuters Institute Digital News Report suggests social and video-driven platforms are usurping traditional news websites and television news in the US and elsewhere in the world. It makes sense as people are spending more of their time on their phones. The number of folks claiming to get most of their news from TikTok is growing.

How new media and traditional media behave in a dynamic marketplace is endlessly fascinating. Digital journalists, or at least the people who present as such, are like cattle fitted with a nose ring. They’re yanked along by algorithms and the need to post news capsules/suppositories several times a day.

Traditional media houses, often feeling outflanked by their more fleet-footed competitors “broadcasting” from home offices in T-shirts and slippers, are sometimes pressured to show up on the platforms with equal frequency to retain relevance. The result can be undercooked ledes or stories that are, on occasion, more misleading than illuminating. Digital journalists are less troubled by putting out bad information because, perhaps, they think they can correct it over the day as the picture becomes clearer. Where’s that “picture" coming from, by the way?

Proponents of this new breed of journalist have long prophesied the demise of traditional media – TV stations, radio, and newspapers will all become echoes of the past. Most digital journalists and news websites are just news aggregators. Many of them merely scrape the websites of established news networks for the latest headlines and then rush to give their audiences the broad strokes. With some of these online journalists having audiences in the hundreds of thousands to millions, they can “break a story” that’s already been broken by a media company with less traffic on their website.

Aaron Parnas, who calls himself an independent journalist, is one of the biggest names in the digital media game. An attorney by training, Parnas has more than four million followers on TikTok. However, nearly all of his reporting is extracted from other media companies covering big-ticket stories. He came to prominence by doing auctioneer-style news summaries, which are made for today’s audiences with limited time and even less patience to dig deeper into a story.

While there are some digital journalists who physically attend news conferences, conduct interviews, and cultivate sources, that world is shared by many more who are quite happy to “curate” the work of other journalists with boots on the ground and mics in faces.

Several factors are at play in this age of new media. Distrust in conventional news has grown exponentially, abetted relatively recently by the rise of alternative sources of information online. The idea that “independent” journalists online are more trustworthy than big media doesn’t hold water. They are also human, driven by the same agendas and influences and moneyed interests that can be found in legacy media.

The shape and sound of news will continue to be dictated by consumer trends. There will undoubtedly be more die-offs of traditional news houses as market share continues its migration to the digital realm. The future for digital journalists isn’t clear either. Monetisation on social media platforms continues to be a challenge. Subscriptions as a business model are increasingly wobbly as consumers are up to their ears in micro payments – streaming services, gaming, and a smorgasbord of parasitic apps.

Ultimately, news, as the closest manifestation of the truth, will become ever more blurred as misinformation is the new information. This places a greater responsibility on the consumers of news to become increasingly better at sorting fact from fiction. And yes, that is as terrifying as it sounds.