Memorandum by Goldsmiths Media Research
Programme
1. The Goldsmiths Media Research Programme,
based in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths,
University of London, is a large-scale, interdisciplinary project,
funded by the Leverhulme Trust, that investigates the dynamics
of a range of media spaces at a time of rapid transformation.
As one of its five constituent parts, the Spaces of the News
project explores the ways in which technological, economic and
social change is reconfiguring news journalism and shaping the
contours of the public sphere and public culture. In particular,
it seeks to evaluate the impact of new digital forms of news gathering,
intensified competition in a 24/7 news environment and a massive
expansion in the availability of news sources and outlets on the
provision of information necessary for citizens to make informed
choices about their lives.
How and why have the agendas of news providers
changed?
2. Starting with the "why" the
main factor is competition and declining economic resources (Curran
and Seaton 2003; Franklin 2005). There are more news outlets and
more time/space (broadcast, print, electronic) to fill but conventional
news consumption has been in steady decline for decades. New technologies,
a second factor, have improved efficiency but also increased space
to fill and further diluted advertising revenues. Both factors
have impacted on the revenues from sales and advertising. Just
in the last 12 months the Advertising Association saw press advertising
drop 2.7%, TV down 4.7%, radio down 7.7%. A third factor is social.
In recent years typical news sources have invested in media training,
technical communications capacity and public relations as they
have become far more proactive in their relations with journalists.
According to Miller and Dinan (2000) the sector rose as a whole
by a factor of 31 (or 11-fold in real terms) between 1979 and
1998.
3. The consequences for news agendas including
the following trends:
— Resource pressures mean journalists
have to produce more with less resources—two or three times
more than they did in the 1960s (Tunstall 1996). This means reducing
costly forms of news, relying on conventional news sources and
story areas, and recycling of outputs.
— Another consequence is an attempt
to appeal to a wider demographic and to compete with the entertainment
sector for consumers that leads to news agendas that are increasingly
influenced by entertainment values (Franklin 1997).
— News sources and public relations
practitioners also have much greater influence on news agendas.
They are better resourced than journalists and are an increasing
source of news stories and research for hard-pressed journalists.
Powerful sources may also dictate the terms of journalist access
(Barnett and Gaber 2001; Davis 2002).
4. There are few quantitative studies of
content change in the UK. Much of the information comes from qualitative
studies of journalists at work (see above studies). However, we
can still conclude that:
— There has been a decline in
expensive forms of news coverage such as investigative reporting
or foreign affairs coverage (outside of UK conflict) and greater
recycling of material by news producers.
— Greater "tabloidisation"
of news. This means more coverage of sports, crime, entertainment
and celebrity. According to McLachlin and Golding (2000), celebrity
entertainment stories made up 17% of news in 1997, up from 6%
in 1952.
— Removal or repackaging of "serious
news" and an increase in light features. "Boring"
or "complex" topics, such as coverage of parliamentary
debates or long-term social problems, are in decline. Soundbite
summaries are common. By the early 1990s the length of time given
to a report on a politician/issue in British news was down to
23 seconds.
— An increasing amount of news
is initiated by powerful sources and their PR advisors. "Pseudo
events", press conferences, photo-opportunities, press tours,
"kite-flying", "leaks" and "stunts"
dominate reporting. Individual personalities, such as party leaders,
are overly featured in news.
How is the way that people access the news changing?
5. For a long time, people in Britain have
relied on two substantial news packages delivered to them on a
regular, usually daily, basis: the newspaper and the TV/radio
news bulletin. Recently, the internet has come to offer increasingly
ready access to these once separate media in digital form, but
changes to how people access the news are likely to go far beyond
the method of delivery.
6. There is certainly a danger of exaggerating
how quickly media habits change. The ESRC-funded "Public
connection" project led by Professor Nick Couldry of Goldsmiths,
University of London (see www.publicconnection.org) found in its
June 2005 survey that television remained overwhelmingly people's
main news source: 85% regularly watched TV for news—at least
three times a week—as opposed to 23% who used the internet
that way. However, newspaper sales continue to fall, and young
people's viewing of terrestrial channels in general, and their
news bulletins in particular, is in decline. Online use that remains
skewed, not least, towards the young, will be highly relevant
to how news access develops in the next decade.
7. Two gaps must be watched closely. First,
the gap between those with ready access to, the internet (including
at home) and those without: the well-known "digital divide".
Notwithstanding recent rapid expansion of broadband amongst the
UK's "connected"population, recent research by OFCOM
and others indicates consistently that home internet access is
leveling out at around 60% of the UK population, leaving a significant
minority unconnected. Second, the gap between the information
supply online (which has diversified hugely, with blogs,
alternative news websites, etc), and news demand by online
users. The Public Connection project found that 50% of survey
respondents in a normal day did not access the internet at all
for their own use, and only 40% spent more than 15 minutes on
it, while among the project's diarists, only one out of 37 used
the internet as his main news source.
8. While it is not easy to address the first
gap, it is at least relatively easily grasped as a policy challenge.
The second gap is more complex in it consequences: it depends
on the habits the connected online majority develop over time
in an online environment which offers continuous access to news
fragments (for example via headlines on internet portals), but
presents an infinite array of materials and tasks for more intense
use, of which news is one, and not necessarily the most pressing
or inviting. We certainly can't assume that the old habits of
consuming news for 20-30 minutes at a time via a daily newspaper
or primetime news bulletin—will be widely replaced by online
habits as intense.
9. More attention is needed to how new types
of news consumption habit can be encouraged, perhaps in new settings.
Many spend a lot of their working time on computers and have work
breaks with in principle free access to computers for personal
use. We cannot necessarily expect large majorities to spend long
periods reading news online in their leisure time at home, but
there may be value in encouraging people to access news at work,
where it can feed into the social and practical context of work.
This will, in turn, require a different attitude from employers
than the one common today (see Hencke 2007).
10. Both news providers and politicians
(whose democratic role depends on a knowledgeable electorate)
face the challenge of sustaining older habits of news consumption
so far as possible, while encouraging durable new habits of news
consumption within a fast-changing online environment. While this
cannot be separated from the wider challenge of sustaining citizen
engagement in politics, the future of news formats/ audiences
will be crucial to any wider solution.
How has the process of news gathering changed?
11. One of the major impacts of new technologies
on newsgathering has been an emphasis on speed of delivery.
Before computerised printing, newspaper feature pages would be
set up to a week before the news pages. Early news went on the
inside pages and the front and back were kept for breaking news.
Computerisation speeds the entire process so that features and
comment can be produced on the same day as news (although a little
earlier). This has led to a blurring of boundaries between news
and features and to the rise of comment. If you can set three
pages of comment on the day then you can ask people to comment
on events as they happen. Writers who can produce readable copy
within several hours have become more valuable than those who
are committed to doing in-depth research. Furthermore, the cost
per item has plummeted and it is increasingly difficult to justify
the expense of paying someone to do weeks of research.
12. The marker for rolling news is who breaks
a story first. Some broadcasters, for example News 24, will now
run stories without the level of corroboration that terrestrial
bulletins demand. They will indicate the provisional nature of
a story's source but consider that they have a more interactive
relationship with their audience about the evolving nature of
the news process. The partial move on-line has further exacerbated
the trend towards speed of delivery. If news can be produced as
it happens, then the news outlet which is an hour late with a
big story has already lost its edge. Now, the imperative to be
first almost always displaces the imperative to be right. With
on-line news, it is, in any case, always possible to revise. The
result is that the public now see, not just the first draft of
history, but the first draft of news. Stories can be easily revised
as, for example, casualty figures come in or as names are provided.
13. Speed, however, is an enemy of solid
research. Right across the press the fact that you can produce
work more quickly has become an imperative to do so. Long investigations
are less likely to be resourced because they are so very much
more expensive than `on the spot' news and lifestyle features.
14. The drift to monopoly, as described
by Benson (2006) with respect to the US, has been constrained
at the national level by the fiercely partisan shape of the newspaper
industry in the UK. At the local level, however, monopolistic
tendencies are more pronounced. Between 1992 and 2005 the number
of companies producing local news fell by half and 10 groups now
account for 73% of all local newspapers (Franklin 2006: 7). Consolidation
of large numbers of local papers within newspaper groups has resulted
in a gradual loss of genuine local news. Newspapers are produced
in centralised offices and then "versioned" by the addition
of one or two local stories. Staff pay is low—50% of journalists
were earning less than the national average wage in 2004 (Greenslade
2004b: 9)—and in many cases staff with one or two years
of experience are managing "trainees" who are often
unpaid. These young journalists have only a limited commitment
to local news. They will be there only for as long as it takes
to collect enough "clippings" to find a job on a bigger
paper or get out altogether. Hargreaves and Thomas (2002) found
that concerns about the future provision of local news are not
confined solely to the press but also to broadcast and online
services.
15. The further consolidation of the local
press and declining budgets in ITV has destroyed what used to
be the training ground for national print and broadcast outlets.
All news businesses are now relying more heavily on universities
and their own trainee schemes, to produce trained personnel. This
(and changing patterns of education) has led to a raising of the
general educational level amongst recruits into journalism but
it has also meant a move away from recruitment of young people
brought up locally into local media. This has contributed to a
drift away from reporting local events other than crime and a
greater reliance on local authority press offices. For the majority
of young journalists a position with a local media outlet is often
a staging post to a more senior job elsewhere.
16. The increasing use of user-generated
content facilitated by mobile phones, digital cameras and the
internet has opened up a myriad of possibilities for journalists
to research and develop stories that do not rely on mainstream
sources. The degree to which they make use of this potential is
as yet unknown. Certainly access to amateur video footage and
phoned-in comment has changed the way in which major breaking
news stories are covered but it is uncertain whether news journalists
use the internet to track down different sources or merely to
access their usual sources more easily.
What is the impact of the concentration of media
ownership on the balance and diversity of opinion seen in the
news?
17. The issues of media ownership have been
chronicled by news production studies dating back to Epstein (1974)
and Schlesinger (1987). All of these reported substantial problems
with concentration of ownership and control of content. Today,
six corporations operate the majority of major websites, commercial
broadcasting/cable casting and newspapers worldwide (News Corporation,
Bertelsmann, Vivendi, AOL-Time Warner, Disney and Viacom). Three
news agencies (Reuters, AP and AFP) dominate international wholesale
news delivery and supply most source material for international
stories on television and the internet. With the further deregulation
of US broadcasting in 2003 concentration of ownership shows no
sign of slowing.
18. The concentration of ownership has occurred
alongside the globalisation of news and the development of new
communication technologies resulting in increased quantities of
news operating at higher speeds and with a global reach via digital
satellite, internet and mobile phones. Some argue that the power
of media owners is diminished in a world where news and entertainment
sources are proliferating at a great rate. But the research shows
that this does little to change the traditional news landscape
when the same few corporations dominate news provision and the
same standard storylines persist. More news, more often than not,
means more of the same. Furthermore, the major conglomerates are
rapidly buying up internet sites in a bid to gain further dominance
of the market (even though the majority of news online is yet
to find a means of profitability. McChesney (2000) argues that
the major conglomerates are willing to lose $200-300 million every
year to dominate the internet.
19. Along with concentration of ownership
are the consequences of increased commercial pressures in a global
multi-media market and shareholders who insist on maximum financial
returns, and hence direction of the news outlet. In this environment
greater concentration of corporate ownership has lead to concerns
over the cutting of newsroom budgets, the undermining of journalistic
integrity, and the danger of greater advertiser and sponsor influence
over news agenda. Hargreaves (2003) claims that it is obvious
to anyone who works in journalism that we need many and competing
cultures of ownership if our news media is to be truly diverse
and consequently trusted. Plurality of ownership does not necessarily
lead to diversity if all owners are of the same type.
20. A decline in trust of the professions
and cynicism in the media also points to increased public perception
(particularly among the young and minority ethnic audiences) that
the news lacks balance, relevance and, too often, serves the same
corporate interests. Public opinion polls (for example Ipsos MORI
2005) put journalists behind doctors, teachers, scientists, business
executives and civil servants and on a par with politicians in
terms of public esteem and trust. It would seem that we are not
happy to see journalism left entirely to its own market devices
and that market forces do not produce a form of news that the
public feel contributes adequately to a democratic society. This
evidence points to an increased need for national and international
laws to limit the concentration of media ownership.
How should the public interest be protected and
defined in terms of news provision?
21. The concept of the public interest has
long been used to justify a range of interventions in the media
policy field, for example to protect speech rights, to promote
local and non-market media, and to stimulate diversity of ownership.
Increasingly, however, policymakers are pursuing an understanding
of the public interest that is based on its perceived `economic
benefits and market effects' (DCMS/DTI 2001: 47). This is a definition
that privileges consumer sovereignty and commercial competition
rather than a more expansive notion of the "common good".
22. There is, however, a special public
interest in news that cannot be measured simply in terms of ratings
and readers but in terms of the role it plays in illuminating
major social issues and assisting citizens to make informed choices
about public life. As we have already argued, the Committee's
wish to "ensure a plurality of debating voices in
the UK news media" cannot be guaranteed by the existence
of a handful of news suppliers, especially if they are all subject
to the same commercial pressures. If we are to see a truly diverse
news media—understood, as Justice Black famously described
diversity to the Supreme Court, as related to the "dissemination
of information from diverse and antagonistic sources" (Associated
Press 1945: 20)—then we need both tough media ownership
rules and a commitment to employ a range of public policy mechanisms
to foster a democratic, responsible and popular newsgathering
environment in the UK.
23. In this context, the public interest
considerations laid out in the 2003 Communications Act, including
the public interest test on media mergers, are unlikely to be
robust enough to withstand pressure from either politicians or
astute media entrepreneurs. The test, for example, requires the
Secretary of State to judge whether there are sufficient public
interest considerations arising from a particular media merger
before recommending further action. Politicians, however, are
not immune to pressure and we agree with the commentator Roy Greenslade
(2004a: 6) in his argument that "despite all attempts to
improve the regulatory regime and to make the process as objective
as possible, the subjective element remains of paramount importance."
It will not be easy to insulate decisions made on the basis of
protecting "the public interest" from the more instrumental
considerations that arise from government's reluctance to antagonize
powerful media interests. Indeed, despite the occasional setback,
the largest media corporations are still likely to dominate news
flows by exploiting their existing strengths in existing and new
media markets.
24. Without a much tougher attitude towards
media concentration and the pursuit of meaningful diversity, current
public interest considerations are unlikely to be strong enough
to confront aggressive liberalization and marketization. Protecting
the public interest requires both a more determined stance on
media concentration and a more imaginative approach to securing
media diversity, one that is based not simply on economic benefits
and quantitative data but on the advantages of stimulating vigorous
debate and critical perspectives and securing widespread political
representation.
3 September 2007
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