The world wide web has changed the way journalism works. The scope has suddenly been vastly expanded with users able to access their news wherever and whenever they want to and even broadcast their own news.
This has been the main reason for the massive decline in newspaper sales. The tabloids have become daily Heat magazines, focussing mainly on celebrity gossip and jumping on a good old fashioned anti-paedophile campaign at any given opportunity. The broadsheets cannot exactly do that so they’ve been forced to adapt a little differently. Some of them downsized themselves thinking that enhancing the ergonomics would help. Unfortunately this didn’t aid sales as much as they’d hoped.
Inevitably they had to take the plunge and dive into the online arena. Developing online content that would be updated continuously to stand side by side with the hard copy newspapers. Of course their aim is to make revenue and there are two avenues that the broadsheets have taken regarding this. The first, is to charge a subscription, making the online content available to those willing to pay for it. The Financial Times for example allows users to view three articles a day, locking them out after viewing the third and only opening the door again upon subscription.
What most newspapers have done however is allow everything on the site to be free of charge, raising the revenue by selling advertisement space. The Guardian have probably been the best broadsheet to move online, with a simple website, good content that’s constantly updated and well integrated adverts. The Daily Mail has also done reasonably well, though it’s moving further and further away from being a broadsheet every day; it features a lot of gossip and celeb content these days and now sits dangerously close to the tabloid-end of the middle-market newspapers.
Here in Britain however, newspaper companies have a different kind of threat to their trade: the BBC. The BBC News website is the most visited news website in Britain with around 14 million users a week. It’s free, paid by the licence fee; there are no adverts, also due to the licence fee; and the content is very good and kept up to date throughout the day. How on Earth do newspapers plan to compete with that?
The BBC have become the dominant force in news media in Britain with their rolling news channel: BBC News 24, and their excellent news website. I must admit I get most of my news from the BBC News website. I will have a look at The Guardian online from time to time, and the Telegraph provides the best sport content, but overall most of my hits go to the BBC. Surely that’s bad for business. Good for consumers like me, but very bad for business.
Smartphones, iPads and other 3G devices have also changed the way we access news as well. It can now be accessed on the go while you’re on the bus or at work, on a park bench or even on a plane. Of course the key to victory on these mobile devices is applications. If your newspaper doesn’t have an app, then you’re in trouble. More and more people are using applications to access news media, not having one will leave you out in the cold. I don’t see how some newspapers don’t have one. The BBC doesn’t have one, so their competitors really should be all over this medium.
Which brings me to the other big online medium: social networks. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have been like an earthquake, not just to news media but to every media. It has revolutionised the internet in a way that has never been done before. It all started with YouTube really, allowing people to post videos onto their own personal channels, interact with one another and troll all over things. This has opened the market to indie news, people making their own news shows that can be watched by anyone, whenever and wherever they want to.
With Facebook people have the ability to share information with one another instantly. See a news story you like on the Sky News website? Share it with your friends! A lot of news sites have clocked onto this and you’ll find a little section at the bottom of the page allowing you to instantly share the link to Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and many more, all to boost the amount of traffic heading to the site.
Facebook also comes with the ‘like’ feature, allowing people to ‘like’ a page or blog, essentially sharing it on Facebook so that friends can easily check out what you’ve been looking at. The ‘like’ pages have also become a good way to get news delivered straight to your news feed too. The BBC has one, Sky News has one, CNN has one, The Guardian has one as do several other news media. Social networking has become a big commercial business, not just for Facebook and Google, but for the corporations using them to get their content out there.
But no social network is more instant than Twitter. Since it’s rise to prominence, Twitter has become a force on the internet. Though it has far less users than Facebook does, Twitter is growing rapidly and is fast becoming a big name in news media. Several BBC and ITV journalists are on it for example, delivering news to their ‘followers’ as soon as they get it.
Twitter is everywhere these days, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a television programme out there that doesn’t incorporate Twitter into its show somehow. Many use Twitter as a way to communicate with the audience. How many news shows have you heard saying ‘tweet us your views’ recently? Another way is to throw a hashtag on the opening of a show. #dragonsden and #sevendwarves for example. Getting a hashtag trending will significantly improve your ratings. A valuable asset then.
However using Twitter as a news platform provides difficulties; because of it news has become quite literally instant, meaning competition has now become immensely intense with rival journalists fighting to get the news out first. This brings a problem though: quality drastically decreases.
I’ve noticed it a lot recently. Some journalists on Twitter aren’t performing the basics. Simply checking a news story is genuine has taken a backseat in this mad competition of who can get the news out first. Take Phil McNulty, the chief football writer at the BBC, one of the biggest jobs in sports journalism. A couple of weeks ago he, along with several other sports journalists in Britain, tweeted about Steed Malbranque’s retirement from football, reporting that he had retired indefinitely because his young son had been diagnosed with cancer and he wanted to spend more time with his family. I remember reading that tweet and being stunned by the news. I did not once think that it was a false story; the chief football writer at the BBC just tweeted it, so it HAS to be true. But it wasn’t.
Now, Twitter is no stranger to fake gossip and lies, just ask Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson. However when you read news that comes from a professional journalist, you don’t doubt its legitimacy. British journalists heard the news story about Malbranque from France, accepted it at face value and printed it without making sure it was true. Steed Malbranque doesn’t even have a son.
It happened once more at the weekend, again in the competitive sports journalism sector. During Manchester United’s match against Bolton Wanderers at the Reebok Stadium, United midfielder Tom Cleverley came off injured after a bad tackle with Kevin Davies. Nick Coppack, a journalist who actually works for Manchester United, tweeted that according to Tom Cleverley’s official Facebook page, he fears that he has broken a bone in his foot. This news was, once again, false. Not only did Cleverley not break a bone, but the ‘Official Tom Cleverley Facebook Page’ was not official at all. It was a fake. Surely an employee of Manchester United would have known that, so there was no reason for me to disbelieve it.
Rather than improving journalism as it should, Twitter and Facebook has probably lowered the standards if anything. If it continues like this then they may well turn into online red-top tabloids. Something I’m sure you’ll agree, we don’t want. My advice to anyone getting their news from social networks is to not take it as truth until you see it on an actual news website, or on TV. How very post-modern of me. Just because a Facebook page says it’s official doesn’t mean that it is. And just because someone puts the prefix ‘TheReal’ at the start of their Twitter name does not make them the real person.
@TheRealJesus is probably not Jesus. That’s all I’m saying.
Oh, and don’t forget to ‘like’ this blog post...
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