S-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the News

It’s not often appreciated by the public, but one of the biggest dreads of editors in the mainstream media is not being able to fill those acres of white space and dead air time each day.

And those dreads have become more intense in recent years as editors have been squeezed on the one hand by wave after wave of cuts to their reporting resources and on the other by a multiplication of outlets and platforms.

While we don’t have reliable figures for our market, this widely respected annual report on the US media market by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism provides an indication of which way the wind is blowing.

According to Pew’s findings, the US newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in reporting and editing capacity in the past decade. Television network news resources are estimated to be down by more than half since the late ‘80s. Roughly, six thousand jobs disappeared in American newspapers last year, on top of a similar number in 2008. Advertising revenues collapsed by 26 percent, while industry wide circulation fell 11 per cent.

While audiences are shifting from traditional newspapers and network television to online media and cable programs, this is not sufficient to preserve the profitability of the industry and stimulate investment. The growing gulf between the ability of media professionals to supply well resourced, well researched and high quality content and the demand of investors, increasingly from private equity, for an adequate return is at the heart of the malaise that many of us now see in the media.

While new technology, such as social media and broadband, magnifies the opportunities for media distribution, the lack of a decent return on equity works against investment in new resources.

This is why, in a nutshell, the front pages of our formerly “quality” broadsheet press are dominated by trivia and recycled PR material and endless opinion polls and forecasts and cheap opinion from people who never leave the office.

In television, the much hyped “24/7” phenomenon has stretched already thin production resources to breaking point, resulting in rolling “rip-and-read” headlines, repetition and talking head forums full of the usual suspects. (Surely, the worst job in TV is being a “talent” booker on Sky or ABC 24.)

The old layers of quality control, provided by seen-it-all sub-editors (many of whom are burnt-out reporters), are no longer there. This leaves newsrooms at the mercy of the infamous spin doctors, mostly ex- journalists adept at creating ready-to-publish material that digs desperate editors out of a deadline hole.

A conference in London last year on journalism’s crisis summed it up this way:

Newspaper readership is falling, the audience for television news shrinking, and young people in particular seem to be less interested in traditional forms of news consumption. 24-hour news channels on shoestring budgets fight over tiny audiences while even well established and committed news organisations like the BBC and New York Times are cutting budgets and laying off journalists.

Those that remain complain of increased workloads, lack of resources, insecurity of employment, greater dependence on news agencies and PR handouts, and lack of training opportunities. There are accusations that serious journalism, with in-depth coverage of important issues that can hold the powerful to account, has given way to a toxic mix of infotainment, sensationalism and trivia.

And don’t we know it. This is a global phenomenon, not just an Australian one. What to do about it is the subject of future posts. But in the meantime, spare a thought for all the hard-working journalists in newsrooms around the nation, pushing the proverbial up hill, getting paid a pittance and continually asked to do more with less.