One memorable image from the media’s coverage of politics in recent months was from Sky News during the Labor leadership challenge.
Comperes David Speers and Kieran Gilbert were gassing speculatively with their guest panel, whilst frantically scanning the incoming tweets on their mobile phones – seeing who would get the word first on what was happening in caucus.
To a viewer watching this circus, it was hard to know how any of this related to journalism. Those of us who follow any one of the Canberra press gallery twitterati or, indeed, Labor caucus members who tweet could have done exactly the same thing without turning on the television. But rest assured, Sky constantly reminded us that we were watching news being made.
The obsession with speed in breaking news that is going to break anyway is one of the consequences of new technology that allows any of us, not just the media, to announce live events to the world in real-time. We saw it too the night before this episode when the ABC, beat its chest about getting the challenge on Rudd a few nanoseconds before the other networks.
For those who did their news apprenticeships in radio or the wire services – where constant deadlines were a fact of life – the mainstream retail media’s sudden infatuation with instant communication is rather quaint. But it’s worth reflecting about what we might be missing when all of the media are focused on speed.
The Columbia Journalism Review this week carries a fascinating cover story – The Hamster Wheel – which decries the consequence of this always-on phenomenon in modern media:
“The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics.
But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!).
Journalists will tell you that where once newsroom incentives rewarded more deeply reported stories, now incentives skew toward work that can be turned around quickly and generate a bump in Web traffic.”
Bingo. As the story says, everybody is a wire service journalist now. There is little time to think or analyse or separate the irrelevant noise from the important signal. It is always about the next thing and the next thing. The journalists defend themselves, as we have seen from Annabel Crabbe and Tony Wright in recent weeks, telling us how hard they work and how the pressures only ever get more intense. As the need for speed increases, the resources are also cut from underneath them. They are required to do more with less, filing to multiple platforms and never getting a chance to take a big picture view.
But here’s the thing. The media has a choice. Just because the Web and Twitter allow you to publish constantly and in micro-detail about events as they unfold (The Wall Street Journal had seven journalists live-blogging the opening of the Winter Olympics), it doesn’t mean you HAVE to do it this way or, indeed, that the public wants you to. The media are doing it to themselves:
“Given that the news business has lost an estimated 15,000 journalists since 2000, it does not directly follow to go from ‘we’re facing a serious transformation in our industry’ to ‘let’s write as much as possible as fast as we can’. It’s not hard to understand the impulse to do more with less. Hamsterism is a natural reaction to a novel set of conditions — a collapsing model, a new paradigm, a cacophony of new voices, fewer people filling an infinite hole. And through the haze we can glimpse an online model that equates Web traffic with advertising dollars, though the connection is far from clear.
“But newspapers aren’t wire services, and wires aren’t blogs. News organizations must change with the times, but nowhere is it written in Newsonomics that news organisations should drift away from core values, starting with the corest of core — investigations and reporting in the public interest. These are not just ‘part of the mix’. They are a mindset, a doctrine, an organizing value around which healthy news cultures are created….the point.”
In the meantime, the unrelenting focus on speed and ‘always on’ news has real consequences for quality in journalism. For one thing, it increases the leverage of the PR agents and the spinners and the flaks, because the journos, like junkies aching for a fix, are ever more desperate for content to keep the churn churning. So they no longer set the agenda for themselves, the agenda is set for them. And, ever more passively, they flag the copy through.
THIS is what is happening to the ABC in Australia, the one organisation we should be able to count on for public interest journalism. It is not an ideological fix-up, so much as a news organisation, so caught up in the technology of distribution, that it forgets what people look for from journalists – speed, yes, but also context and understanding and an appreciation of the big changes that are often obscured by the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute and second-to-second noise.
Against that background, is it so surprising that the media, now the biggest generator of the noise, should fail us so very much and when when need it most?
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