New Media vs. Old Media, or Welcome to the Digital (Middle) Age(s)

Old media is dying today. Newspapers are closing. TV news stations fear they are next. Journalists everywhere are losing their jobs.

In its place we have new media—digital. Facebook, Instagram, Vine, etc.

Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry for all those lost jobs, but there’s no stopping progress.

We are going boldly forward into the future.

Or are we?

Maybe what we are actually doing is going backward to a much older time. Instead of the digital age, what we might be experiencing, when it comes to communications and media, is the middle ages.

That’s the idea suggested by British historian Andrew Pettegree in his book, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself.

In the book, Pettegree makes the point that what we see today as old media (newspapers) is relatively new in human history—newspapers, and journalism itself as we know it today, only goes back about 200 years.

Before that, few people would have had access to news from far away. Almost all news was local—you would know what was going on in your town, and maybe in towns one or two over.

And how did they get information? It was delivered personally, by friends and neighbours.

Reviewing Pettegree’s book in The New Statesman magazine, veteran newspaper editor Peter Wilby wrote: 

“In the medieval world, news was usually exchanged amid the babble of the marketplace or the tavern, where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding.

“In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning.”

I think Wilby is on to something.

These days, fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers or watching TV news. It’s not that they don’t want information. They just want to get it from other sources.

And what is one of the fastest-growing sources of information? Facebook, or other social media.

And who provides that information? Friends.

Or, to put it another way, Facebook today is the equivalent of that old middle ages tavern or marketplace.

It’s the place where people gather with their friends to exchange information about what’s happening in their “town.”

It's a place of conversation, where information is deemed more trustworthy because you know the people who are sharing it.

The difference today is that these new "towns" are not defined by physical geography, but by relationships or shared interests.

Facebook as the new local tavern. It sounds like back to the future, to me.

The Future of Newspapers, or Asking the Right Question

The future of newspaper dominated the discussion in Canada this past week, after Postmedia—the country’s largest newspaper chain—merged newsrooms in Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary, laying off 90 journalists in the process.

The cutbacks prompted a number of reporters and columnists to write about the death of journalism. One went so far as to say journalism wasn’t dying—it was being murdered by uncaring readers, advertisers who no longer buy ads, and craven governments.

The future isn’t any better for broadcasters, by-the-way; TV stations say they lost $73 million providing local news across the country in the fiscal year 2013-14, and another $41 million in the six months ending in February, 2015.

Adds the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting in a report to the CRTC,Canada’s media regulator: Nearly half of the country’s local TV stations could be off the air by 2020 without a boost in revenues to pay for local programming.

It’s not like we don’t have access to news anymore; as Winnipeg Free Press publisher Bob Cox noted, “we are all drowning in media; so much information everywhere, shared by our friends, aggregated in news feeds and always at our fingertips.”

While it’s easy “to find out about Prince Harry’s latest love,” it’s getting harder, he said, “to find anything about local school trustees or the latest local theatre production”—something newspapers “still do a pretty good job” at.

For now, at least.

As anyone who is slightly observant, the future for newspapers and TV news is bleak.

As the CRTC observed: "Canadians sense that there is a weakening of the ecosystem for local news gathering, production and dissemination across all Canadian media."

So: What’s the future of newspapers?

That’s a big question. An important question. The question many are asking.

But it might be the wrong question.

And why is that?

Asking about the future of newspapers is akin to somebody in the 1960s seeing the decline of train travel and asking: “What’s the future of passenger trains?”

That was the wrong question back then. The better question would have been: “What is the future of transportation?”

Why was that a better question?

It was a better question because the thing that needed to be asked about wasn’t one form of transportation—passenger trains—but about transportation itself.

As we know, by the late 1960s the passenger train was mostly dead in North America, replaced by airplanes and highways.

But while passenger trains ceased to be the main way people went from one place to another in Canada and the U.S., they still needed to travel between places—that need did not disappear, even though passenger trains as a form of travel faded away.  

It’s a similar situation for newspapers today, and maybe for TV news, too.

Instead of asking what is the future of newspapers, the better question might be: What’s the future of sharing information?

Why is this a better question?

It’s a better question because the need for information will always exist, but the need for physical newspapers—like passenger trains—may not.

People will still want information, in other words. They will just want it differently. Probably online, on tablets or phones.  

And they may even want different information than what newspapers and other forms of journalism are currently providing, as I noted in an earlier post.  

Figuring out how people will get information—and if they will pay for it—is another question altogether. 

So far, nobody has that answer.

Don’t get me wrong; I will miss physical, printed newspapers when they are gone. (Something predicted to occur by 2025.)

But pointing fingers at readers, advertisers and governments won’t get us anywhere.

What we need to do is ask the right question.

Update: The same week of the Postmedia cutbacks, the Nanaimo Daily News announced it would close after 141 years. A week later, the Guelph Mercury announced it was ending its print edition after 149 years.

Good News and the Future of the Media

In his book Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of a Media Revolution, author John Stackhouse laments what the loss of newspapers might mean for society. (Read my review of his book here.)

Stackhouse is not alone in feeling this way; many other journalists worry about the fragile future of the media.

In so doing, they often lay blame for this predicament on two things: The precipitous loss of advertising, and the decline in circulation.

(The two are linked, of course; the fewer people who watch TV or read a newspaper, the less incentive there is for advertisers to advertise there—or pay top dollar for ads, if they do.)

  

What I seldom hear is any meaningful critique of the media by the media itself. What if it is part of the problem? 

That is, what if one of the reasons for the decline in circulation is because we, the media consumers, are tired and worn out by what the media offers us each day? 

Bleeds and Leads

If you watch any newscast, or listen to radio news, or read a newspaper, it’s a fair bet that much of the news will revolve around conflict, tragedy, disaster, malfeasance and crime.

  

All those things happen, of course. But is that really news? It's not like we don't know the world is a terrible place. 

What is news these days is when people do good things—when things turn out better than we hope or expect, when there is charity, forgiveness, collaboration and cooperation. Why can't we learn more about that?

(And we can do with less of the "gotcha" questions while we're at it, like what has happened recently with the Liberal Government not reaching its target of 10,000 Syrian refugees. 

Instead of celebrating that about 6,000 refugees have come in just a couple of months, the media keeps emphasizing how the government has "failed." Can't they say anything positive? Isn't it remarkable that so many have arrived?)

The point is this: At a time when the media desperately needs circulation (paying customers) to offset the loss of advertising dollars, they may not be offering us any new or compelling reasons to pay up.

Instead, they are just offering more of the same old things. And I think many are done with it. 

The Pope and Good News

I’m not the only one who feels this way. So does the Pope.

In his 2015 year-end address, Pope Francis called on the media to tell more positive and inspirational stories to counterbalance all the evil, violence and hate in the world.

He noted that 2015 had been a difficult year, what with all the “violence, death, unspeakable suffering by so many innocent people, refugees forced to leave their countries, men, women and children without homes, food or means of support,” the Pope said.

But, he added, there have also been “so many great gestures of goodness” to help those in need, “even if they are not on television news programs (because) good things don't make news.”

The World is More than Tragedy

The Pope’s comments echo as the words of British author Alain de Botton in his book The News: A User’s Manual.

Great Britain, he says of his country, is more than what you see on the TV news or read in the newspaper each day.

The British nation “isn’t just a severed head, a mutilated grandmother, three dead girls in a basement, trillions of debt, a double suicide at the railway station and a fatal five-car crash by the coast,” he writes.

It is also “the cloud floating right now over the church spire, the gentle thought in the doctor’s mind, the small child tapping the surface of a newly hardboiled egg while her mother looks on lovingly, the nuclear submarine patrolling the maritime borders with efficiency and courage."

All true, but don't expect to learn about it from the media.

Looking for the Helpers

Of course, we shouldn’t be shielded from bad things. And the media doesn't only report bad news. But I think reporters need to work harder at letting us know the world isn’t only tragedy and terror. 

Maybe one reason why we don't get more good news is that it is harder to find.

Bad news, by contrast, needs no help being found. It will always announce itself, whether it’s an explosion, an attack or just the daily police press briefing.

Good news, on the other hand, needs someone to go look for it. It rarely issues press releases. It doesn’t draw attention to itself. 

Someone has to go out and find it.

When Fred Rogers, who grew up to be Mr. Rogers of Mr. Roger’s Neigbourhood on PBS, was a little boy, he would see scary things in the news and worry. When that happened, his mother would say to him: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

The same thing could be said for the media. When there is violence, crime, disaster and tragedy, tell us about it—but also tell us about the helpers. 

Help us feel good about where we live. Helps us feel connected to others. Give us hope for the future, even if it seems in short supply.

And, where possible, tell us what we can do to make things better.

Showing Another Side of the Story

I'm not suggesting that the media only offer us happy stories all the time. That would be irresponsible.

But maybe, as de Botton suggests, it could make sure to also show another side of the world we live in, a world that “seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.”

And maybe if it reporters did that, more of us might want to pay for a newspaper or watch the news.