On Disruption: An insider’s view of the collapse of journalism

Can journalism and the news industry survive the perfect storm of digital disruption? Dr Martin Hirst reviews Katharine Murphy’s essay On Disruption.

Katharine Murphy’s brief essay On Disruption lays out for the reader a useful insider’s view of how the news industry and journalism are struggling to cope with the changes wrought by digital technologies and collapsing business models.

If you have any interest in understanding how the news establishment sees itself, and its prospects for surviving the crisis of profitability and trust, it is worth reading this pamphlet.

At only 120 pages, it would be unfair to expect Katharine Murphy to provide fully-articulated solutions to the almost panic-inducing problems confronting the mainstream media. Having said that, On Disruption is an insight into how establishment journalists see themselves, their mission and the state of their industry.

The key theme that Murphy explores is that the internet and social media instituted a period of disruption that has unsettled the news media and left it in a state of uncertainty that persists today.

This is true enough, but my criticism stems from the technological determinism that frames her view:

‘… the boss has decreed this is the future, not because he or she necessarily wants it to be, but because it is the future, and we are powerless to argue with it.’

This is a classic trope of technological determinism: the belief that technological change is the root cause of everything. In this case, it is the pessimistic, and ultimately passive, view that the future is somehow pre-ordained by the technology and that we are “powerless” to shape the future for ourselves.

Inevitably, Murphy argues, journalists must adapt to the new ways, rather than challenge them. The second telling point about the quote I’ve used here is the reference to “the boss”. This metaphorical figure is present in a long anecdotal metaphor that Murphy uses to explain how disruption has affected the news industry.

The analogy involves substituting the car industry for journalism. In the analogy, the reader is asked to imagine themselves as a worker in a car factory that is confronting technological change. Okay, it’s only a metaphor, so perhaps not be taken literally, but it is a key section of the first half of Murphy’s argument, so it is worth deconstructing.

Murphy begins by suggesting that the car analogy is ‘possibly psychic penance on my part’ for her previous work on ‘structural adjustment’, which emphasised ‘disruption as an economic homily’ while ignoring ‘the human dimension of the story’. As Murphy acknowledges, when there is personal interest involved, the human dimension suddenly becomes very real.

The take-away from this is that the structural adjustment process now being applied to journalism is a necessary corrective brought about by digital disruption.

Scooped: The politics and power of journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand

Hot off the press

Scooped is finally available. You can order online from Exisle Books

This book is the first new text on New Zealand journalism in ten years. Scooped is an edited collection of essays canvassing the politics and power of journalism and the news media in New Zealand today.

Scooped: The Politics and Power of Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand critically examines some of the most pressing economic, political, social and cultural issues facing journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Approaching journalism as a field of cultural production, the book brings together contributions from a diverse list of academics and journalists, and interrogates the commonsense assumptions that typically structure public discussion of journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Rather than simply treating power as something others have, and politics as something that the media simply covers, the book situates journalism itself as a site of power and cultural politics. Lamenting the often antagonistic relationship between journalism and academia, the book offers a vision of a critically engaged journalism studies that should be of interest to academics, students, journalists and general readers.

 

I’m going to be LATE for the museum

LATE 04
Innovate: Media
Thursday, 3 June 2010

This month LATE at the Museum asks what a rapidly-changing digital landscape means for broadcasters, policy makers and of course us as audiences?

The evening will ask what is happening, and what needs to happen, to ensure the independence and profitably of content creators in the age of ‘open source’ media.

Is the Internet the friend or enemy of today’s broadcasters and journalists, and how can we sustain quality programming and reporting at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and people expect to read, hear and watch content for free?

Smart Talk

The evening features a panel discussion with Associate Professor of Journalism at AUT University, Dr Martin Hirst and Brent Impey, ex CEO, Mediaworks NZ (TV3, TV4). The discussion will be moderated by former editor of the New Zealand Listener and award-winning columnist Finlay Macdonald.

Great Music

Entertainment on the evening includes Little Bushman who return to the Museum for an encore following their spellbinding performance at our inaugural LATE, plus Jeremy Toy (Opensouls) with special guests.

Philosophers and journalists – unlikely bedfellows? Bourdieu in the house!

[Thanks Jess for the link]

An interesting, if a little obtuse piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week about the fractious relationship between philosophy and journalism. I was struck most immediately by this paragraph, which IMHO sums up the situation reasonably well:

Still, broadly speaking, we need philosophers who understand how epistemology and the establishment of truth claims function in the real world outside seminars and journals—the role of recognized authorities, of decision, of conscious intersubjective setting of standards. And we need journalists who scrutinize and question not just government officials, PR releases, and leaked documents, but their own preconceptions about every aspect of their business. We need journalists who think about how many examples are required to assert a generalization, what the role of the press ought to be in the state, how the boundaries of words are fixed or indeterminate in Wittgensteinian ways, and how their daily practice does or does not resemble art or science.

Carlin Romano, We need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’

There’s another key statement in Carlin’s piece that I also identify with quite strongly. Here he’s talking about the insoluble and necessary link between journalistic and philosophical modes of thinking:

I’ve always insisted to the philosophy students that journalistic thinking enhances philosophical work by connecting it to a less artificial method of establishing truth claims than exists in philosophical literature. I’ve always stressed to journalism students that a philosophical angle of mind—strictness in relating evidence and argument to claims, respectful skepticism toward tradition and belief, sensitivity to tautology, synoptic judgment—makes one a better reporter.

There is no doubt for me that journalism is — at it’s core — an intellectual pursuit that has a high public interest attached to it. There is a necessary couplet between journalism as a practice and theories of democratic public discourse. It is an imperfect linkage — one that’s distorted by the ideological contortions of logic necessary to justify capitalism as a social formation and the dismal science of economics as some sort of rational explanation for human behaviour and human nature (both of which I utterly reject).

This is a long post, so you might want to print it off and read at your leisure. I am keen to discuss Carlin Romano’s timely essay, but also to further explore my own thinking in relation to what I regard as a core philosophical approach to journalism scholarship — the use of the dialectic as an organising and analytical tool to understand the social relations of news production in the widest sense.

The comical world of Karl du Fresne – “Dr Phelan, I presume!”

I have published Sean’s commentary on another exchange with Karl du Fresne because we (Sean and I) think it is important to keep this discussion alive. It began some time ago now with a column by Karl in response to an academic article by Sean. You can find all the backtrack links at the end of this post.

I am happy to host other responses here too. Ethical Martini is part of the historical record for these things and, besides, I’m nearly finished with the book manuscript, so I’m happy for any contributions at the moment to keep the front page fresh. I will be back to full-strength in a few weeks. My publisher wants the MS by Friday 24 July and the book, News 2.0: Can journalism survive the Internet? will be published by Allen & Unwin in October this year (fingers crossed!).

The short piece below was originally published in the Manawatu Standard (June 13) and Nelson Mail (June 17) as a direct response to an earlier column by Karl du Fresne. Since neither paper published it at the Stuff website, I would like to thank Martin for giving me the opportunity to belatedly publish it at his blog. I will be writing more about this brouhaha in time (a more ‘theoretical’ piece, Karl, I’m sure you can’t wait), but this is my tuppence worth for now…

Sean Phelan

Massey University

The comical world of Karl du Fresne

I would like to thank the editor for giving me a chance to respond to a recent column by Karl du Fresne (May 27). I’m sure Fairfax media could run a monthly supplement of columns by people who have been unfairly maligned by a man who seems to treat curmudgeonliness as a vocation.

I was the subject of an article that has since been published at du Fresne’s blog under the headline of ‘Why leftist academics hate the media’. The article was the latest instalment in a soap opera initiated by an earlier du Fresne blog, which lampooned an academic journal article of mine that was published in 2008.

While I don’t have much space to explore the substance of that debate here, it concerns the culture of New Zealand journalism and journalism education. Du Fresne attacked my essay, partly because it critiqued an earlier article of his. He also objected to my writing style, which, in his comic assessment, was ‘written in academic jargon of the most pretentiously arcane type imaginable’.

This whole affair has been comical alright, though not for the reasons assumed by du Fresne. This is because, in his world, what constitutes ‘bizarre’ is the thought that someone might write an academic paper suggesting that the ideas of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, could be relevant to an analysis of New Zealand journalism.

What can we learn from video gamers that will help journalism?

This is a shameless plug!

The Journalism and Society Research Group was recently established by Dr Martin Hirst and colleagues, in the School of Communication at AUT University, to further research and collaboration with industry on issues vital to the health of the news industry and the democratic functioning of the mass media.

The inaugural meeting of the group will take place on Monday 6th April 2009, from 5.30 to 6.30pm followed by drinks at the Brooklyn Bar.

Mass(ive) media: Borrowing from video game research to explore journalism and society

Journalism of the Future – a Missouri perspective

I’ve been in Columbia, Missouri (pron: Mizzoorah) for the past few days, enjoying the hospitality of the Missouri School of Journalism and helping them (in my own small way) to celebrate a Centenary of operations.

It’s also the launch of their state-of-the-art convergent newsroom and associated research and teaching facilities at the Reynolds Institute.

As well as honouring MSJ’s proud history, the celebration has a serious side, a forum on the future(s) of journalism. The focus of discussion has been on journalism, journalists, convergence and, of course, curriculum issues.

Link to Forum site

I’ve been able to get an overview of journalism education in a number of places and alongside my visit to the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC Los Angeles, I’m starting to get a picture of where the journalism curriculum is going and what the stumbling blocks are.

One interesting note: at Annenberg they’re still offering undergraduate degrees in print and broadcast journalism. Their MA program (I know Allison, but I am in America, OK!) offers tracks in print, broadcast and online.

I was also relieved to find out that the struggles and issues we face at AUT are really no different from those being tackled around the world. It’s not the case that we are a million years behind; in fact we’re on par with some of the bigger schools and not that far behind the leaders.

That’s the good news. The bad news is…