Commentators who project themselves into the future are either very gifted or exceedingly stupid. Only time will tell which of those I have been.
I have been encouraged to lay my credibility on the line by a series of reports over the past week that address the future of mass media – the print, broadcasting, and mainstream digital outlets that are the primary producers of journalism.
I have projected myself forward to a time when I am preparing for my 100th birthday. Okay, it’s not that far away. We are talking about a leap in time of not much more than 20 years. Given the pace of technological change, that is as far forward as any sane person should be prepared to predict.
What I see is a landscape in which print is the quaint pursuit of an artisan group of niche periodical publishers, broadcasting is no longer a term in common use because it has been replaced by streaming services, and ‘mainstream’ is something that marketers recall with wistful fondness.
I see China and Bangladesh continuing to flood the world with mass-produced use-and-throw-away garments with which we clothe ourselves, while information seekers turn to the equivalent of nineteenth century bespoke tailors for their news. Journalism will become personal.
Several developments have drawn me to that prediction.
Two articles in the industry publication Editor & Publisher caught my eye. First was a piece on a rather off-putting subject: Orality. What it meant was a move away from the institutional nature of editorial decision-making to a more conversational approach (that is in keeping with social media, AI chatbots, and algorithms). Then, last week, I looked at an E&P story on the exodus of prominent journalists from mainstream media to set up their own newsletters, blogs, video-streams and podcasts. Then I read an interview with a staffer on the German public broadcaster Deutsche Weller who described how its journalists were being turned into ‘content creators’ with closer connections to their audience. Finally, I read a detailed Future Newsroom Study produced by the Financial Times and the World Association of News Publishers.
That study canvassed 448 newsroom executives and staff in 86 countries, including New Zealand. The top newsroom goal in 2026 is audience engagement but news organisations have varying degrees of success in planning and carrying out strategies that meet that goal. The more savvy ones are bringing audience engagement in-house – tapping into communities in planning their coverage. There is a strategic shift toward a ‘storytelling’ style, and our own Stuff was singled out for its use of service-oriented journalism through the ‘Solving Stuff’ section of its website You can see it here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/topics/solving-stuff.
Added to these thought-provoking pieces was a secondary analysis by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute of its annual digital news survey. The second take looked specifically at the news habits of young people aged 18 to 24. When I am 100, some of those people will consider themselves middle-aged. They will carry with them the attitudes and habits they are now developing.
One of the study’s key findings was that on social and video networks, young people pay more attention to individual news creators (51 per cent) than to traditional news brands (39 per cent). They are also more comfortable with AI, using chatbots for news more often and in more elaborate ways than older people, and hold more positive attitudes towards AI-assisted journalism.
All of this points toward the development of journalism practised by individuals or small groups who are closely attuned to the needs and attitudes of audiences that are drawn to them by the personal characteristics of the content creators. These sole traders or cooperatives will use artificial intelligence to multiply their resources and tailor their outputs.
This is more optimism than prediction, but I hope professional journalism will continue to be the principal driver of the content they produce. No matter the form in which information is imparted, the core principles of journalism (starting with accuracy) are essential ingredients if the public is to be well-informed.
Just are there are no guarantees that professional journalism will not be smothered by influencers serving narrow interests (their own or others), there is no certainty over the size of audience that these single providers might draw.
It is possible that they may attract large audiences. The E&P article on the exodus of journalists from mainstream media highlighted a number of them whose new audiences run to six figures.
We have seen the rise of similar operations in New Zealand but, obviously, the market is smaller and so are the audiences. Nonetheless, we have seen digital news platforms like Newsroom and The Spinoff move into spaces that mainstream media have left underserved or unfilled. Former radio broadcaster Sean Plunket has built an influential online enterprise by presenting The Platform’s radio-that-isn’t-radio to a targeted audience on the right of the political spectrum. Business journalists Bernard Hickey and Jenny Ruth, political journalist Richard Harman, Auckland commentator Simon Wilson, Southland’s Logan Savory, and Queenstown’s Peter Newport run successful solo online enterprises.
They point the way to a future where the news industry is no longer dominated by a small number of players – NZME, Stuff, TVNZ, RNZ and Allied Press.
One of the catalysts of change will be the setting of the sun on legacy technologies. I know that newspaper will cease to print and television will cease to broadcast well before King Charles or his successor wishes me Happy Hundredth Birthday. And it is odds-on that radio will have suffered a similar fate within the timeframe.
Will newsrooms remain at anywhere near their present (already depleted) size when there is no wake-up breakfast radio alarm, no Six O’clock news appointment, and no print advertising revenue to prop up online news sites that AI has robbed of click-through audiences? I don’t think so.
However, the need for news and information will remain and others will move to fill the spaces. Where once money determined who could enter the field (journalist A.J. Liebling famously said “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”) the threshold to participation over the next two decades will become truly enabling.
With that, however, comes a numismatic certainty: The coin has two sides. On the obverse (‘heads’) is a public sphere in which there are more voices and a richer array of perspectives. On the reverse (‘tails’) is an array of silos stretching into the distance.
The dangers presented by the reverse side of the coin are (at the least) two-fold. Silos collectivise like-minded thinking. When enough silos with similar worldviews are combined, society becomes polarised. Trump’s America shows us the dangers that lie there. And there is another peril: Silos may keep us apart and promote individualism over community.
If the multi-faceted nature of society is such that consensus is elusive, civic health must be based on equitable forms of compromise. To give proper effect to that process, we need to have access to common sets of verifiable information to both inform our positions and determine that the compromise is fair.
The real challenge over the next two decades will not be the ability to replace our legacy media, but to do so in a manner that ensures everyone in the community has the same access to accurate information on matters that affect them and on which they can form their own opinions.
My powers of prediction cannot determine whether, when the coin is flipped, it will come down heads or tails.
I am limited in the scope of my fortune-telling by the experience of one of my predecessors as editor of the New Zealand Herald. William Lane wrote a column under the nom de plume ‘Tuhunga’ until his death in 1917. One of his columns (which I assume was written in 1903) looked forward to New Year’s Day 2003 and stated that “it would be a bold man who ventured to assert positively that there will be horse-racing at Ellerslie, rifle-matching at Avondale, steamer excursions to the beaches, and train-trips to Rotorua”.
Nonetheless, he did predict that horse racing at Ellerslie would survive. And he was right. However, his column taught me that you should quit while you are ahead. He went on to describe the races – tense contests between flying machines around a course that circumnavigated the city.