A publisher giving evidence before a select committee last week on the state of New Zealand’s media used a phrase that sent an icy chill down my spine: An extinction event.
James Frankham, publisher of the widely acclaimed New Zealand Geographic was echoing the words of New Yorker magazine, but his use of that phrase brought it home to this country with a resounding thud.
He was one of a succession of media representatives appearing before the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Select Committee, which is considering the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. Each of them painted a grim picture of the future of journalism if new ways are not found to pay for the production of news and its derivatives.
Days before the hearing, New Yorker had published an article headed “Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event?” It chronicled massive layoffs in the American media – 2681 last year and an accelerating number already this year – and quoted a January newsletter by media consultant Matthew Goldstein in which he said: “I see a potential extinction-level event in the future.”
He was adding the impact of artificial intelligence integrated search to the media’s existing woes. AI-integrated search, rolled out by Google, answers queries without referring users to outside websites. In other words, even the limited benefit that news sites have had in the past are about to be lost.
The article was accompanied by an illustration of a meteor racing towards Earth, with writhing dinosaurs meeting their end. The use of that extinction stereotype was unfortunate. We are not talking only about the death of legacy media like newspapers – the so-called dinosaurs. We are facing the death of journalism itself. It is more helpful to remember that there have been five extinction events in Earth’s history. The end of the dinosaurs was the fifth, and some argue that humankind is now causing the sixth.
The combination of the New Yorker article and evidence presented to the select committee has forced me to have second thoughts about how I envisage the future of our news media unfolding.
Until now my most dystopic vision has seen a Darwinian progression with the weakest of the species dying off but the more robust members of the breed surviving. This would mean, for example, that community and regional print titles could disappear, along with local radio and smaller digital start-ups. We could see the end of print editions and much of our linear broadcasting, and even some of the larger players could withdraw from the news market. Nonetheless, we would still have vestiges of pluralism in that market and the fittest will have survived.
I am no longer sure that even that far from optimal outcome is what lies before us.
Malcolm Gladwell popularised the term Tipping Point: “That one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once.” The news business has been fighting an epidemic for most of the 21st century and, without some serious changes, it is approaching its tipping point.
Biologists have a different term for it: Extinction Threshold, which refers to a critical value below which a population or species will become extinct. They have developed mathematical models to predict that point, some of which take account of random events that can tip the balance one way or another.
Journalism is approaching that threshold where its population – measured either in audience or in what remains of its workforce – is no longer capable of sustaining it. The profession will need that random event – perhaps several – if it is to survive in a meaningful form.
Former ACP Magazines chief executive Bruce Cotterill appears to have read the New Yorker article. His Weekend Herald column picked up the existential theme and lamented what he saw as a decline in news quality and balance which threatened its future as much as declining advertising revenue. His column effectively told the news media to clean up their own house.
No-one could sensibly argue against improving the quality and nature of our journalism but that, sadly, is not going to lift our news media away from that extinction threshold. Media organisations cannot employ more journalists and enhance the skills of existing staff if they do not have the means to pay for their services.
Clare Malone, the author of the New Yorker article, offered her readers a glimmer of hope.
The business models that will sustain journalism in the future won’t be perfect. They’ll leave people out who need good-quality news the most. They will probably cater for older, wealthier men who (for now) make up the demographic most likely to pay for news. There will be idiocy and the enablement of rich idiots. But there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile, if not particularly remunerative.
If that is the prospect for the largest media market in the world, the future for journalism in a country with less than two per cent of its population must be bleak indeed.
That, however, need not be the case.
Most of those who appeared before the select committee last week and many of the written submissions (including my own) call for significant financial contributions to local journalism by the multinational search and social media platforms that appropriate content without payment. The impact of that uncompensated appropriation will rise exponentially with AI-driven initiatives.
Sunday Star-Times editor Tracy Watkins, in her editorial at the weekend, wrote about the state of our journalism and the way it is judged by readers. In passing she took a swipe at Cotterill over his comments about a lack of in-depth reporting. I agree with her that there are examples of fine investigative and in-depth reporting in this country (of course, we need more), but his general comments on overall quality were justified. More importantly, Watkins spelled out in no uncertain terms the impact that the multinationals were having on the ability to produce the sort of journalism we need.
And every time you share our stories, the social media giants, Facebook and Google, rake in the money. But none of that money trickles back to the media companies whose journalists and photographers were on the ground, working around the clock…Either you agree that the big social media giants should have to pay for what’s not theirs, or you don’t. And if you don’t, what comes next? What if Facebook and Google were all we had left?
Tracy Watkins was not scare mongering. Nor was the Ashburton Guardian’s Daryl Holden when he told the select committee that New Zealand’s media companies were “slowly but surely bleeding to death”.
Making the platforms pay is both necessary and equitable, but requiring the multinationals to come to the bargaining table is not a fix-all. Far from it: There must be a large raft of changes – both in government policy and within the industry itself – to ensure that journalism survives.
The first step in that direction must be recognition by both the public and politicians on both sides of the House that journalism – faced with an existential crisis with profound consequences for democracy and social cohesion – is a public good that must be preserved.
Such a commitment would form the foundation on which specific policies and initiatives could be built.
It won’t be easy. The purposes and practices of journalism are, at the same time, simple and extraordinarily complicated. Yet the consequences of its disappearance are profound.
Think of it as an art gallery in which an eclectic array of paintings is hung. Some are boldly broad brushed with stark messages while others are built from multiple layers of paint and embody exquisite detail. Collectively they provide a picture of our society.
Without a diverse body of trained artists, the walls would be bare…until someone without commitment or conscience opens the door to nameless people who daub those walls with graffiti, disinformation, and obscenities.
The “tipping point” for the NZ media in my view was their shockingly bias reporting of the Parliamentary Protest. They failed to ‘read the room’ of the nation over the mandates. I’m not sure they can ever regain that trust. They seem determined to continue to push one-sided narratives – come hell or high water.
I’m not sure journalism is facing extinction; maybe the mass media (or some parts of it are) It is undoubtedly true that non-search directed advertising reliant on delivery by print is in trouble. But as someone once said, to find out what the media will look like after advertising look at what they were like before advertising. Only two factors were different; they relied on patronage or subscription for funding and they served discrete rather than mass audiences. But the journalists themselves continued to interview peopleto observe events and to write them up.