Bad News: Why we need more informative news, and how we get there
By: Dave Olsen
Tags: News, Social Media, Media Criticism, Politics, Media

So far, we’ve seen how profit-driven news sort of worked, but mostly failed, and how state-owned media has worked a bit better, but is unable to dig underneath stories to provide better news. But both the market and the government could still have an important role to play in changing news for the better.

Let’s look first at the non-government stuff, because it’s a lot less wonk-ish. Over the last decade, two big shifts have taken place in the media industry. New media organisations, dedicated to exploiting the growing demand for news, have been established, with Vox and Tortoise standing as two fairly good examples. At the same time, the rise of social media has allowed more and more journalists and commentators to become freelance or self-employed, creating content of all forms directly for their audience, not for corporate executives.

These two shifts coincide somewhat: Vox would not be as successful without YouTube, for example. But they are distinct, and both provide an insight into the future of market-driven news.

There’s every reason to believe that the demand for a different kind of news is going to keep rising throughout the 2020s, as our world becomes more interconnected and hundreds of millions more people are lifted into the global middle class. This demand is ready to exploit for already-established alternative news organisations, as well as completely new, perhaps fantastically innovative and resourceful organisations. But we might observe that this alternative industry growth is probably restricted to those with easy access to tech, with fewer hours to work, and with more money. The challenge will be trying to make this kind of news more widespread, and it’s not clear that this is a challenge which alternative organisations can easily meet.

It’s a challenge to which self-employed journalists, exploiting social media, could well rise to, though. We all know about dis- and misinformation, how it has spread on social media, and how social media exacerbates polarisation through echo chambers. But the flip-side of these content platforms is that they make it easier for authoritative, intelligent communicators to forge a career in an industry that would’ve either corporatised them or chewed them up and spat them out just a decade or so ago.

Social media and open platforms for content have already allowed thousands of great journalists to go it alone and make enough money to sustain themselves and fund their work. This site is a great example, but the truth is that no one company will ever have a monopoly on self-employed journalists because audiences which shift from platform to platform and follow those they trust wherever they go. The profit motives are not eliminated this way. But it does allow good journalists and reporters to have a different option, and a way of making money without the need for everything they do to go through the corporate filter.

The news at the moment is pretty horrible at anything other than surface-level reporting and clickbait. But we are seeing shifting dynamics in the industry, and there may be a way forward even within the profit-driven world.

But governments can also have an important role to play. Clearly, state-run and funded media is not the way to go: it is simply too constrained to provide the kind of quality news that we want. But there might be a mixed approach — something in between nationalised media and private media.

This could take on a range of forms. The more laissez-faire approach would be to simply subsidise and help to expand new organisations which are dedicated to a new brand of news, though this would obviously be open to pretty significant manipulation for political purposes. Still, though, it might be a way around the state-owned media problem of constant accusations of bias. A requirement for organisations accepting taxpayer funds would naturally be a non-profit business model, and so these organisations might be able to avoid the constant danger of drifting away from the original aims by removing the profit motives but still taking mostly private revenue.

Equally, the government could establish a part-state-funded organisation, where the other part comes from investors and subscribers, though you might think this is more likely to be a worst-of-both-worlds rather than a best-of-both.

It’s not completely clear that either of these proposals would work in practice. But they’d be relatively cheap to try out, and if the government wants to deal with the problems that the news industry faces, then they would certainly be worth a shot.