Yeah, yeah, newspapers are doomed, budgets are collapsing, journalists are losing jobs, and unpaid writers are slaving away at traffic-whoring fast food posts for major outlets that promise the experience will give said unpaid writers a leg up in a dying industry. It’s pretty clear why newspapers have always been doomed — a poor ability to move online and monetize content is a start — but while everyone is all gloom and doom about hardcopy rags, there hasn’t been as much attention paid to what’s going to fill the void.I mean, I don’t care if it’s blogs, new media, or Reddit that do it, but there’s always going to be a demand — at least, I hope to every higher power that there will — for serious reporting and global news coverage. But with most of the old standards tightening their belts, and international coverage not getting any cheaper, who’s going to step up? Well, in the near term, it looks like global news is going to be increasingly brought by the only outlets with zero budgetary concerns: state-run media.Al-Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatari royal family, has already been a standout in state-run media, with a wealth of coverage across various media available for free online. Hot on its heels is Russia Today (RT) News, controlled by the Kremlin, and China Daily, run by the Communist Party of China, who have both exploded in terms of how much content they’ve provided (again, for free!) online and worldwide. Which is great, until you get to that whole “state-run” part.Mark Mackinnon, writing for The Globe and Mail, explains the issue well:[L]ook more carefully at the conversations on Twitter, or much of the blogosphere. They often begin with content produced by professional journalists, sent at considerable expense to far-flung locations, and more than occasionally into harm's way.
Social media contributes those debates, simultaneously augmenting and challenging the mainstream media with eyewitness evidence and unique perspectives. That's all for the better. But no truly independent blogger can afford to spend months (or dare incur the legal fees that might follow) investigating allegations of corporate fraud. Nor would it be advisable for an untrained, under-equipped and uninsured Twitterer to venture out to the scene of the latest fighting in Sudan or Afghanistan.
Throughout the recent crisis in Syria, and before that in Libya and Egypt, Xinhua and RT News have thrown unprecedented money and resources at reporting from the scene, even as Western media scale back on their own efforts. It's not too far-fetched to imagine a near future where it's Xinhua or RT, rather than the Associated Press or BBC, that have the only correspondents on the scene of an international crisis, meaning the world will only get Beijing or Moscow's version of what's happening.Mackinnon’s point about social/new media is of course validated by the fact that I’m here blogging and commenting on his own work. But I also see it from the flip: producing original video content here at Motherboard and VICE is expensive. That’s fine, of course; it’s the nature of the game, and no outlet wants to should cheap out on its coverage. But when global giants like the AP or Reuters are increasingly faced with either/or decisions (not to mention the original issue of access), the time is ripe for outlets with huge budgets to snap up more readership.As always, it comes down to money, and with news, that means ads. It’s pretty glaringly clear that “standard” internet advertising — banner ads and pay-per-click models — just aren’t worth much, and a large part of it is because the Internet (and TiVo! and Netflix! and Kazaa! Shakes fist from lawn) has conditioned us to expect to receive ad-free content — or, at the very least, to tune out what ads there are.But quality coverage still requires money, which means finding funding from somewhere. And, yes, outlets are still to blame for not being able to monetize their content effectively. You see the effects of this every day: If your revenue is based mostly off of pay-per-click banner ads, a lowest-common denominator post, like a cheap roundup of cat pictures, is quite possibly going to pull in way more views for less money than a nuanced, deeply reported, and expensive dispatch from Syria.At the same time, I do think some of the onus lies with the reader too. And, yeah, ads can be a bummer, especially when they’re executed poorly, and paywalls aren’t a replacement for the flexibility you’d get from dropping a couple quarters in a newsstand. But when the alternatives are either fluffy, thin reporting; or worse, biased coverage sponsored by governments, we have to find a palatable way to fund good reporting.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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