It is not news to note that along with traditional working-class occupations, one of the hardest hit business and employment sectors, even before the recession, is the traditional news media. Rocked by, to use a favorite business journalism cliché, a “perfect storm” of technological innovation, shifts in consumer habits, and of course declining advertising revenue, reports of the death of the traditional newspaper may not be greatly exaggerated.
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s latest report, The State of The News Media confirms that newspapers lost 26 percent of ad revenue in 2009, for a three-year total loss of 41 percent. And the projections for the future are equally grim. The report suggests that, for newspapers, “the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass. The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s profits, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online. The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.”
As my colleagues and I have noted before, the consequences of this revenue bleed are dire, for both information and, indeed, democracy. After all, original reporting, as Pew confirms, still comes primarily from these same traditional outlets that are faced with dwindling resources.
Meanwhile, as newspapers devote more emphasis and resources to online journalism, the Pew Project suggests, their focus shifts to “disseminating information” rather than “gathering it, making news people more reactive and less proactive.” The report rightly notes that this shift grants more power to newsmakers, who, through press releases and press conferences now take their own accounts directly to the public “in a less vetted form, sometimes close to verbatim.” Such accounts also quickly become fodder for commentary via the web. Absent from many of these news opportunities is the supplemental reporting that “would unearth more facts and context about the events,” so that “while technology makes it easier for citizens to participate, it is also giving newsmakers more influence over the first impression the public receives.”
And yet, despite these important concerns, one of the brightest spots in the otherwise bleak forecast for media is community journalism– and this is where the convergence of the media and the economic meltdowns gets interesting. While traditional media continued a steady decline over the past year, citizen and community media expanded.
As Michele McLellan points out, community journalism projects are evolving as hybrids between old and new media, between professionals and citizens, and between for profit and not-for-profit groups, resulting in the creation of “exciting experiments that will help shape the future of news, information, and civic engagement.” Increasingly, projects like Oakland Local and YSU’s thenewsoutlet.org explore means to “mix community building with professional standards of reporting.”
Indeed the “perfect storm” cliché might just hold weight for the ways in which media and communities, particularly recession-hit working- and middle-class communities, might work together to redefine their futures and affect positive change.
Recent studies and anecdotal observations reveal some interesting albeit conflicting findings of the effects the current recession on community building and engagement. Taken together, even with the contradictions, these trends might point to some opportunities for media and for the communities they serve. For example, while the Civic Health Index gathered by The National Conference on Leadership charts a decline in civic engagement defined by traditional metrics of participation in volunteer organizations, the study also finds that a re-definition of civic engagement to include tangibles like food and shelter, what might be termed “working-class issues,” makes the picture more complex. The study finds that
Even though they are disproportionately affected by the economic downturn, low-income Americans are still finding ways to give back to their communities. Thirty-nine percent of respondents with an income less than $50,000 reported helping others by providing food or shelter, compared to only 27 percent of Americans with a higher income. Overall, 50 percent of Americans gave food or money to someone who was not a relative, while 17 percent allowed a relative to live in their home and more than one-in-ten took in non-relatives.
Annie Gowen of The Washington Post chronicles a sense of renewed solidarity in one D.C. neighborhood in which neighbors were banding together to respond to the problems of foreclosure, increased crime, and blight caused by the recession. The sources she cites indicate that technology and an active younger generation, one comfortable with the tools of media, might actually increase engagement, a finding confirmed by the aforementioned Civic Health Index, which finds that “Millenials who use social networking sites for civic purposes are far more likely to actively engage in civic participation in their communities.” In fact, this group leads the way with a 43 percent community service rate.
News organizations, partnering with community groups, universities, and other not-for-profits must increasingly become catalysts of civic engagement in order to remain viable in the shifting news economy. Journalists are well positioned to take the lead in this new information/organization ecosystem by realizing and returning to their strengths: helping to set community agendas, guarding accuracy in reporting and transparency in government, and gathering and presenting information in ways that serve the members of the community. Academics, particularly those involved in media, community-based research, and working-class studies, can contribute to this revitalization by helping community members identify ways to use new and traditional information technologies for community change and greater civic involvement.
So while the traditional newspaper may in fact be dying, media outlets may also be reborn as something far greater and far more useful. By taking active leadership roles, traditional news outlets and practitioners can transform the role of the professional from that of competitor with citizen journalists and “upstart” outlets to that of mentor, or better still, partner in the retooling of the information needs of their communities. The community information needs of the digital age will best be met by innovative partnerships between traditional and new media and community organizations and universities, as creators and delivers of content take cues from news consumers, who increasingly integrate content from multiple sources to stay informed and relevant.
Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies
Jason, I couldn’t agree more. It is the sustainability and the funding issues that ultimately too often tank these important projects, and quite frankly, I don’t have the answer to the problem,–and many of the possible solutions are fraught with some serious ethical pitfalls.
At Open Media Boston, we certainly have done – and will continue to do – the things Tim suggests above. However, more community engagement means more work for relatively poor and understaffed community news publications like OMB. Which often translates into an unfunded mandate in an industry trying to figure out new ways to monetize itself from top to bottom. And while working-class communities may benefit from the work done by publications like ours, that does not at all mean that working-class people are any more willing to help fund new news organizations than anyone else is at present – regardless of their overall giving patterns. Also, although it is tempting to get excited about community participation in news gathering, it is very difficult to find community members who are willing to put in the work necessary to do proper news reporting. Many community volunteers, left to their own devices, will simply “disseminate information” rather than “gather news.” Being able to pay contributors and separate wheat from chaff in terms of journalistic quality, would help push community volunteers in new news organizations towards professionalism, but for most of the new crop of online news publications that money simply isn’t there yet. Furthermore, even when traditional news media, universities and other institutions partner with new news organizations that doesn’t automatically mean they are willing to find money to help keep the new news organizations afloat. Quite the reverse. The happy-go-lucky communitarian ethos of getting community “stakeholders” together obfuscates class dynamics and conflicts in this arena as everywhere. That is to say, a working-class led community news publication like Open Media Boston has to struggle to survive and properly cover the working-class communities we serve even as we are expected to gamely participate in do-gooder initiatives by large well-funded institutions that we are critical of or in competition with. Failure to do so means we are bad sports, one supposes. But at the end of the day, institutions that already have money will still have it … and working-class institutions like ours will still be broke. After a fashion, we can easily just go away. And who benefits from that? Working-class communities? I think not. The take-away from these musings is that partnerships between working-class communities and new online news organizations can be a great thing, but let’s not wax too rhapsodic and gloss over the very real difficulties involved. The expansion of community media – and certainly of professional community news media – may be a very temporary phenomenon. Unless someone shows us the proverbial money.
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