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By
Mark Lyndersay
September, 2017
I flip open my phone, half-expecting to see the update already,
but some traditions, almost forgotten now, must be honoured.
For the issue that marks the 100th anniversary of the Guardian,
the online feed has been halted until the traditional press
start time.
There’s a part of me that feels proud of the publication
for taking this opportunity to remind its readers of the
long tradition of publishing, but there’s another part
of me that just knows that most of today’s readers
just won’t get it.
Where I see sentiment and history, they just see an annoying,
unnecessary halt to the continuous news feed that constitutes
the core of the Guardian’s business these days.
My phone, which folds down to the size of a half-pack of
cigarettes (remember those?) opens to a screen on which
a funky graphic of letters tumbling like press rollers spells
out “Please hold, the press will start soon...”
In the wee hours of the morning, the graphic disappears
with a chuffing, clanking sound effect and the familiar
newsfeed, a summary list of the current news on the island,
region and the wider world begins to scroll slowly down
the screen. The format has been redesigned, but the items
I’m interested in are still tagged in the particularly
fetching shade of cerulean that I’ve chosen for my
selects.
The top story suggested for viewing is the Guardian history
special, a collection of features, photos and footage that
traces the history of the paper from its early days of wooden
floors, monolithic manual typewriters and yellowing copy
paper and the hard rhythmic banging of the lead forms as
they hammered out the next edition of the paper.
There’s still a published edition of the paper, of
course. It’s required for the public record and for
people who still prefer to read something printed on the
crushed pulp of dead trees. But it’s been five years
now since ubiquitous bandwidth and readable text on today's
foldable cellphone screens made the idea of a printed paper,
sealed for posterity at the moment that ink meets newsprint,
a memento of the 20th century.
Those were challenging times, as the old arguments about
the convenience of radio, the engagement of television and
the richness of journalistic reporting collided with a fourth
force that few were paying enough attention to, the Internet.
The groundswell didn’t start with the traditional media
houses. It began with talented tech heads and some smart
writers and photographers who saw the Internet not as a
metaphorical highway but as a destination, a real medium
that was maturing quickly.
Bored with the standard news cycle, they started creating
news pages that featured in-depth stories, extensive photojournalism,
video background and audio clips that spoke directly to
a generation that had grown up on the newsbursts of RSS
feeds and the pointed video clips of YouTube.
The first efforts were clunky, to say the least. Much of
the writing was enthusiastic but poorly structured and fact
checked, and thing these early publishers learned came from
a hands-on experience with legal process, as their subjects
responded to cavalier slander with sobering seriousness.
Things settled down a bit after that. TriniNews.com went
out of business after losing their first legal battle and
the remaining Web reporters abandoned their rivalry and
consolidated around a more sustainable approach to Web journalism.
Retired journalists found themselves needed again for more
than a few sage bits of writing on the op-ed pages, as a
new generation of Web journalists decided that learning
the ropes was better than getting hung by them.
At first, traditional media ignored the new channel for
information. Traditional audience measures didn’t calculate
subscribers to news feeds or clock Web hits, but the phone
companies saw the sudden jump in subscribers to their data
plans, and the surge in data demand.
The first response from phone companies was to stanch this
flow by raising rates, but then they began to examine where
the data was coming from and realised that what they were
seeing wasn’t a fad, it was a trend and one that could
be profitable.
Data rates dropped, prices on Internet-enabled phones were
slashed and suddenly there were only two kinds of phones,
cheap ones you stashed in the glove compartment for an emergency
or gave to your sub-teen children and the rest, the data-enabled
phones that everyone over 11 was using.
It’s fair to say that traditional media didn’t
see this trend coming, at least not by any traditional indicators.
What tipped media managers off was what they weren’t
seeing, specifically an audience in the age range 18 and
below.
The numbers hadn’t quite dropped off to zero when traditional
media started studying the phenomenon, there were enough
households with children reporting that they were part of
the traditional audience that the decline was seen as steady,
not the freefall it actually was.
But by 2011, it was clear to anyone who cared to notice
that their children weren’t just staring at text messages
on their phones and laptops and the primary source for information
for anyone under 25 was one (and often several) of the news
sites that streamed information to an Internet device.
The immediacy of the information flow was startling. Young
people glancing at their phones were walking off the street
to alert fire officers to a blaze before the phone could
ring. In one often referenced incident, an agitated youth
resorted to holding up a video of the blaze running on his
phone’s screen to convince incredulous fire fighters.
News was being sent in as text messages by reporters and
reader/viewer tips were being flagged and confirmed within
minutes of transmission. Pictures were flowing into these
news sites from a multiplicity of sources. At a shootout
at a popular restaurant, one news site was able to post
a gallery of images from phones on the spot that told the
story like a comic strip.
By 2015, Web videos were streaming incontrovertible proof
of shady activity even as public relations professionals
were denying incidents live on TV.
Something, clearly, had to give. As it turned out, the givers
were the traditional media houses and the recipients were
the now handsomely rewarded young entrepreneurs who had
created a virtual fourth estate that was so embedded in
the awareness of a new audience that it became clear to
traditional publishers and broadcasters that it made more
sense to buy and switch than fight.
Within a generation, newsrooms consolidated as the urgency
of newsgathering on a minute by minute basis and the need
to review and edit a massive feed of information became
the core task of publishers.
News on television and radio became a perfunctory production,
a nod to the legal requirement to provide community service,
but the real business of media was the punishing work of
sifting through news from journalists in the field, text
feeds from readers and regular contributors, double checking
the comments on stories to kill obscenities and legally
dubious opinions and editing photo galleries, audio and
video clips to support the key stories of the day (and night).
I often think of an aphorism that one of my mentors shared
with me back when I began writing about technology: “Tell
me something I don’t know about something I don’t
care about.”
These days, that’s metamorphosed into a new creed:
“Tell me everything you know about everything that’s
happening, because somebody out there will grab the feed
to find out about it.”
A
postscript
If there’s anything that pontificating about technology
for ten years in my column BitDepth has taught me, it’s
that guessing about the future is a risky business that’s
almost guaranteed to be an embarrassing failure.
The brief for this piece was to provide a forward look to
where the Guardian might be in 2017, on its 100th birthday.
Ten years ago, I was just joining the paper again after
a hiatus of five years and the future, viewed from that
perspective, looks just like the past, only different.
Yes, the next ten years will definitely bring changes.
Will they be as drastic as I’m suggesting in this piece?
Probably not. But there are influences strengthening that
will change the way news is reported and consumed in the
coming years. How they will evolve newsgathering remains
unclear.
We still don’t have personal rocket packs and flying
cars, but the basic building blocks of this story already
exist. How they come together in evolving journalism remains
to be seen.
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