Gil Scott-Heron wrote, famously, that “the revolution will not be televised.” Perhaps he was right. But as we saw with the protests in Iran, the revolution is likely to be tweeted. And then aggregated on political blogs. And reported by TV news. And also analyzed in newspapers, where the merits of the articles and the substance of the issues are debated and argued over in the comment threads of the newspaper’s website.
This is the news ecosystem of 2010, where the Internet now ranks as No. 3 to TV's local and national news shows, a far cry from the days when a man came home from work, dropped a cube of ice into his scotch, and picked up the local metropolitan daily newspaper as his sole, authoritative window upon the outside world.
New data from the Pew Research Center shows that, nowadays, one is more likely to be flicking through the New York Times app(lication) on one’s iPhone at the bus stop, tweeting one’s reaction to it as the bus pulls up, and alerting friends in Beijing and Delhi – who may never have cared about the news in the first place – via your Facebook feed. Brave new world, indeed.
The (American) survey’s results are fascinating, if only for confirming statistically what many already know about today’s news environment: the monopoly of traditional news gathering organizations has shattered and people are getting their information from more than one source, both in terms of where that information is coming from and how one is actually accessing that information. A full 92-per-cent of American news consumers get their information from multiple sources.
“The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone,” the study's authors write. “In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory.”
Some numbers from the study in support of that:
- 33 % of cellphone owners look at news on their handsets.
- 28 % of those using the Internet have customized their home page to show customized news and information
- 37 % of Internet users have participated in news by helping creating it, commenting on it, or by disseminating it (via social media)
So what does this mean? Although much of the authoritative reporting work is still done by the staff of large news companies, the average news consumer isn’t relying on any particular organization, nor any particular technological avenue. This is both good and bad.
Let’s start with the good. People are still interested in news (“Yay,” says Iain). They are getting it from more than one source, whenever they want – which shows either a healthy thirst for information or the debilitating ubiquity of today’s 24-hour news cycle. Either way, people know what’s going on. People aren’t relying on TV schedules or the 6 a.m. soggy paper drop to find out about the world, they are scanning different outlets at different times, seeing who gives them the best news “experience” possible. Newspaper correspondents in Haiti, for example, had thousands transfixed on Twitter, writing instant and intimate snapshots of the tragedy. Though newspapers and other traditional organizations are stumbling through modern technology – by the way, the survey refers to them offhandedly as “offline” news sources – news itself certainly isn’t.
And there’s the bad – or sort of bad, I suppose. By diluting facts – or what reporters present as “fact” – with format restrictions (140 characters or less!), there is a danger of dumbing down or simplifying very serious subjects. There is also the danger of confusing access to such information (via your friend Karen’s inane, emotional commentary on the Burmese protests, for example) with actual critical knowledge of current affairs. This is the difference between, say, reading “OMG Pakistan is so wack,” on Tweetdeck, while rocking back and forth on the streetcar, and reading Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books, debating the merits of striking a deal with Taliban. That, and reading a headline on Facebook doesn’t drop any revenue to the news agency that provided the reporting behind such a headline.
Then again, many said that radio was the death of newspapers, that TV was the death of radio, and that the Internet was the death of traditional news more generally. None of that has so far turned out to be true. News is vibrant and organizations that provide it are adapting to new technologies and platforms, experimenting to see what works and what ways should be abandoned. Everything may be fragmenting, but in that fragmentation many people are finding empowerment. And that’s great.
