Journalism is changing, and so is the way we consume journalism.  On the eve of the 2015 Future of Journalism Conference, Tess Woodcraft talks to Angela Phillips, Professor of Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of Journalism in Context (Routhledge 2015) about how strong news journalism is crucial for informed citizenship, and how our increasing reliance on Facebook and YouTube for news may have serious implications for democracy.

 

Prof Angela Phillips:  I’m interested in the way in which news journalism is changing, and in particular how news audiences are changing in relation to changes in the industry.  So I have looked at audiences in my book, Journalism in Context, but I have also been looking at young news audiences in an international context to see how young people are accessing news.

Tess Woodcraft: What’s been happening in journalism?

AP: News journalism is changing and so is the way we consume it.  Facebook is now a major source of news for young people.

TW: What are the implications?


AP: Since the rise of the internet, there have been big changes, not only in how journalism is produced, but how it is consumed.  These two things are in lockstep.  At the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, a lot of people were very enthusiastic about the kind of changes.  They saw the internet as a means of democratising news.  They saw audiences being  much more involved in news production and they talked about journalism being less elitist, more involved with audiences, that journalism would become a much more collaborative process.

TW:  To a certain extent that has happened, hasn’t it?  For example, at Shoreham Airshow (August 2015) ordinary people’s videos  of the air crash were all over the news.

AP: In very marginal ways this ‘pro-sumer’ revolution – the idea that the consumer also produces – has come to pass, but not in anything like the way those web enthusiasts imagined it would.  What we have today is bystanders with cameras.  Whereas before journalists would have gone and interviewed people about what they saw, and it would have been secondhand information, now if there is a big event like an aircrash or bombing, there will always be people in the vicinity who have camera phones and will very often put that information into social media where journalists can access it. But this does not make them journalists, they are still sources.  And although all that information moves around – via Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube, for example – most of what happens is that it is curated by journalists who bring it together and construct a narrative around the information and repackage it in a different way.  So it is not collaborative.

We are seeing journalists with more and more power than they used to have – the power to find their way into places where they never otherwise have managed to be.  The likelihood of a journalist being in the right place at the right time when a bomb goes off are miniscule.  So the difference is that we now have access (to pictures particularly) where we didn’t have access before, but it doesn’t really fundamentally change the job of journalist or the relationship between journalist and audience in any way.

Certainly if you are on social media and you are on social media and you are interested in news, the chances are that you’ll get some of this information via social media.  But what is interesting to me is looking at who gets what information and just how democratic this process is.  Because when you look at the overall statistics not very much has changed in any fundamental way.  You still find the major traditional news sources – the biggest newspapers (NY Times, Daily Mail, The Guardian), the BBC and in America the major broadcasters are all in the top 10 of the rankings for what people are looking at.

So we are still seeing the same major titles being the major purveyors of news,

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