I (David Hayward) work for the BBC so I would say this wouldn’t I – big/traditional media is as important today and will be in the future as it ever has been. At a time of Flat Knowledge, when everyone can find out anything at the touch of a keypad on a mobile device, the job of the fourth estate takes on an entirely new and important role.
The future of the media in the digital world is something I’ll be speaking about in Kosovo and Albania next week, so I’ve been looking at and thinking about it quite a bit. It’s also something I look forward very much to debating at length at Open09. (More postings on that to come soon.)
I think the question is not – is there a future for big/traditional media, rather how is big/traditional media adapting to the new world.
There’s no doubt, the 10, Today and Newsnight are still the BBC’s flagship news programmes and are likely to be for several years – just look at the figures.
But we all know that everything we do is changing radically. This has been illustrated by several things, albeit anecdotal which I’ve come across recently.
Last week I spoke to a group of students at the University of Bedford, as part of the Radio 4 University Tour. While discussing how they got their news I asked whether they watched the 10 O’clock news. Only 4 out of twenty of them had a TV – that’ll be no then. They all had blogs and all found out about the death of Michael Jackson via social media.
BBC News is also advertising for a Social Media editor and very interestingly the commissioning power of BBC newsgathering is changing. All big news events are planned with online at the heart. One example of this is David Shukman’s recent Bangladesh flooding story. His producer, Mark Georgiou told me how their bid started with what they could do for the news website, not the 10, not the Today programme – news online. Until recently this was unthinkable.
The BBC’s role is still the same, to inform educate and entertain. It just needs to adapt and do it in a different way. If the BBC and big media doesn’t, who will?
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Just an add on to the post above.
This Reuters Institute working paper,
Journalism, Democracy and the Public Interest: rethinking media pluralism for the Digital Age by Steven Barnett (link below), makes some points, which are relate nicely to the …death of big media debate…… not least one quote.
“The political economy of online news is not one of diversity, but one of concentration ….. the democratic potential remains just that, potential, despite the deluge of information available on the web, old media sources remain the privileged tellers of most stories circulating around the world”.
As I said in my previous posting – if the big media isn’t doing the public interest journalism, who is?
Download the pdf here.
One criticism of Auntie Beeb is that she occupies such large a space on the web, unnecessarily.
As she’s not about profit, is there an argument for her to scale down her web presence, thus saving some expenditure which could, in turn, be ploughed into quality local media including, dare I say it, print?
These are the areas that really need public service media help, not the web.
There’s enough on t’internet already and to be fair the standard of much BBC content shovelled onto the web seems average at best and certainly available elsewhere.
Don’t get me wrong, I passionately believe in an independent and publicly supported BBC, but surely it’s there to fill the gaps left by the for-profit corporations as well as providing balance.
I reckon it’s worth a conversation at least.
History shows that innovation comes from the little guys; see Wright Brother, Bell, Whittle, etc. etc. the big boys get to bureaucratic and become meetings people, keynote speakers, blah, blah, blah. Change is overdue.
We are fed up with the negative democracy news items doled out by the faceless news script writers contrlled by control freaks. The good news is on the web look and you will find!
For a brief explanation of flat knowledge, go here http://www.vimeo.com/7329806