I wanted to come back to that debate about standards and about vested interests. Old media is dying out for a simple reason. No, not necessarily because blogs are great and technology is outpacing all of us. The reason is about a decade ago old media organisations stopped paying media professionals a living wage.
It is possible to make a living as a journalist – if you have a staff job. Most staffers I know are so overworked though they wouldn’t have time to check and double check all their stories. And I’ve been involved in my share of compromises in a recent BBC film I produced. The priority these days is to shove a product out the door with as little downside as is feasible within the constraints of inadequate budgets, even in a world where there is plenty of money to do better.
Among the freelancers I know none can live by reporting alone. The same is true of television and newspapers. When TV broadcasters began outsourcing to independents the obvious but unexpected happened. Instead of one profit centre there were now two. And gradually independent producers have come to see themselves as part of a harsh commercial reality. At least that’s how they like to tell it.
So those two profit centres squeeze budgets, gladly use inexperienced staff, reduce the opportunity to travel, meet and qualify interviewees, and generally force a get-the-job-done mentality.
The National Union of Journalists in the UK is right now running a campaign to keep journalism relevant (to newspapers and TV broadcasters). That’s how bad the situation now is. But this is not yet a cash poor industry, just one with artificial profit centres.
The mainstream media don’t pay a living wage to the people that matter -the journalists – unless you are a celebrity. The same is true of TV and newspapers. It’s common these days for a journalist to have to source pictures for newspaper articles for example, limiting employment for photographers, and increasing the time-burden on a low paid freelancer writer.
The irony of this is that many of the people at the top of the independent television production tree began life as radicals who stepped outside the safety of the big broadcasting institutions with a view to saying something new, and making TV in different ways. What they achieved is stifling free speech because broadcast journalists have fled the business, or daren’t speak the truth for fear of harming the commercial prospects of their occasional employees.
Blogging is a great response to that. Producing or helping to plan minority, niche channels has a healthier feel than the relative oppression of the network and the newspaper. And clearly readers/viewers love it too. That’s a lot of momentum against traditional ways of doing things.
