Foreword
(yes, this might possibly be the first blog in the world that has a foreword. You are part of history. Embrace it. Take a screenshot. Tell your grandkids.)
When I was asked to write this foreword, I was somewhat shocked. I am not ashamed to tell you that when I, William Randolph Hearst, was offered the chance to once again deal in my second-favourite commodity (words), it brought a small tear to my eye. I can remember so long ago, when I first started in the newspaper game, what it was like: heavy machinery, ink everywhere, and not a computer to be found. We didn’t have spell-checker back then, but we certainly did have notoriously tricky words like ‘gubernatorial’ and ‘abstinence’! The kids of today don’t know how easy they have it.
Which brings me to the reason that I’m here today: to provide a (primarily conceptual) bridge between the old school ‘print-edition’ and the newfangled ‘online newspaper’. How has the newspaper reporting game changed as the world rapidly moves towards digitised information? It’s a fascinating question to consider. It is not a field I’m qualified to discuss, so instead I’ll hand over to Dominic Stevenson, who has had much less experience in newspaper publishing but infinitely more experience in blogging and shameless impersonation. And since I’m told this piece will take the online form of a blog, I have nothing left to do but let Stevenson get on with it.
William Randolph Hearst*
Historically, newspapers have been one of the primary ways in which the news is collated and disseminated to the masses; a cornerstone of the media. With the advent of the internet, the traditional set-up of the newspaper was challenged. Would the traditional daily become redundant under the heel of the internet with its instantaneous nature and inherent cost effectiveness? At this point in time, papers continue to circulate in physical format (and my prediction is they will continue to do so for a long time) but there is no doubt that all major newspapers are becoming equally reliant on the success of their website in order to stay relevant in the cut-throat modern media age. Join me, won’t you, as we take a stroll into the virtual newsagency and examine the beast that is the online newspaper?
Possibly the biggest feature of online newspapers is the advent of the comments section. Comments provide readers with a real time snapshot of what readers think of an issue or article. This can at times enhance the online experience – an insightful comment from another reader can indeed affirm or challenge the stance we have taken on the issue and provide a useful forum for debate. The instantaneous feedback from readers also keeps reporters and columnists on their toes, they are now publically (and instantly) at the mercy of their readers.
In the real world, however, the comments section is much more frequently used by loud-mouth dolts to express their opinions IN CAPS LOCK or with badpunctuation!!! Of course, this can be entertaining in itself and I think as an open democratic society we should be ever vigilant to ensure we never take away the basic rights for idiots to utilise their soapboxes, whether they be virtual or otherwise.
An interesting habit which I have formed with browsing newspaper websites is actually becoming bored with the article itself (damn you, internet, for reducing my atten) and scrolling down to the comments, which are often much more juicy. To be honest, the anonymous public will always have a much meatier opinion on mildly controversial legislation than any ‘qualified’ journalist will. Perhaps one day the newspaper columnists will cotton on to this and actually have the comments at the top of the webpage, and we can all stop pretending we read the article anyway and just watch Tim from Sydney and Vanessa from Parkdale slog out the climate change debate.
A related cousin which is sometimes invited to Comment family gatherings is the instant online poll, another tool which I often find much more entertaining and insightful than the actual ‘news.’ It’s great fun to try and find similar articles on news websites with vastly different readership demographics and check out the poll discrepancies (or you could use the internet to do something actually fun). However, like the comments section, the poll provides an invaluable instant gauge on how the reading public is feeling about any particular issue. It makes it that much easier to determine if you fall within the consensus on delicate subjects and if not, gives you a chance to discreetly change your opinion on controversial matters before you blurt out some politically incorrect joke and ruin a party. It’s handy little benefits like this that make me constantly wonder how society ever functioned without the internet.
Another advantage of the newspaper website is the joys of multimedia integration. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and newspapers can easily dedicate whole galleries to subjects and stories where previously one or two photos would have had to suffice in order to save space. Furthermore, the use of video can be utilised successfully on the site, although sometimes the clips are of questionable content. A couple of days ago, Hobart daily The Mercury was running with a video that showed Lady Gaga falling off a flaming piano. In the prehistoric past, we perhaps would have had to rely on the vividness of the reporters words in order to conjure the mayhem that must have ensued. But now we can view Gaga’s unrequested gravity surplus in all its glory. Of course, in the prehistoric past this probably also wouldn’t have qualified as news, but luckily the internet means that newspapers can be a lot less choosy and elitist with their reporting, which can only be a good thing.
I’ve already briefly discussed in earlier posts about the reliability of internet news. Certainly, the internet news has provided a fantastic resource which we can get instant updates on a fast breaking story. But it also adds the danger that the wrong facts will be reported in a desire to update news quickly rather than accurately. This incorrect information is then spouted through the social media sites before it can be properly reeled in, leading to vast rumours circulating much quicker than they ever could before.
Speaking of social media, it has become increasingly apparent that everyday citizens are now becoming part of the news publishing cycle, with newspapers calling for reader’s photos and videos to supplement journalist’s stories. This has angered some aspects of the media community, particularly professional photographers, who feel their careers are threatened by the influx of amateurs. It’s a delicate debate. On the one hand we should embrace the opening of the news cycle to every day citizens, who can often provide unique photos and perspectives that might be missed by the time a newspaper photographer reaches the story. Of course, it’s possible that the market will take care of this debate when the public realise that their photos are worth something to the newspapers and begin charging accordingly. One must consider, however, that for many amateurs seeing their photo on the homepage of a national newspaper’s website could indeed be incentive enough to supply their images for free.
Actually, as I was researching that last paragraph (‘researching’ is a word that’s thrown around a lot these days. Please note that I use it in its loosest form) I came across this, an app from Channel Nine that provides you with a quick and easy way to send in your photos and videos to the station:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/8227617/nine-newsbreak-app-launches Whilst not strictly related to online newspapers, the app illustrates nicely the flourishing of amateur contributions to the media cycle. Of course the terms and conditions make it quite clear that you’re selling your soul: “In submitting Footage through the Footage Services, you grant to Nine an exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, transferable, royalty-free licence to use, copy, reproduce, edit, modify and exploit the Footage in any media, and to sublicense such rights to other” but as I mentioned before the narcissistic cravings of the avid mobile snapper know no bounds. (By the way, what do Channel 9 mean when they say they have the right to ‘exploit’ the footage? Are they planning to make it work in their salt mines for below-award rates?**) Although in this case we are dealing with television and not newspaper, the overall principal is the same: the media market is beginning to get savvy to the huge amount of free images and material that it can get from the public, and the internet is an integral part of this.
What sort of threat does the online newspaper pose to the more traditional print medium? It’s hard to find solid data. The ever reliable Melbourne tabloid Herald Sun reports that “The Herald Sun remains Australia's most popular daily newspaper, attracting 1,520,000 readers Monday to Friday.” Unfortunately, this data was collated in May 2005. As much fun as it is to reminisce (the Billboard Hot 100 number one song for May 2005 was Gwen Stefani’s hauntingly introspective classic “Hollaback Girl”) the Herald Sun isn’t exactly forthcoming in recent data.
Rival Melbourne daily The Age is a little more helpful, reporting that in Dec. 2009 (Billboard No 1. was Empire State of Mind - Jay Z ft. Alicia Keys) it had a readership of nearly 700,000. In any case, these numbers are still quite large, and it seems that people are still quite attached to their print versions. There seems to be something familiar and comforting in holding a physical copy of the news, and the print editions of newspapers are generally laid out in a very reader friendly and less “CLICK HERE” “NO, HERE!” NO, WAIT, HERE!” manner, as evidenced by the website for The Australian below:
Fun game time! Try and count the number of clickable options!
For those of you sensible enough not to play my little game, I counted 58 clickable options all up (including ads), and that’s just for the top quarter of the homepage visible in that screenshot, and doesn’t include drop down options which are available if you hover over certain links. That is a phenomenal and somewhat overwhelming amount of information for the brain to comprehend. Compare this with a typical print paper front-page (I nearly called it a homepage), which has (based on my count of the Age front-page for Saturday April 9) just under twenty front-page objects that draw your eye (including ads and photographs). Considering many people like to read the newspaper in the morning, the more mellow print paper is definitely a more attractive option than the information cluster-bomb website. However, it must be remembered that there has been over a century of print medium formatting, whereas online newspapers have been around for less than twenty years. I’m sure that the website design will become more intuitive and attractive.
I have barely tapped the surface of all the goodies that online newspaper websites have to offer. Online archives, live blogs with journalists, and more ads than you can poke a cursor at all deserve at some stage to be examined and discussed in their full glory. But for now, suffice to say that while the print newspaper will always be the grand-daddy of modern media, it’s worth keeping an eye on its insolent and hyperactive great grandchild, who in its own inimitable way ensures that we’re always up to date with the myriad of useless and depressing things that are constantly happening.
*W.R Hearst may or may not have actually agreed to contribute to this blog, but by assuming that at some stage in his life he had either written or uttered all the words used above, it was simply a matter of me editing them into a coherent and luckily, somewhat relevant paragraph.
**As far as I know Channel 9 don’t actually operate any salt mines, but wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if someone broke the news of their discovery through the Newsbreaker app?
