New media and the adaptive capacity of journalism to evolve

When I first started blogging, I had rarely thought about the future of journalism and newspapers. I blogged for fun, to keep my friends up to date with what I was doing. In the past year and a half, I’ve attended a number of events with media accreditation and I’ve also befriended numerous journalists from the Vancouver Sun, the Georgia Straight, the CBC, etc. I have also been invited to participate in think-tank-like roundtable discussions (such as the New Media Round Table) to provide my academic viewpoint.

In the past few months, I have been thinking more about the evolution of journalism, the challenges facing newspapers and the future of media itself. At the NMRT I mentioned that my view of mainstream media was that it was not declining or dying but it was evolving (a point that Kirk LaPointe reinforced a few weeks later in a very good editorial for the Vancouver Sun).

At NMRT I also asked around for a summary of the challenges facing journalism and newspapers. Mostly, declining advertising revenue was indicated as the main factor. But recently, I came across Todd Gitlin’s excellent piece (Gitlin is a sociologist and the chair of the communications program at Columbia University). Gitlin mentions the 5 wolves that have arrived to the door of American journalism:

Four wolves have arrived at the door of American journalism simultaneously while a fifth has already been lurking for some time. One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers. The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention. The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial – so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis – is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business.

A large portion of my research agenda (particularly the work I did while I was writing my PhD) examined the adaptive capacity of industries to external changes in their environment. I used the body of literature on adaptation to climate change to create a framework to explore how industries adapt to external shocks (I briefly mentioned this in a post I wrote on the gaming, electronic arts and tech cluster in Vancouver). My hypothesis in regards to the future of journalism, news outlets and primarily, newspapers, is that their survival and success will depend on a strong adaptive capacity to face the 5 wolves mentioned by Gitlin. I also posit that being able to properly harness new media/social media tools to enhance the content creation process will also strengthen said adaptive capacity.

I understand that one of the main worries of the news industry is revenue and profitability. That challenge, unfortunately, is one that I’m not sure how to tackle, particularly I haven’t thought about it in detail. Pay-per-view models seem to be working with sports events, but I think that the assumption that news should be free and universally-free-flowing makes paid-content revenue models challenging. That`s where I foresee the adaptive capacity of news outlets will be tested (particularly newspapers).

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