Lepore, Jill. “Does Journalism Have a Future?” The New Yorker, Annals of Media, 28 Jan. 2019.
Jill Lepore’s article summarizes changes to journalism since the 1900s, most significantly, the shift from daily newspapers to digital news/opinion/advertising hybrids.
Lepore agrees with journalists and scholars who declare 1950 to 1980 journalism’s Golden Age. The “signal feature” that marked the age was news organizations’ “adoption not of a liberal bias but of liberal values.” The values were aided by a business model that allowed news organizations to remain relatively independent from influence because they relied almost entirely on subscriptions for revenue.
Lepore introduces the scope of change in journalism with a staggering statistic: “[b]etween 1970 and 2016 … five hundred or so dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough” to survive (Lepore). She then identifies three stages of change.
The first stage was “conglomeration,” from approximately 1980 to 1990. Acquisitions and mergers hurt journalism by suppressing competition and normalizing the practice of news organizations taking on debt. Debt made them dependent on, and therefore beholden to, advertisers and special interests, who provided increasingly larger percentages of the organizations' revenue.
The second stage was “the fall,” from approximately 1994 to 2016. Storied newspapers like the New York Times and Boston Globe suddenly found themselves competing with online upstarts like the Huffington Post and Breitbart News. Traditional organizations paid reporters to do research and give firsthand accounts, but the upstarts collected what traditional organizations reported, put spin on it, and published that spin as original content. Hoping to gain subscribers by dangling free content, the upstarts were even more dependent on advertising than their predecessors-turned-competitors. They were also privately owned by individuals whose worldviews and political beliefs shaped their content in ways that hadn't been possible for subscription-based organizations. This stage marked the first major blurring of lines between news and opinion.
The third stage was “digitization and likability,” from approximately 2017 to the present. Social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, and gossip sites, like BuzzFeed, billed themselves as news organizations. They “changed the way news is covered, reported, written, and edited,” making it faster, “edgier, and needier, and angrier” by collecting users’ data, such as what they “liked” on social media, and using it to curate news feeds that matched users’ interests and beliefs. Repeated exposure to increasingly oversimplified and/or fringe versions of news coverage that catered to their beliefs pushed users toward false for-or-against dichotomies, moved centrists and moderates toward political extremes, and equated socio-political beliefs with personal identity. These platforms were even more dependent on advertising for revenue because they offered full access for free. Since advertising rates were governed by users’ interaction with a platform, platforms did everything possible to attract and prolong users' engagement. That included presenting content that tapped emotion, especially fear, anger, disgust, frustration, and self-righteousness, and linked it to social-political issues. Furthermore, whereas editors and executives at traditional news organizations started as interns, learning the ropes and being steeped in journalistic values, ethics, and practices throughout their careers, platform employees fell into reporting jobs—often unintentionally—by way of careers in tech, politics, activism, psychology, sociology, lobbying, or influencing (on social media or via podcasts). Lepore sums up this stage by noting that “if journalism has been reinvented during the past two decades, it has, in the main, been reinvented not by reporters and editors but by tech companies . . .”
To survive during the third stage of change, traditional and aggregator news organizations began imitating the “digitization and likability” model, culminating in a world where the change seems complete from a Golden Age when “news stories were like tape recorders” to the current era in which “so much of what the Times, Post, and other previous news organizations [do is] determined less by their own editors than by executives at Facebook and BuzzFeed.”
Lepore provides a well-supported analysis of problems in news reporting that should concern all Americans, especially educators who seek to help students develop critical thinking skills and form genuine, well-rounded identities. The caption for her article's illustration offers a dire warning that fits with conclusions I've drawn after reading a wealth of sources on the state of journalism: “The more desperately the press chases readers, the more it resembles our politics.” Her article is brief and easily accessible for undergraduate students. I plan to use it in composition, research, and journalism courses.