Is Journalism Out of Time?
Peter Thiel, somewhere, mentioned that he asks this extraordinarily difficult job interview question: Tell me something that is true that everyone else but you disagrees on. The weirdest answer I have for this question might be:
“journalism would serve the society better if journalists didn’t operate around regular publication schedules, which is what they still mostly do”.
News are important. Anthropological and historical studies seem to confirm that people have always had an intrinsic need for accurate, relevant information. Nowadays, a functional communication system is understood as a requirement for a functional society.
But the importance of news doesn’t mean that people need periodical news. With periodicity I refer to regular publication schedules, which is most clearly visible in (daily) newspapers. Each day every page must be full of news. The same logic applies to TV and radio, with their dedicated daily slots for news. Even a 24 hour news channel, the logic of which is partly inherited to online news, operates under strict periodical logic. Periodical news shapes the way the audience processes information and structures the rules for discussion between readers and writers. Its outcome to media culture is significant: periodicity has created the mediated society, where media is consumed as a habit and every piece of information can be commodified to news products. It has also contributed to the fact that media has a necessary bias to reinvent society, its words and meanings constantly.
From the economic perspective, the periodicity ensures that news get old. This makes it possible to sell more news. Indeed, periodicity can be understood as the first instance of planned obsolescence. While people do need some kind of time objects to make sense of the passing of time, such as seasons, wrinkles, kids that grow surprisingly fast and temples that last for millennia, there is no reason why news products should be time objects that provide such an understanding.
Nevertheless, even more crucial than to understand the underlying reasons for periodical news, is to ask if a news system that is build around such a core idea can even deliver what is required from it. Nowadays people access very little information that is not periodically produced: there is almost no mechanism to distinguish the importance of events from day to day. Does such a societal system fulfill the individual need for accurate and relevant information or does it optimally maintain the communicative fabric of the societies? There’s a lot of criticism towards news, journalism and the media these days, but can the news really be fixed with the proposed solutions: more objectivity, better background research, real impartiality and so on? I believe not. I believe that the fix to the current problems in journalism lies within its changing nature as a product — from periodical to out of time journalism.
Phase changes
When the current news system was created in the 17th century, it was based on physical products that had to be sold constantly to maintain a steady stream of income. Because of the nature of such physical products is that they are rival (as in, if I have the newspaper, you cannot have the same newspaper), and because information itself is nonrival (we can both have the same piece of information at the same time), periodicity was created as a strategy to hold the property in information. Here is how it works: Only when the newspaper was released, the information started to spread quicker than the newspapers were sold. And because the spoken information is not stored in solids and thus cannot be confirmed, people still went on to buy the paper even if they knew, somewhat, what it consisted of. But the competitors (who would at that time copy the information word-to-word) couldn’t keep the pace.
For the same reason, this periodical structure continued despite the emergence of radio and television, which didn’t have the rival product features of the newspapers (we can both watch the same program at the same time). Television and radio programming allowed for scheduled news. While it was now more easy to cut the program for some special event and news, this was rarely done. Furthermore, the new intangible nature of these media provided the opportunity to send a constant stream of news in special, dedicated channels. The frequency of periodical news increased massively, now bordering infinite, but still the media operated under the rules of periodical news and programming.
This “frenetic standstill” of ever increasing pace of periodical news has continued over to the online news of this day. Nevertheless, digital information goods are actually not nonrival by nature. They are antirival, meaning that they improve from use. This antirival feature can be very beneficial in how these products create value to people and society. But the periodical nature of news render it impossible to accumulate such information in beneficial way. In other words, the periodicity as a way of making information a property simultaneously make it impossible to use the antirival features of information products.
Any business model enables certain categories of products and makes others obsolete
Those who criticize the news rarely look at how the news as a product is designed. The constant, repeating stream of news and “news” is taken for granted. But early editors in the 17th century quickly learned how to manufacture subtractability to information goods by making news disposable. This is a feature of the news business model: periodicity was a method for holding the property on information. It was a requirement for the product to have this characteristic as long as the business model of newspapers was based on the value of current information. It was also a mechanism that allowed turning almost any information into news: if it’s in the paper, it’s news. News industry would not have developed without making products that were periodical. The planned obsolescence made sure that one would rarely pay for yesterday’s news, so the news company could sell today’s news.
News as we currently understand them are a feature of this business model. News are not natural (events are). Instead they are manufactured to fulfill the property yielding potential of the business model. Very peculiar features follow from this. For example, the cost of news is the same everyday despite the importance of events, and nowadays the price is often separated from the act of getting the information entirely. While price remains the same, the value of accurate, relevant information can differ significantly from person to person and from day to day. However, because the reader cannot know the value of the provided information before it’s read, readers have to buy the news (these days with their attention and time) everyday. Thus, readers are addicted to this never ending flow of news and “news”.
Digital information goods could function differently. And as one can realize from the previous chapter, they actually have started to function differently already. When the cost of newsreading to the reader is the time spent, news from more interesting events begin to be more profitable. A massively important change was the shift to clicks to reading time, a change that I also made a small contribution to with a reading behavior based news aggregator Scoopinion. But due to the periodical nature of news production, media companies are actually fighting against this change and trying to do whatever they can to make all the “news” on their website as interesting as possible. News are fragmented from the events, decontextualised from their contexts and reader is nudged to wonder what piece of information is actually relevant. An example of the latter is a headline that asks a question, such as “Is Journalism Out of Time?” According to the so called Betteridge’s law, the answer to such question is always “no”. Nevertheless, the curse of periodicals continues even though the incentives are now aligned to disrupt the whole production model.
Instead of purposely decontextualising news from the slowly changing understanding, they could accumulate understanding about the contexts. Instead of a constant stream of manufactured content, digital information could only be delivered if it impacts on a relevant context or fulfills a personally set news criteria. And most importantly, instead of enabling only a business model based on planned obsolescence, digital information could enable new antirival business models for journalistic products that produce “gains of trade” between multisided markets.
Out-of-time journalism changes media culture, news production and consumption
The news product was based on a business model that nowadays is not the most efficient one in delivering accurate, relevant information. A common mistake in considering news is to think that the most important things get most attention when the opposite might be true! The powerful have a lot of resources to not be in the news.
Nor does this old business model prevail in creating the fabric of the current society, when it’s compared to the possibilities of the business models that benefit from the antirival features of information products. Periodical news decontextualise events, encourage conflicts and reinvent the societies even when this is not necessary.
Nevertheless, antirival news products can only work if they are not (fully) periodical. They need to be able to accumulate some asset. Accumulating a timeline of accurate understanding of any context should provide value both for individuals and for the society. Journalism would be better of if it didn’t have regular publication schedules, and digital information products make such schedules more and more difficult to maintain. But it remains a mystery that how the journalistic product should be structured, if the business model aims at the accumulation of information regarding contexts, not events. I have some ideas about how to do this in practice, which I shall return to later on.
Most ideas presented in this text come from the book The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information by C. John Sommerville (1996)
