Mir: "The news media: watchdogs prefer the paywalled garden"
Coming up on the 10th anniversary of the eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park here is a vignette from Andrey Mir that highlighted the changing role of corporate mass media.
From his Medium page, November 24, 2020:
“What
happens when journalism is everywhere?”, Mathew Ingram asked in 2011.
Nine years and one Trump term later, the answer is here. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020).
On November 15, 2011, soon after midnight, the New York riot police started
a raid to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters from their camp in
Zuccotti Park, Lower Manhattan. Two hundred protesters were arrested,
six journalists among them, including two journalists of the Associated
Press (AP). They tweeted the news about their arrest. The event had
widespread resonance, both in politics (some compared the police raid in
Zuccotti Park to the events at Tiananmen Square[1]) and in the media industry[2].
Many outlets and media associations, such as the PEN center, for
example, “condemned restrictions on press coverage of police crackdowns”
and called the arrests of journalists “an obvious abridgement of the
First Amendment.”[3]
The next day, AP employees received an email that contained the following, as quoted in New York Magazine:
In
relation to AP staff being taken into custody at the Occupy Wall Street
story, we’ve had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around
social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them
to knock it off. We have had staff tweet — BEFORE THE MATERIAL WAS ON
THE WIRE — that staff were arrested. (Highlighted in NYMag.) [4]
New York Magazine
wrote that in AP, “The official rules note, ‘Don’t break news that we
haven’t published, no matter the format.’ (Reuters spells out the same
idea plainly in their handbook: ‘Don’t scoop the wire.’).”[5]
As Hollywood Reporter put it, “The Associated Press was not happy about being scooped on Twitter by its own employees.”[6]
***
The
case was widely discussed by media critics. It revealed that
journalists must supply news not to the public, but to their outlets. On
the background: Twitter happened to be a faster and better tool for
covering hot events than even a newswire. The news org had to remind its
staffers that they owed news to it, not to Twitter.
The
AP representative and the sender of that email, Lou Ferrara, after
watching all the nasty commentaries on Twitter, later explained that the
first reason why AP staffers should not tweet out news before it got on
an AP platform was that ‘we put news on our products first. That’s what
our customers expect.’[7] The second reason was personnel-safety concerns....
No longer were the wires or the papers the place to find news. Instead they became the place for readers to, as Mr. Mir puts it:
....Because of the internet, ad revenue in the media has declined much
faster than reader revenue. The media were therefore forced to switch to
the reader revenue business model aimed to sell content. However, as
content is free on the internet, it is hard to sell. People almost
always already know the news before they come to news websites because
they invariably start their daily media routine with newsfeeds on social
media. Increasingly, therefore, if and when people turn to the news
media, it is not to find news, but rather to validate already known
news.
Thus, the reader revenue the news media now seeks is not a payment
for news; it is actually more a validation fee. The audience still
agrees to pay for the validation of news within the accepted and
sanctioned value system. After switching from ad revenue to reader
revenue, the business of the media has mutated from news supply to news
validation....
