From Andrey Mir at the Human as Media website, December 1:
This new function of the media is a semblance of notary service. The event has happened, it is known, but we want it to be validated within a certain value system. After that, a disturbing event “comes into effect” as disturbing for certain reasons. Basically, the news media are now needed to explain exactly how outrageous an outrageous event is.
- Interview with Andrey Mir in “Rossiyskaya gazeta”, translation, continued.
- See the beginning: Will journalism survive the internet?
– It may be true that subscription revenue in the press has plummeted. Ad revenue is migrating to the digital platforms, too. But a new way of supporting journalism has emerged. Readers are ready to pay for quality content, aren’t they?
– There is no evidence of industrial-scale payments for quality content. People might pay for content sometimes and sometimes it’s journalism. Besides the poor positions of the news in the market of paid content, there is also the problem of so-called subscription fatigue among users. People get more and more annoyed by digital services of all kinds seeking to sneak and charge them pennies for a subscription to something.
At the same time, tons of content seek to get my attention for free. The suppliers of content compete for my time and attention. They are operating in conditions where they must improve their quality, using, among others, the tools and gimmicks of good-old journalism. As a result, the ecosystem is tuned in such a way that high-quality and highly relevant content, be it news or entertainment, will find me for free. The news media might participate in the production chains, but they will not get money or even traffic for it.
The situation is even worsened by the so-called cannibalism of formats. News outlets must advertise their best articles on the internet, and thus they spend their news asset on advertising, not selling. News teasers on social media give away the assumedly valuable commodity of the news for free. The news media must do it because they must compete for attention.
As a result, everyone’s newsfeed on social media is full of informative headlines and news announcements. Our friends deliver it to us, often with witty and sarcastic comments, adding a value that the initial article might lack. Oftentimes, there is even no need to click and read the original article. And this happens, indeed. People often do not click through and do not visit the news media websites that originated the news. Thus, newsfeeds become a sufficient and even, in fact, very densely packed source of news agenda. As I said, the news media might participate, but they don’t get paid – neither monetarily, nor in traffic....
....MUCH MORE
And a couple of interesting paragraphs from another of his pieces:
....Normally, journalists are affiliated with but not assimilated by the elites. In terms of social demography, newsrooms are filled with highly educated and passionate people who are well-networked with the elites but remain a part of their own professional clique. In terms of psychology, those who get selected for this profession meet some specific criteria. They need to be very ambitious, often bordering on narcissism; have a proclivity, sometimes messianic, for public service; and a very specific professional ever-challenging innate need to dig for scoops ‘at any cost’, which is always spurred on by competitiveness. All these criteria create a caste with a high level of self-awareness and self-determination. Much like priests of a cult, journalists normally think they do not serve the ruling elites – they shepherd them.
The demographic and psychological characteristics of journalists force them to oppose the political pressure of the elites as well as the business pressure of the media as a commercial enterprise. Or it also can be said that newsroom autonomy creates economic value of a higher level than the routine trade of ads or copies....
—Subscription solicited as donation: a new cause of media bias, December 22
