Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

The Reporting Crisis

Where we get our information and what sources we trust will have a profound impact on our future identities. What’s in store for the news in the Internet era is well-covered ground, and the battles we see today over monetization strategies and content syndication will continue to play out in the coming decade. But as technology lowers entry barriers in every industry, how will the media landscape as we know it today change?

It is manifestly clear that mainstream media outlets will increasingly find themselves a step behind in the reporting of news worldwide. These organizations simply cannot move quickly enough in a connected age, no matter how talented their reporters and stringers are, and how many sources they have. Instead, the world’s breaking news will continually come from platforms like Twitter: open networks that facilitate information-sharing instantly, widely and in accessible packages. If everyone in the world has a data-enabled phone or access to one—a not-so-distant reality—then the ability to “break news” will be left to luck and chance, as one unwitting civilian in Abbottabad, Pakistan, discovered after he unknowingly live-tweeted the covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden. 4

Eventually, this lag time—before the mainstream media can get the story—will alter the nature of audiences’ loyalty, as readers and viewers seek more immediate methods of information delivery. Every future generation will be able to produce and consume more information than the previous one, and people will have little patience or use for media that cannot keep up. The loyalty that audiences retain will derive from the analysis and perspective these outlets offer, and, most critically, the trust they have in these institutions. These audiences will trust the credibility of the information, the accuracy of the analysis and the prioritization of news stories. In other words, some people will split their loyalty between new platforms for breaking news and established media organizations for the rest of the story.

News organizations will remain an important and integral part of society in a number of ways, but many outlets will not survive in their current form—and those that do survive will have adjusted their goals, methods and organizational structure to meet the changing demands of the new global public. As language barriers break down and cell towers rise, there will be no end to the number of new voices, potential sources, citizen journalists and amateur photographers looking to contribute. This is good: With so many news outlets scaling back their operations, particularly their international footprint, such outside contributors will be needed. The global audience benefits as well, through exposure to a greater range of issues and perspectives. The effect of having so many new actors involved, connected through a range of online platforms into the great, diffuse media system, is that major media outlets will report less and validate more.

Reporting duties will become more widely distributed than they are today, which will expand the scope of coverage but probably reduce the quality on a net level. The role of the mainstream media will primarily become one of an aggregator, custodian and verifier, a credibility filter that sifts through all of this data and highlights what is and is not worth reading, understanding and trusting. Particularly for the elite—the business leaders, policymakers and intellectuals who rely on established media—validation will be critical, as will the media’s ability to provide cogent analysis. In fact, the elite will probably rely more on established news organizations simply because of the massive swell of low-grade reporting and information in the system. Twitter can no more produce analysis than a monkey can type out a work of Shakespeare (although a heated Twitter exchange between two smart, credible people can come close); the strength of open, unregulated information-sharing platforms is their responsiveness, not their insight or depth.

Mainstream media outlets will have to find ways to integrate all of the new global voices they can now reach, a challenging but necessary task. Ideally, the business of journalism will become less extractive and more collaborative; in a story about rising tide levels in Bangkok, instead of just quoting a Thai river-cruise operator, the newspaper would link its article to the man’s own news platform or personal live stream. Of course, the chance for error increases in the inclusion of new, untrained voices—many respected journalists today believe that a full-bodied embrace of citizen journalism is detrimental to the field, and their concerns are not unwarranted.

Global connectivity will introduce entirely new contributors to the supply chain. One new subcategory to emerge will be a network of local technical encryption specialists, who deal exclusively in encryption keys. Their value for journalists would not be content or source related but instead would provide the necessary confidentiality mechanisms between parties. Dissidents in repressive countries—for example, today’s Belarus and Zimbabwe—will always be more willing to share their stories if they know they can do so safely and anonymously. Many people could potentially offer this technology, but local encryption specialists will be highly valued because trust is important. This is not too different from what we see throughout the Middle East today, where virtual private network (VPN) dealers roam busy marketplaces, along with other traders of illicit goods, to offer access to dissidents and rebellious youth to connect from their device to a secure network. Media organizations that cover international issues will rely on these scrappy young VPN and encryption dealers as they rely on foreign stringers to build their news coverage.

A new type of stringer will evolve as well. The conventional stringer today is an uncredited journalist whom newspapers pay to report, often from a foreign or unstable country. Stringers risk their lives to gain access to certain sources or visit dangerous places, taking these risks because professional reporters cannot or will not go there. An additional category of stringer may well emerge: men and women who deal exclusively in digital content and online sources. Instead of braving dangers on the ground, they’ll take advantage of rising global connectivity to find, engage and extract information from sources they know only online. They would connect journalists with sources, as stringers do today. Obviously, given the additional layer of distance and obfuscation the virtual world presents, media outlets would have to exercise even greater caution than they usually do with regard to embellishment, validation of sources and ethics.

Imagine celebrities in the future starting their own news portal online about a particular ethnic conflict that they care deeply about. Perhaps they believe that the mainstream media isn’t doing enough to publicize it or that it has gotten the narrative wrong. They decide to cut out the traditional middlemen and deliver stories directly to the public; let’s call it Brangelina news. They hire their own people to work in the conflict zone, and they provide daily reports that their staff at home form into news articles to publish on their platform. Their overhead would be low, certainly lower than major news outlets, and they might not even need to compensate reporters and stringers, some of whom would work for free in exchange for the visibility. In short order, they become the ultimate source of information and news on the conflict because they both are highly visible and have built up enough credibility in their work that they can be taken seriously.

Mainstream media outlets will find such new serious competitors in the future—not just tweeters and amateur onsite observers—and that will complicate the media environment in this period. As we said, many will still favor and support the established news organizations, out of loyalty and trust in the institutions, and the serious work of journalism—the investigative reporting, the high-level interviews, the prescient contextualization of complicated events—will remain in the domain of the mainstream media. But for others, the diversification of content sources will represent a choice between a serious outlet and a “celebrity” outlet, and the seemingly insatiable appetite for tabloid-like content (in the United States, the U.K. and elsewhere) suggests that many consumers will probably choose the celebrity one. Visibility, not consistency or strength of content, will drive the popularity of such publishers.