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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
5 4 December - January 2017
MEDIA
A
T THE beginning of 2016, the major new
vogues predicted in media circles were 3D/
VR immersive technologies, and podcasting.
A lot has changed since then.
Virtual reality/3D is still in the earliest
stages of development – and, for serious news, may not
ever evolve beyond a gimmick – but podcasting contin
-
ues to go mainstream, further industrialising and
professionalising what was a domain favoured exclu-
sively by amateurs and enthusiasts. Just as social
networks – and to a lesser extent news media – colo-
nised the paces carved out by bloggers, so too with radio
and other media companies. Across a range as diverse
as NPR and the New York Times, Buzzfeed and Storyful,
including online start-ups and regional and local media
outlets, everyone wants to be a podcaster.
In Ireland, the Irish Times was one of the first
into the podcasting forum, building a custom
studio in Tara Street. But like their print
and other written offering, most of their
podcasting efforts were institutionally
dull, following a well trodden format of
professional and predictable panels
long ago defined as the way to do audio
by RTÉ and everyone else. It is notable
that their breakout success – the Second
Captains – came to the Irish Times citadel
with an already established audience, and was
not born in RTÉ, but in independent radio.
Meanwhile, new entrants to the market took a fresher
approach than that of the Irish Times and Irish independ
-
ent podcasts. Headstuff.org features a variety of new
offerings, fronted by newer voices (and notably as likely
to be presented by a comedian or an author as by yet
another journalist) and bringing new points of view. And
in the closing weeks of the year, Maximum Media –
owners of Joe.ie and Her.ie – announced their own plans
for a broad spectrum of new audio – and audio-visual –
productions in 2017.
Interestingly, one of the post-election post-mortems
in the US examined the role of podcasts as promoters of
‘echo chambers’: when listeners seek out podcasts to
listen to, rather than taking the variety of stories they
are served by a broadcast station, they create a media
bubble, blocking out stories they aren't interested in.
That tension between greater variety and greater isola-
tion is sure to become a theme across all media as
information sources fragment in a volatile post-Truth
future.
Advertising revenues, meanwhile, continue their
migration away from traditional media. American news-
papers, having told themselves the situation was
stabilising, watched in dismay as the New York Times
announced ad revenues had slumped 19% in the third
quarter, even as Donald Trump's presidential run pulled
in new readers and page hits.
Irish media can expect similar results, according to
results from media buyer Core Media, which
released a survey pointing to an advertising
shortfall of 12% in 2016, with radio
spending falling five percent, due to a
combination of Brexit uncertainty and
the continuing move to digital. That
amounts to an additional loss of €16m
for print and €6m for radio compared
to the expected out-turn at the begin-
ning of the year.
Commenting on the findings, Core Media
chief executive Alan Cox noted that there was
"a lack of innovation in the radio sector and it is losing
money to digital because of it. It is important that they
do something demonstrable in their content. Some sta
-
tions have, but the majority haven't”.
Trump's presidential campaign may have brought
some good news for newspapers, however. In the wake
of his election, amid reports of voters motivated by "fake
news" and propaganda misinformation websites, the
New York Times and Washington Post both reported a
boost to their subscription revenues, as readers moved
to support paid-for and reliable reportage. The effect
was not confined to the United States either, with Irish
publishers also confirming to Village that they had seen
Own, and
be attractive
Lessons from 2016 for
moribund old media
Podcasts hit
the big time but
can be echo
chambers
by Gerard
Cunningham
December - January 2017 5 5
post-election spikes in online subscriptions.
The Financial Times has shown that there is at least
some market for paid-for news, and in November passed
a significant ‘digital first’ milestone, when for the first
time it raised more revenues from online than print oper-
ations. Irish titles clearly still have some distance to go
before matching that performance.
Whether this translates into a longer-term pattern, or
fades in the coming months as the Trump era normalises,
remains to be seen. It would indeed be a true situational
irony of Trump's tantrums against the press if his fre-
quent threats to sue and shut them down improves their
bottom lines – at least among the more liberal titles
which continue to defy him.
Fake news is unlikely to go away any time soon. Capi
-
talising on an audience already primed by years of
exposure to Fox News to believe any conspiracy theory,
and benefiting from the same economics of scale as
aggregators from the Huffington Post to Buzzfeed, but
without the inconvenient overheads of fact-checking and
ethics, the rise of bogus news sites, custom-built for the
internet and pandering to the prejudices of their readers,
were in a sense inevitable, at least for as long as Face-
book's algorithms and Google Ads tolerate and promote
them.
Individual sites may come and go, but even if the now
near-legendary Macedonian teenagers and bored Cali
-
fornian millennials pumping out pro- Trump fictions go
out of business, it is not hard to see a future where the
same approach – either deliberately distorting news for
propaganda purposes, or making up stories out of whole
cloth simply for the revenues – is weaponised by every-
one from Vladimir Putin to Fox News.
Murdoch's cable behemoth is already scrambling to
get ahead of the pack, having found itself wrong-footed
by the ‘alt-right’ (that is, fascist) Breitbart News during
the election cycle. American politics has veered so far
right that Fox News, which contented itself with increas-
ingly shrill "dog whistle" signalling, now finds itself
labelled part of the very mainstream it sought to under-
mine. As control passes from Rupert to the next
generation of Murdochs, it will be interesting to see how
they respond to the challenge.
Despite the calls for it to do so, it is not clear if Face
-
book will take concrete steps to block fake news. It is not
even clear if it can do so, and there are clear moral dilem-
mas in giving censorship power to a single
corporation.
The internet interprets censorship as damage, and
routes around it, and if the network – social or physical
– wants fake news, then it will find a way to locate and
propagate fake news. People, being people, will still
share false stories.
Journalists have long held that the most effective
remedy for bad speech is more speech and better
speech, and that may be the case now more than ever
before. That means journalism – and journalists – have
a job to do. Fake news has to be identified, called out,
and named for what it is. And that's the case whether it
comes from a Macedonian teenager's bedroom, the twit-
ter account of the US president-elect, or one of the
yellower corners of Fleet Street.
Facebook doesn't want to be a publisher. It wants to
be a platform. It doesn't want to be an editor. And truth
is, it probably wouldn't be a very good editor. Moreover,
given the closeness of some board members to the nas
-
cent Trump administration, Facebook risks being a very
bad editor indeed. News-publishers struck a deal with
the devil in allowing their content on Facebook. They
were tempted by shared data, and advertising revenues
from Facebook Live and Instant Articles. But as any smart
drug dealer will tell you, the first hit is always free. Just
as it has in the past, Facebook can turn off the revenue
tap in a moment, and make publishers pay for continued
access to their audiences.
Ultimately, publishers and news outlets have to own
their sites, and make them attractive enough that audi
-
ences will want to visit them and share the stories they
find there. The challenge for journalism is to do that in
an environment where revenues are falling, and their
expensive product is competing against cheap and plen-
tiful fraudulent news.
Newspapers,
believing the
situation was
stabilising,
watched in dismay
as New York Times
ad revenues
slumped 19%
Irish
Independent
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Examiner
The Irish
Times
Irish
Daily Star
Evening
Herald
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Daily Mail
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50,346
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102,884
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46,578
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