What will media look like in 2037?
A recent article in Politico asked a number of prominent media observers to look ahead at what they thought the state of the media would be in 15 years. That time frame was selected because Politico is now 15 years old, so the idea was to look into the future as far as the time that’s past since Politico came on the scene.
Needless to say, the entries included the obligatory “past performance is no guarantee of future outcomes” disclaimers, especially for such a long time horizon. But the commentaries also included some perspectives that, while perhaps not unique, summarize where we are and where we’re headed in some insightful ways.
Split decisions
Overall, two themes or trends seemed apparent, and worth commenting on.
The first was a sort of Gresham’s law (“bad money drives out good’) perspective on media content. As Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) put it in his lead-off piece, “the flow of information will only get faster and more discordant in the years ahead,” creating a situation in which “The trivial blurs with the profound, the false with the true…”
The countervailing viewpoint by some others, though, was that our current unsettled state could lead to, as Canadian media scholar Heidi Tworek put it, “A much more diverse set of people [who] will have a voice and will find an audience … by innovating new ways to report and discuss news.”
One of the comments that built upon Carr’s perspective came from Suzanne Nossel, CEO of free speech advocacy group PEN America, who suggested that 15 years from now “Most Americans will be in the swollen ranks of the informationally adrift — those lacking the means or energy to discern meaningful signals amid a cacophony that encompasses serious journalism, opinion writing, perpetual hot takes, corporate advertising, paid promotions, bloviations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, much of which is deliberately disguised to sound like something else.” That seems somewhat dystopian, but also seems largely accurate since it describes how things are today.
A congruent view came from former Time magazine editor Richard Stengle about information “haves” who will enjoy “bespoke and sophisticated content” and “have-nots” who will get “advertiser-supported content that is broad and less sophisticated and it will be stoked by algorithms based on emotion and eyeballs.” Journalism professor and commentator Nikki Usher offered a corollary observation that inequality of those with access to high-quality journalism and those without will mirror income inequality.
All that said, optimistic viewpoints similar to Tworek’s came from Akoto Ofori-Atta and Lauren Williams, co-founders of Capital B, who suggested that emerging members of the evolving news ecosystem such as Chicago’s City Bureau, Detroit’s Outlier Media and Philadelphia’s Resolve Philly offer the prospect for journalism to “live up to better, more equitable standards” — not coincidentally, their goal at Capital B. Lynette Clemetson, director of a journalism fellowship and awards program at the University of Michigan, is similarly hopeful about the “impressive efforts” of small and medium-sized independent news organizations to provide important local news.
Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, pulls together both trends with the observation that “We are well into an age of media fracture, and in the coming years that trend will only accelerate. The information-rich will get information-richer, but those without the appetite or funds to access gated digital communities will inhabit a vast wasteland of viral lies, propaganda and conflict.”
But he also foresees an emerging counterweight of a “more integrated and human-scale media landscape,” citing the example of local publishers from the LION Publishers network as an example as well as his own New_ Public project. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik’s description of the phenomena is that these emerging outlets could “build a journalism that treats people as citizens and neighbors, not just consumers,” which he says could create “journalism worth sustaining for another 15 years — and beyond.”
Glass half full
My inclination is to agree with the glass-half-full perspectives offered by Pariser, Tworek, Clemetson and the women from Capital B. Common sense makes it clear that we’re never going back to the orderly information system of a generation ago (when I began my media career) and instead must accept an ecosystem that is ever-more fragmented, cacophonous, and difficult to navigate. That will have its negative impacts. But the pace and promise of journalism innovation, especially at the local level involving many of the examples cited by the Politico commentators (e.g. LION), nonetheless offer great promise for the future.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: journalism, local news, news coverage, news ecosystem | Permalink.
Originally published at http://emergentjournalism.wordpress.com on January 28, 2022.
