James Curran speech: “Journalism in Crisis”

James Curran, professor at Goldsmiths College and Director of Goldsmiths Media Research Center opened the day of conferences with “Journalism In Crisis”, a speech on the issues the media industry is facing today.

JIC marks the 20th anniversary of the British Journalism Review and James Curran declared it makes it “a double pleasure to be at the University of Westminster today”.

The major cause of the crisis journalism in facing nowadays is the emergence of internet as a popular medium. Since 1999, the proportion of UK households using the internet rise up to 62%. Two third of the nation is connected which makes us to wonder “What’s the impact of the internet on news production?”

James Curran pointed out that many people believe the internet is not creating a “crisis” but an endless list of opportunities and quoted Jim Callaghan who once said: “Crisis? What crisis?”; words that many academics and media personas echoed in the recent years.

The Goldsmiths professor then dealt with what he thinks are the main issues journalism is facing nowadays. The first one is what he calls “the tabloid approach”. For him, too many newspapers are trying to catch the reader’s attention by any means.

“We must make the readers crossed” seems to be journalists’ new let motive. “If one way to gain a reader’s attention is to make them angry, another one is to make them frightened”, he added.

Curran also believes that today’s journalism encourages excesses and inaccuracy. Too many stories have been “sexied up” to make them more attractive to the readers.

He later outlined how British media are unrepresentative of the nation’s real political views, arguing that the UK press’s political views are way more conservative than the population’s.

An other problem Prof. Curran mentioned was the increasing pressure journalists have to face in order to produce stories fast. They don’t get the time to “think” their angle anymore and most of the time recycle the information they get from a limited number of sources. The consumer ends up reading the same stories in different websites, which undermine the value of news production today.

Professor Curran cited the failures of both PSB and commercial broadcast models, illustrating his point by examples of the Iraqi War coverage in the New York Times.

“The American media tradition is in crisis because it is being converted to the net,” James Curran argued that many newspapers in America are in serious trouble because of the emergence of the internet. “It’s beginning to look as if the business to produce news by advertising is in crisis,” Curran said.

“About 60 newspapers has died in the last year in the UK. Yet, the web apocalypse that is hitting journalism in western countries is not happening everywhere else in the world. In eastern countries such as India, newspapers sales are on the rise.”

James Curran believes that the web is giving the British PSBs a way to reach a younger audience.

Citizen journalism and web-based journalism are getting global. But James Curran insisted that “dominant news brands are still dominant”, user-generated content has not taken over as the favourite form of journalism yet.