Connecting with audiences

My PSB Online: investigating patterns of news personalization and customization in Britain and Denmark.

Benedetta Brevini came to JIC last Tuesday to introduce an interesting comparison between the English and Danish model of Online News websites.

“People are more and more able to personnalise their news consumption according to their interests and preferences,” she declared.

Many news websites have introduced a system of “news recommendation” and widgets produced according to target groups so that “the users can not only get faster to the news they are interested in but also aren’t shown the news they don’t care about”.

Mit DR is the new website for Denmark’s Public Service Broadcasting. The original idea was to make Mit DR an interactive platform where people could personalize their news page.

The BBC news website, as for it, does not provide full personalization of their news page and quoting Sophie Walpole, senior staff from the BBC Online team, Benedetta Brevini added: “This certainly does not work for us. I think we will never provide a full personalization of our content. It is very important to make sure that all the content we produce is fully available to people.”

Being able to personalize your news page is a really interesting option and proves how technologies can help journalism evolving, yet it raises concerns. “The adoption of news recommendations could undermine the PSB original role, Brevini argued, and I am not sure that putting the audience “under surveillance” is a good thing.

Journalism’s crisis, journalism’s opportunity. A comparative appraisal of the state of the news business in the United States and the Middle East.

Philip Seib, from the University of South California, then delivered a speech on the crisis journalism is facing today in different countries.

Seib blamed the Western news media for not adapting to new technology faster: “Many people say that journalism is in crisis, but it really depends on where you are. In the West, we witnessed media organizations failures to keep pace with the development of new technologies. In the developing countries, they learned a lot from it.”

He then focused on the news business in the United States explaining how much it changed in the past few years. “Before it was a one way communication, then CNN introduced all-day long news bulletins.

“The newest technologies changes this relationship much more. You are not just glancing at some paper or television, you participate. If you see something that you think is newsworthy, you ‘tweet’, take pictures and share.”

Most of Seib’s students never read newspapers for news, they go online: “The rising generation will mark an even more pronounced shift to technologies.”

New technology was thought to supplement the original model and not replace it, “that is not the case for the US,” Seib argued. “It amaze me how some news organizations are slow to keep up on these new technologies.”

“There is no reason to pay $50 every month to get your favorite paper on your doorstep every morning when you can get it for free online. And the public is getting used to get things for free.”

Philip Seib believes that news organization should gather and come up with an economic model to handle this problem. They need to agree on what the viewers should pay for and what they can give for free. “Otherwise people will all go on the Washington Post’s website which is totally free instead of paying a premium fee on other websites.”

“Journalism is facing a number of issues. When you add the economic crisis on top of that, you get a real storm. Many news organizations will suffer from this.”

Seib then tackled the topic of citizen journalism, arguing that “anyone can be a journalist today” and reach millions of readers. “It is free press in its true essence.”

The academic from South California then referred to the CNN effect by introducing the “Al Jazeira effect”. Al Jazeira is a famous arabic news channel. “Its recent coverage of the Gaza war had a big political impact,” Seib revealed. “It was condemning governments of countries such as Egypt for not coming to help.”

“When a crisis breaks out, everybody is watching Al Jazeira,” he said. This proves how much political power news television channels can have.

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.