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Profit-driven media’s credibility hit by scandals, to be saved by values
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SPECULATING about the future of newspapers in the digital age does not generally inspire optimistic sentiments, at least not for those still actively engaged in the “business.”
In George Brock’s “Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age,” he explores how innovation fueled the growth of journalism, why experimentation is crucial to its future, and why journalism must remain true to its core values.
He talks about experimenting with formats and funding models. Apparently, dexterity and nimbleness are needed in meeting at once all these different requirements, since a good newspaper can be profitable or loss-making, but is dead when deprived of its credibility.
Brock devotes considerable space to how the British phone-hacking scandals resulted in the abrupt closure of the tabloid “News of the World.” But Chinese observers should be reminded of a scandal more pertinent to the scene, the recent blackmail scandal involving a website that used to be linked with 21st Century Business Herald.
Early last month, Shanghai police announced that the website was being probed in a blackmail scandal in which some of its editors and reporters are accused of being involved, in collusion with public relations firms. Shanghai police have arrested several people, including the editor-in-chief of the website, and two PR firm executives.
It is reported that since November 2013 the website had, in cahoots with the PR firms, extorted hefty advertising or sponsor fees in exchange for positive coverage, or for quashing critical reports. To better identify the potential victims, the website carefully classified companies into “listed,” “to be listed,” “to undergo M&A,” “being restructured,” or “well-known” companies.
The website used to be the online edition of the influential 21st Century Business Herald. In 2010, it was allowed to operate independently for the sake of “development.”
PR firms’ role
One of the suspects revealed that deleting a negative report generally was worth 200,000 yuan (US$33,000) to 300,000 yuan in advertising fees. Since 2010, the outlet had collected hundreds of millions yuan in advertising contracts from over 100 companies.
As such deals need to be brokered by PR firms, those PR firms are also plying a lucrative business. Lian Chunhui, one of the PR firm executives involved, said that since 2009 she found that the first question posed by potential clients was generally, “How are your relations with the media? Could you help eliminate negative reports?”
This online venture, like many of its counterparts, in light of market fundamentalism, is experimenting with a business model no longer new to many media professionals in China, although this kind of innovation is a betrayal of the media’s primary mission.
As Brock observes in the book, in England the rise of newspapers, coinciding with the rise of Prostestantism in the late 1600s, was intended to form individual political opinions. In America, the press developed as a conduit for ideas that unified the diffuse population and spread public opposition to colonial rule.
Clearly at that time newspapers were fairly unfamiliar with the idea of advertising, which is crucial today.
Print journalism had enjoyed a sustained period of relative stability through the second half of the 20th century, until the rise of the Internet. According to the book, by 2004, Craigslist took away at least US$50 million in annual advertising revenue from San Francisco-area newspapers alone.
Newspaper companies’ digital revenue grows far too slowly to replace the loss.
But more damning is the crisis of credibility, as too many media outlets compete recklessly for the diminishing ad budgets for print media.
Reporters were told to “make this story work,” while veracity of the story’s premise is no longer so relevant at some organizations. This detracts from journalism’s central mission.
As the author observes, “If information flows like liquid in and out of devices 24 hours a day, journalism’s value lies in something it has done before: sifting, distilling, taking the signal from the noise.”
While the price of most goods tends to fall, the cost of good journalism will go up. In China, the media will play an added role in helping define and disseminate socialist core values.
Clearly, that mission cannot hope to be satisfactorily completed by corporate media pathologically eager to turn a good profit.
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