The Future of News: Introduction, Review of Literature, and Research Questions
News and media organizations have been attempting to figure out their futures since the beginning of mass-produced journalism. One such example of sensing where the trends are going can be found in Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson’s 2004 video entitled, “EPIC 2014.” “EPIC 2014” (and the follow-up video “EPIC 2015”) tried to anticipate how markets and the media industry would react to internet companies challenging the traditional media’s hold on audience share, prestige, and content creation. The central thesis is that many of the large news organizations would go away from the internet and return to their “niche” mediated worlds (e.g., the New York Times would stay in its lane and only be a print organization). Even Thompson (2005) would admit to one year later that the future guesses present in this video (or any remake of the video) would consistently need “patched up” to match the reality of the now. This acknowledgment by Thompson speaks to an almost universal truth that any attempt to say something intelligent about the future of any industry tends to have some issues.
Most predictions related to media and journalism fail to account for two constants present in the development of mediated content, technology, and human communication. The first being a point that William Gibson noted about the writing of science-fiction authors. Gibson is best known for his novel “Neuromancer” and the quote “The future is already here — it is just not very evenly distributed” (Gibson, 1999). The better quote to keep in mind is “I don’t have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.” Another way to think about this concept would be to say that the present tends to borrow a lot of its form and function from the past. It would be fair to state to that most of the “future” society moves towards comes from the legacy of the present and the past.
The second of the constants that causes any predictive statement to have issues is the “Cheating the Prophet” problem. This problem refers to a problem noted in G.K. Chesterton’s (1904) “Napoleon of Notting Hill.” Chesterton described the game as the players listen attentively to wise predictions about the future. They then go out and do something else. Any expert in the field of media and journalism that shares their wisdom and knowledge about where the media industry will be in ten or twenty years with the general public must be prepared for almost inevitable inconsistencies that will arise when the predictive future meets its “now” on the timeline.
A way of presenting a better vision of the future of news and journalistic content will be the focus of this article. Specifically, the paper will begin with a solid theoretical foundation in defining journalism’s role in society and communication technology’s connection to a cultural future. This review of the literature will lead to an analysis of the predictions made by opinion leaders within the industry through the framing of the technology being marketing as the future of journalism and the media.
Definitional Issues
Three definitional issues need to be briefly addressed to begin empirically answering the question regarding the future of journalistic content. Those issues are the definition of journalism, journalism’s role in society, and the nature of prediction and future studies in communication and journalism scholarship.
Journalism is the hardest of the three operational definitions to articulate (see Lacy & Rosenstiel, 2015; Deuze, 2005; Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014; & Zelizer, 2005 with regards to the issues defining journalism). The International Communication Association (ICA) (2017) and the various journalistic organizations chose to use a broad construction when addressing the nature of journalism. ICA uses a more deductive mode in their definition (“What is news? Who are the people responsible for making decisions about what news is, and how do their backgrounds, education, attitudes, and beliefs influence these decisions?”) while the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (Self, 2009) frames journalism studies as a study of the ethical process of producing the news. A more precise definition is needed to avoid the relativism problem that can arise from such definitions. Therefore, based on previous literature surrounding this topic (Tilton, 2016), journalistic content will be defined using the following four criteria:
- Any content that explains a topic/issue/point of interest/event of current interest using a truthful, compelling narrative.
- The purpose of creating said content is based on allowing the audience to understand anything that influences that truthful, compelling narrative under the guise that the content acts as the voice or record of the given community that is shared with the audience.
- The content must also explain why the audience should care about that topic/issue/point of interest/event.
- Finally, all content must follow the ethos and spirit of the practice of journalism as defined by the previously listed journalistic organizations in this section.
These criteria are designed to help focus the empirical elements of this particular attempt of
Journalism’s role in society is a little less problematic with regards to the previous literature. Thomas Hanitzsch (2007) presents a reasonable deconstruction of the culture of journalism and its influence on the rest of society. There are three themes that define journalism’s role in society. The first theme is the institutional roles that are fulfilled by journalistic organizations and journalists. At its core:
- journalistic organizations and journalists can choose to intervene or be passive towards the issues of the day that affect their given communities (interventionism),
- journalistic organizations and journalists can choose to be adversarial or be loyal to the power structures that run a given society (power distance), and
- journalistic organizations and journalists can choose to treat their audiences as consumers or as citizens (market orientation).
The second of these themes would be the epistemologies that are embedded in the culture of the journalistic organization. Two elements determine how journalistic organizations determine how knowledge (and by extension, content) is created. They are:
- journalistic organizations and journalists exist on spectrum between totalitarian understanding of reality of a situation based on a “truth” that “cannot be created, invented, or altered in any way” (ibid, 376) and the concept that journalists (through their judgment, interpretation, and value) create their reality that falls in line with the understood norms of a given community and situation, &
- journalistic organizations and journalists establish claims of the truth on a spectrum between high, empirical justifications of the evidence supporting a given claim based on the facts to a low, analytical modes that represents a truth that is independent of the facts as presented.
Finally, the relationship between journalism and society is defined by the ethical ideologies that drive journalistic organizations and those within these organizations. Hanitzsch denotes that these ethical ideologies are not “specific to the cultural context in which they are embedded” (ibid, 378) as those would be moral value. Instead, ethical ideologies make up the contextual dimensions of journalism culture. The two axes of the spectrum would consist of:
- the relativistic nature of the extent to which journalists reject or accept basing their code of ethics on universal moral rules or absolutes (relativism) &
- the relativistic nature of the extent to which journalists believe that the ends justify the means (idealism).
It is important to note these three listed themes regarding journalism’s role in society as the future of journalistic content and journalism will be based heavily on how various media organization see themselves in relationship to the society as a whole. The media trends that will be analyzed in the results section of this article are going to be based on the tools of media production, the technical standards associated with media production, or the means in which mediated content is distributed to the general public. All three of these points must be understood under the central frame the technology is not a neutral actor is this relationship, but rather the use and implementation is connected to institutional roles of the journalistic organization, the epistemological framing of the journalistic organization, and the ethical ideologies that are embedded in those journalistic organizations (Polgar, 2011). This understanding leads to the third definitional issue, the nature of prediction and future studies in communication and journalism scholarship.
The most succinct description of the nature of prediction and future studies in the field of communication and journalism comes from one of the foundational works in this area, Carey and Quirk’s (1973) “The History of the Future.” The central thesis of the article is, “And yet while the future as a prophetic form has a long history, the future as a predictable region of experience never appears” (174). The rationale for the continued study of the future (despite the repetitive misses of the academy) is also laid out by Carey and Quirk. Their research, in conjunction with Czitrom (1982) and Marvin (1990), states that scholars should project what the discipline will be in the future for three reasons. The first being that the future will continue to become the present. Scholars should look to add to the discipline’s realm of the known and scholars’ understanding of the now by analyzing how the realm of the known will change over a period. It is in this spirit that most scholars place a “future research” section in their writing. Those scholars want to see if their scholarship will hold up in the future.
The second reason that discussing potential futures is vital for an academic discipline like communication and journalism is that represents the perfect nexus of playing out the effects of a particular idealism or ideology that is dominant in society with the effects that those ideals or ideologies have on the “development of modern technologies of information processing and decision making by computer and cybernated devices” (Carey & Quirk, 1973, 174). Academics pursuing this line of inquiry are required to define the core criteria that define those central ideas and ideologies and place those criteria within the context of normal technological development. This balancing act of presenting the abstraction of social movements within the concrete of the form and function of technologies of communities is the ultimate test of any scholar of a discipline.
The last reason is perhaps the most simple but the most necessary. The future represents the potential of optimism in humankind and faith that the progress of society will lead to possibly better outcomes. Academic writing becomes a ritual of despair without this faith and optimism present in the interactions of knowledge. Therefore, adding a discussion of potential futures to most academic writing acknowledges the fact that there will be a future.
These three overarching rationales for future study plus the two previous definitional issues regarding journalism and its role within society will form the foundation for the research questions for this study, which are the following:
RQ1.) What themes are present in the media industry’s coverage of the future of journalism and news coverage in the United States regarding the newsgathering techniques by journalists?
RQ2.) What themes are present in the media industry’s coverage of the future of journalism and news coverage in the United States regarding news production?
RQ3.) What themes are present in the media industry’s coverage of the future of journalism and news coverage in the United States regarding the presentation of news?
These three research questions will allow for a focus on the journalistic workflow of most news organization via the analysis of leaders in this field. However, the answers derived from this research questions will only give a sense of where the industry thinks it is going in the near future. There must be some form of analysis to show that the industry is actively trying to go in the direction described in the previous three research questions as opposed to simply playing lip service to the future of the industry. Therefore, a fourth research question is needed to provide a mode of validating the language being used by industry leaders.
RQ4.) What is the correlation between the themes listed in the three previous research questions and the actions taken by the organizations within the media industry?
There is a term that needs a good operational definition before moving onto the description and rationale of the methodologies for this paper. The first being “near future,” which is being defined as within the next five years. Near future is one of the terms often used with trends research (Jordan, 2000) and would seem to fit the area of focus needed for this type of analysis. Anything further out than five years out would seem to be outside of the scope of what the modeling, the technology, and society could conceptualize based on the subject matter of this research.