I spend as little time as possible on LinkedIn – my
impressions of that particularly odd and toxic form of social media are a
subject for another time – but in one of my brief visits during the holiday
season, a short commentary posted by a journalist named Sharada Balasubramanian
caught my attention. I am connected to Ms. Balasubramanian through
circumstances I cannot recall at the moment, and I do not know her personally;
according to her bio, she describes herself as an Environmental and Development
Journalist and Media Trainer, and based on her list of various jobs going back
about 20 years, that seems like an appropriate description.
Since Ms. Balasubramanian’s piece is not very long, and to
spare you the discomfort of wading through the LinkedIn bog to find it, I’ll
post it here in its entirety, as it was written, save for correcting a few
minor typos:
Our stories behind paywalls – the state of journalism
“My journalist friends keep publishing every other day, but
then I cannot read any of them – all of them are under paywall.
I come from a legacy newspaper background, starting my
career as a sub-editor over two decades back. The thought of journalism was –
it will be read by policy makers, government officials, the general public, and
perhaps, the story could contribute to change. All of that has changed.
In today’s scenario, when journalists talk about impact or
organisations talk about impact, I am clueless as to how this is happening. Do
we know that policy makers read those stories and bought those changes? How do
we judge the impact of such stories, or how can such claims even be made? Do
the change makers watch Instagram reels? The market is flooded with content –
how are we sure what they read. It is not like those olden times where Times of
India, The Hindu or the Indian Express or The Statesmen was read to know what
was happening.
I am baffled by the word impact in today’s media scenario,
and I find it unacceptable as journalists keep talking about their story
impact. On the other side, I also hear decision makers or NGOs say, we do all
the work and fight for years, and some journalist claims impact. I empathise
with them.
When some young journalists write to me telling, our pitches
have not been accepted – can you offer me guidance and tips? The only advice I
had was, please read the articles or stories of the website where you are
pitching your stories – understand what they want, and then pitch – it may
work. I cannot dispense the same advice today – for them to read any
publication, they have to subscribe or pay.
So how do journalists pitch the story is another ballgame
altogether? And how do they get their pitches approved? It is hazy, and for now
hard to solve.
And with the overflowing freelance journalists, especially
in the field of environmental and climate journalism, it is not even jostling
for space – there is limited space left for jostling – some of the well-known
environmental media sites have shut shops.
The media website owners say they are forced to go behind
paywall for revenue generation – the adverts have shrunk, and how do they
monetize. I really do not understand the revenue model of today’s media, so I
am not authorised to speak on this. What I understand about the paywall, that
it is sheer business, and if you pay read, else you cannot.
The statement of press democracy, a change maker, or
impactful stories all seems to be disappearing in thin air for now.
And people who talk about it, they may only convince
themselves of it. Not the world. Not the people.”
***
Obviously, Ms. Balasubramanian was freestyling a bit with
that post, and it took me some time to interpret it to my satisfaction, which
was necessary because my first reading of it was triggering. What it boils down
to, if I understand it correctly, is the same general complaint about the
enshittification of modern media I have heard many times from within our
business and from the audience, and it goes something like this: Media has lost
its mission to be the objective source of truth in society, and replaced that
with commercial objectives; after all, if media is obliged to operate as a
business, it has no choice but to be the best business it can be, with all that
implies about choices and compromises it has to make.
As a consequence, the change in priorities has degraded the
quality of the product itself; because media is now profit-oriented, and the
currency by which we ultimately measure success is eyeballs, then “impact” –
and therefore validity and credibility – is simply a function of how big the
audience for a particular piece of output is, whether or not it’s gone “viral,”
which is a term that makes me gag even if I don’t say it out loud, and not
whether the story had any real-world effect.
And of course, Exhibit A in this indictment of the media is
the contemptible paywall, the most visible example of prioritizing production
of revenue-generating content over providing information.
Reality bites
The Manila Times implemented a partial paywall about
two years ago, and there was a great deal of uncertainty about whether or not
it was the right thing to do; the plan encountered significant resistance from many
of our associates, particularly among the opinion writers, who feared it would
drive away their audiences. At present, we have a paywall for our opinion
section and some of the special sections of the paper for the online edition,
but the daily news in the main sections (National, Regional, World, Business,
and Sports) is free. We have a digital edition which is a virtual print
edition, that of course is by subscription only; and we still print a
substantial number of hard copies every day – I’m not sure of the exact number,
it’s in the neighborhood of 400,000. Our daily reach, according to our
consultants, is about 2 million.
The hard reality is that it costs money to produce the news,
and it costs more money to produce a better and more diverse product (such as
the multimedia streaming channel we launched a few months ago). There are
supplies to buy and bills to pay, and above all, talent costs money. Whatever
else journalism is to those of us who engage in it, it is above all a job,
because we all like to do things such as live in a building and eat food.
There was a time when advertising and subscriptions to the
print edition were sufficient to fund the entire operation, and provide all of
our content for free online. But print is dying, so that doesn’t work anymore.
We could provide all of our daily content for free online, but in order to support
ourselves it would require an unreasonable amount of advertising, which no one
likes; we are already at the limit of what is tolerable on the free parts of
our website, and there are some papers in town who have more limited or no
paywalls whose websites are practically unreadable due to so many
advertisements. Take a peek at the Inquirer for an example of that.
And on top of these constraints, our competition has
increased enormously; not only are we competing with the other legacy media in
town, we are competing with thousands upon thousands of self-appointed social
media journalists. Some of them are actually good at it. So, we need to keep up
our quality and what competitive advantages we can hold onto, which are in the
form of experience, and greater resources and scale. And guess what? That costs
money, too.
Unfortunately, the only way we have to measure whether we
are spending our money appropriately is by the size of our audience, the
so-called “impact” that Ms. Balasubramanian scoffs at, because real impact –
catalyzing some change in society or government – is not something that happens
every day. It does happen, but it takes a ton of ore to produce a gram of gold.
I do understand Ms. Balasubramanian’s frustration, from the
standpoint that we, as paying customers, have a reasonable expectation of receiving
value for our subscription money. Too many news outlets, whether of the
traditional or social variety, do not adequately provide that, and that is wrong.
We, as media practitioners, should embrace the pay-to-read model as a
compulsion to constantly improve the quality of what we do. I certainly try to
look at it that way, and treat every day as training for better research
skills, better critical thinking skills, and better writing skills, with the
end view of making my stories the best anyone can read on any given topic. I’ve
been doing it with The Manila Times for a dozen years, and if I do it for 100
more, I will still fall very, very far short of perfection.
But not far enough
that I’m apprehensive about asking someone to pay for it; and as my craft
improves, I’ll just ask you to pay more. It’s my job, after all.
