The Future of Journalism

The “mood music” of the Future of Journalism conference is distinctive and unique; especially the atmosphere of the opening plenary. The crowded conference hall, publishers setting up their book stalls, the hum of delegates’ conversation, excited shouts as people recognise well-known and friendly faces not seen since the last conference, people distributing leaflets about additional sessions and the unmistakably loud buzz of energy, anticipation and excitement as the conference proceedings begin to unravel. Unlike the larger annual conferences of the professional bodies, with their fragmenting sub-groups which generate a plethora of “Conferences within the Conference”, the Future of Journalism is a specialist, international meeting place for scholars of journalism studies. I remember one recidivist attender saying, “this feels like our conference—a conference for journalism scholars; a conference where we’ve all come to discuss the same thing—the future of journalism”.

But for me, 2015 was bound to feel different; or so I thought. I had convened and helped to organise the previous four conferences, decided the key themes and chaired the opening plenaries. This time my role was simply to make a few brief introductory remarks to provide a little context about the conference in 2015 focused on The Future of Journalism; Risks, Threats and Opportunities.

The new organisational group of colleagues at Cardiff (Stuart Allan, Cindy Carter, Stephen Cushion, Lina Dencik, Iñaki Garcia-Blanco, Janet Harris, Richard Sambrook, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Andy Williams) kindly invited me to contribute to the opening session by talking briefly about the history of the Conference and its links with the journals—Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies. They also asked me to be brief: I’ll try.

The journals have always been closely connected to the Conference in two ways. From the outset, the journals’ publisher, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, has provided financial sponsorship for the Future of Journalism, while the journals have always published a selection of conference papers in co-ordinated special issues in each of the three journals. So there—in essence—are the key links. I should also mention that the original idea for a Conference came from the publisher: why so?

Journalism Studies was launched in 2000 and enjoyed early success, so when I suggested a second journal to Routledge in 2005, they warmed to the idea and proposed a conference to kick-start the project. I agreed, but always viewed the conference as a “one off”—simply a launch pad for Journalism Practice. The Conference needed a theme and I decided on The Future of Newspapers which reflected my long-standing research interests in the local and regional press, as well as research on journalist–source relations at a time when news seemed increasingly packaged for public consumption by public relations professionals working in government, corporations and the community.

But the Conference focus was also influenced by a meeting with some members of the National Committee of the National Union of Journalists in 2006. The mood of the meeting was an amalgam of near panic and deep despondency. Their members saw only risks and threats, but few opportunities, accompanying the introduction of new media into news gathering and reporting. They identified a perfect storm brewing with a cluster of factors suggesting a catastrophic and rapid collapse in the viability of local, regional and, to a lesser extent, national newspapers: sales and readerships were falling dramatically; revenues from copy sales, as well as advertising revenues, were disappearing and with them the business model which previously delivered revenues to fund regional news; journalists were being laid off; job vacancies were not being advertised; print journalists with 30 years’ experience were being retrained across a weekend to file videos online; while some jobs—like photojournalism and sub-editing—were being redefined, sometimes out of existence. There were many new skills and working practices to learn and to re-learn but no sufficiently resourced scheme of staff development was in place. There was clearly a significant agenda to interrogate and contest here. It was a passionate meeting; we all left feeling certain that we would never forget what had been said there; in many ways it proved prescient of later developments.

The Future of Newspapers conference turned out to be a success, feedback was very favourable, the journal special issues were published and everyone asked about the date of the next Conference. The School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies agreed to host a conference at Cardiff every two years, but broadened the focus to consider The Future of Journalism in 2009. The specific focus of subsequent conferences was signalled by the sub-title following the heading, Future of Journalism: Developments and Debates (2011); In an Age of Digital Media and Economic Uncertainty (2013); and Risks, Threats and Opportunities in 2015.

This development of theme seemed appropriate and relevant. What was becoming clear in 2007, but is in sharp focus with a decade’s hindsight, is that journalism has been experiencing a sustained period of far-reaching and rapid change in all aspects of day-to-day journalism practice; the organisation and resourcing of the journalism industry; and scholarly research in the field of journalism studies. The consequences for the academic study of journalism have involved: changes to the dominant research agenda, the need to reconsider basic concepts and theoretical frameworks, but also to rethink and develop new methods for conducting journalism research. In short, the emergence of digital journalism studies as a new field of inquiry rather than journalism studies conducted in an age of digital media.

Let me mention briefly how these changes impact on some aspects of the work of the academic journal editor; some evident risks, rather than threats, seem clear. Web metrics provide editors with a clear sense of “what works” editorially. Like newspaper editors, academic journal editors know in (perhaps too close) detail precisely what interests readers, measured by page views and downloads. Editors know that articles with a focus on “social media” or “mobile devices” will most likely trigger more downloads than almost any other theme. The significant question here is whether this knowledge necessarily helps to shape editorial choices? Certainly not when an editor is drowning in submissions and subscriptions are bullish.

But the opportunities for scholarly research are equally clear and significant. I am very struck by the scale and pace of change which new media have created, not only for the content and foci of academic research but for the methods to explore research issues. A study published in Journalism Studies (2001), for example, explored the reporting of Islam in the UK quality papers, based on a sample of 2500 articles across five papers; by contemporary standards this was a substantial research effort (Richardson 2001). By 2013, however, the first issue of Digital Journalism reported a study involving an automated content analysis of 2,490,429 articles from 498 online English-language news sources, from 99 countries, stretching longitudinally across a year (Flaunos et al. 2013). Only three years later, in February 2016, a paper published in Digital Journalism presented findings based on a sample of 1.8 billion tweets relating to 6103 hashtags for journalists and news organisations—one fascinating finding from the study is that less than 1 per cent of these tweets related to news (Momin and Pfeffer 2016).

The potential for research in our field—given the development of automated text analyses—where newsbots write the news, while other actants read and analyse its content (both quantitatively and qualitatively), based on these staggeringly large and barely conceivable samples, is just incredibly exciting. Automatic text generation makes the robots which merely drafted newspaper headlines in Michael Frayn’s novel the Tin Men, look like uneducated illiterates.

By the close of Future of Journalism 2015, I was delighted to discover that despite all the changes in the convening and organisation of the Conference, the mood of anticipation and excitement at the opening plenary was still unmistakable. Many congratulations to the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff for organising the fifth Future of Journalism Conference. Bigger and better than ever, fresher for having a new group of people organising the event, as well as three distinguished plenary speakers to launch us into our conversations about the future of journalism. And of course, that unmistakable buzz of this quite unique conference, was evident everywhere.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bob Franklin

Bob Franklin, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, UK. Web: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/182928-franklin-bob