Multi-media Journalism:
a Contradiction in Terms?

Lewis A. Friedland

Introduction

Journalism and its Public Functions

Emerging Forms of Public Communication

Introduction

In considering the theme of our colloquium, "Multimedia: A Revolutionary Challenge," I was led to ask: for whom, or against whom, is the revolution being waged? Although we have become inured to the term "revolution," it still connotes a clash of forces and a struggle for power. And I think that this "multimedia revolution" is no exception.

Today the field of journalism is undergoing a rapid transition from a print-based to an electronic culture. This may seem an odd proposition. After all, we have lived with radio for seventy-five years, and television for fifty. It is well known in the United States that most Americans receive their news from television. Hasn't this transition to an electronic culture of journalism already taken place? It would seem that the stakes here are not print-culture against an emerging electronic culture, but a struggle for dominance between the first generation of radio- and televisionbased electronic media, on the one hand, and the emerging generation of electronic communications technologies that we have been discussing for the past day.

I submit that in the field of journalism this transition to an electronic culture has not yet taken place. What distinguishes journalism from all other forms of multimedia is its publicness, its Öffentlichkeit which persists even in the United States which has lived within a media system dominated by commercial values for at least 150 years. In a few moments, I will develop this notion of the public sphere functions of journalism, but for now I wish simply to make one presupposition clear: the public sphere functions of journalism inhere in print culture, which is fundamentally a culture of discourse, deliberation, and interpretation. This journalistic culture in the United States has been preserved primarily through the institutions of our daily newspapers.

The market structure of the newspaper has been rooted in a complex market bundle. News is sold to audiences and audiences are then sold to advertisers. This market bundle, in turn, made the separation of the newsgathering and editorial from the business functions of the newspaper possible. That organization has remained relatively autonomous from market structure. This autonomy has sustained the deliberative values of print in the editorial culture, and its ethics of independence, balance, and objectivity.

These same ethics were carried forward into the news organizations of the first generation of electronic media. There is a founding myth of electronic journalism in the United States, and it revolves around the figure of Edward R. Murrow and the CBS news organization that he built to cover World War II. For many years CBS news was considered the touchstone of "quality" journalism in the electronic media; more recently that mantle has passed to our National Public Radio. It is no accident that CBS was, and NPR is, the most "print-like," the most discursive, of our electronic media. To the extent that electronic journalism had standards and models, then, at least until the mid-eighties they were rooted in print culture.

In the last decade, these standards have begun to erode, as a result of two revolutions in journalism: a revolution in industrial structure and a revolution in culture. It is not possible to understand the contradiction that inheres in the concept of "multimedia journalism" without considering each of these revolutions separately. We have to begin with the challenge to the newspaper industry, which remains the core institution of print culture in the field of journalism.

Newspaper publishers in the United States now worry out loud about whether and how they will survive an onslaught of information providers, from telephone and cable companies to the so-called information utilities. These concerns have heightened the traditional tension between the editorial and business sides of news organizations, with the heads of business staffs condemning their editorial colleagues as ostriches, and editors and reporters decrying the philistines who would destroy the very integrity of journalism.

There is growing evidence that the fears of traditional news providers are not misplaced. There is an rapid divergence between the traditional news industries, particularly the newspaper but also broadcast news and the world of "multimedia" - a term which covers a multitude of new products and delivery systems from the growing electronic information networks to the delivery of entertainment to the home. We can understand this split in several ways. The first is the movement from a mass market for news to a fragmented market segmented according to demographic strata. The second is the movement from the vestigial public values that were supported by the mass market orientation of the traditional press to a set of values that is defined largely by the pursuit of higher income consumers.

Let me offer a few examples of the rapid decomposition of the traditional news markets. Only fifteen years ago, CNN was born. The advent of 24-hour world television news began the speedup of the global information cycle, and stimulated the demand for multimedia news in real time. We are just now beginning to see the full effects of this change. From here it is only a short step away to the digital video news service now being discussed by Oracle, with AT&T, MCI and Intel with CNN and Reuters providing the news. This network will let personal computer subscribers create customized video newscasts or do online video research. The Oracle service will compete with the video news services now being offered by Bloomberg Business News and Dow Jones, with the important difference that the new service will be able to be randomly searched and accessed.

These services, at least for now, are being offered primarily to business and institutional customers, those who can afford the substantial costs of delivery for real-time digital video. But a multitude of similar "news" services will soon be available to homes, schools, and other sites of consumer demand. They now arrive mostly via phone lines. Soon they will be available via cable, satellite, and broadcast. Major information utilities like Prodigy and America Online have been offering news and information services for several years, and are rapidly expanding onto the World Wide Web, the interconnection of graphically driven, hypertext linked "pages" that support multimedia through the Internet.

The Ingenius service for schools, a joint venture of Reuters and Telecommunications Inc. is delivering a full motion multimedia newspaper to schools via cable in selected cities, and it seems certain that this venture is a testing bed that will soon be expanded. Bertelsmann has made an agreement with America Online to provide multimedia services to Europe, and is now engaged in discussions with Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom. Just in the last month Rupert Murdoch and MCI agreed to a major joint venture to provide Fox "content," industry jargon for programs, over MCI's global networks. And last, but not least, Microsoft is now hiring journalism graduates as rapidly as it can to begin its own online "news" service that will be made available over its own network, which will be able to be accessed by every user of its new Windows 95 operating system.

I could go on, of course, but I simply want to convey the breadth of these new information offerings that are directly linked to the traditional and relatively well-bounded business of news provision in order to give you some idea of the ways in which journalism is beginning to "unbundle," to borrow the phrase of my colleague William Blankenburg. The tightly constructed bundle of services offered by the traditional news organization consisted of the provision of information to readers or viewers, the sale of a news product to that readership (in the case of newspapers) and the sale of those readers and viewers to advertisers. It is precisely that bundle that is beginning to fall apart under the assault of a number of forces.

The new information services that I have just described threaten to erode the monopoly on the provision of news and information to readers. This in turn threatens both the sale of the traditional news product to those readers and the sale of the readers to advertisers. As this process continues and advertising revenues decline, the ability of traditional news organizations to maintain the same levels of news gatherers and organizers-reporters and editors-is eroded in turn, devaluing the news and information that they provide and opening the way for new competitors. Thus begins a vicious cycle of expanded competition that has begun to seriously erode the economic foundation of the news organization that we have known in the West since the mid-19th century.

At this point we should ask: what difference does it make if the traditional news organization declines? Isn't this simply part of the cycle of capitalist competition and technological innovation? Surely an institutional structure that developed in the 19th century is long overdue for a fundamental change. Further, if people choose to receive their news over a computer, isn't this a major improvement that will allow readers to receive much more of the news that they want, and much less that they do not? Don't the new sources of information serve as perfectly adequate substitutes for traditional journalism?

It seems certain that the decline in readership of traditional newspapers that has already begun will continue. In May 1995 a circulation audit of America's ten largest newspapers showed that nine had suffered circulation declines from the previous year. The largest decline, suffered by NewYorkNewsday , was 7 percent. The only substantial increase was for Ruppert Murdoch's NewYorkPost, up 7 percent (suggesting at least some shift of readers from Newsday's more serious tabloid to the Post's more sensationalistic subway paper). One reason for the general circulation decline cited by newspaper executives was the effort to increase prices for newspapers in order to shift the cost of the paper from advertisers to readers. Even though the consequence is a drop in circulation, publishers are willing to live with this decline because the readers retained are the "quality" readers desired by advertisers, in otherwords, readers in the highest demographic categories.

This is the beginning of the answer to our question concerning economic change. Publishers who accept this circulation decline are indicating a retreat from the traditional economic structure of the newspaper as a mass market provider of information. There is also strong evidence of a willingness to shift toward new forms of information provision by American newspapers. As of December 1994, sixty U.S. newspapers were publishing online editions either over local dialup services, or over the commercial information utilities such as Prodigy and Compuserve, including some of the largest and most important in American journalism: theNewYorkTimes, WallStreetJournal, LosAngelesTimes, WashingtonPost, and Knight Ridder newspapers. An additional twenty-seven, with some overlap, published some form of edition on the world-wide Internet. The New Century Network has just been formed by eight major newspaper groups to set up a cooperative wire-type service to share electronic articles and databases over the Internet. Almost daily, new electronic editions go online, indicating that this trend, while in its infancy, is serious and will continue to grow.

This shift has clear implications not only for the economic viability of the daily newspaper, but for its changing public role. The acceptance of general circulation declines in exchange for a smaller audience of middle- and upper-middle class readers indicates not only a retreat from the mass market, but from the newspaper's role of public sphere institution as well. Before returning to our larger argument, let me offer a few examples of the kind of audiences that news organizations are now pursuing.

A 1994 profile of home Internet users shows that their average yearly household income is almost $67,000, compared to $42,400 for the U.S. as a whole, or half again as large. Eighty-one percent of Internet users have graduated from college, compared to thirty-three percent of all Americans. Sixty percent are white collar, compared to thirty-four percent of the American people as a whole. Forty-one percent work for their corporations at home. We could go on, but the picture is clear. This is an upper stratum of the population to whom not only the online services, but, as we have seen, the traditional newspaper as well, will increasingly cater.

So we have a broad picture of the impact of multimedia information sources on the traditional economic structure of news and of the movement of the traditional newspaper toward wealthier audiences. Our task is now is to sort through the implications of this shift for journalism. Until now we have looked at the impact of the economic structure of the new media on traditional news organizations. But we have not considered the changes that these shifts will bring in journalism and its public sphere mission. As journalism is the second major term of our question - whether multimedia journalism is a contradiction in terms - we need to examine what journalism has been and should be, before we can proceed.

Journalism and its Public Functions

I strongly believe that the question "what is journalism" can only be answered in a comparative perspective. That is to say, what journalism is and has been in Germany differs considerably from what it has been in the United States. To avoid facile generalizations I will remain close to the case of the United States. If this seems too parochial, I can only say that as has so often been the case, for better or worse, new media trends in the United States tend to work their way outward, so perhaps the dictum de te fabula narratur applies.

Michael Schudson, in Discovering the News, describes the rise of American journalism on the twin pillars of commercialism and objectivity. Beginning around 1830, the U.S. penny press, brought about a commercial revolution in American newspapers. In contrast to the period of partisan, political journalism that characterized the U.S. till that point, the commercial press sought a mass audience. To find that audience, it engaged the broadest-and some would say the lowest-common denominator of the rising cities by developing a series of genres in reporting that we now call "tabloid": crime, entertainment, and so on. The concept of objectivity that developed concurrently with the commercial press filtered out "opinion" in such a way as to narrow the definition of news to that which could be reported from the "beats," the regular set of police, court, and other venues that provided the news that counted for the mass, urban, commercial newspaper audience.

In contrast to this particular conception of commercial and objective journalism, we might counterpose another tradition, that of Öffentlichkeit, or the public sphere, which in contemporary discourse has largely been defined by Jürgen Habermas in his masterwork, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I do not want to extensively review his argument, but a few words are necessary. For Habermas, journalism is, of course, part of the public sphere in which rational-critical public discourse is formed and represented. His account is both historical - in arguing that such a sphere existed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries but then declined - and normative. I am concerned here with the normative dimension of Öffentlichkeit, that is, as a standard of rational-critical public discussion that we can hold up to journalism in order to ask both how it does function and how it should function.

Now U.S. journalism has long held that it has fulfilled its public sphere responsibilities, and that is why it receives its special protection against government interference by our First Amendment. In the story that it tells of itself, U.S. journalism is commercial to be sure, but it is simultaneously objective, and this very objectivity allows it to fulfill both its First Amendment and public sphere duties: to provide a free and open marketplace of ideas open to all. The reader of Schudson's work, and a number of other empirical studies that have followed in its wake might question this story. As we have seen, when U.S. news institutions claim public functions, they are actually describing their outreach to amass audience, and it is this activity - mass market appeal - rather than public discussion per se that undergirds their fundamental self-justification. Because the pursuit of a broad mass market has grounded the parallel fulfillment of public functions, the fragmentation of that market into more narrow demographic strata allows news institutions to retreat from the broader public when it becomes profitable to do so, as indeed they are now doing.

This, of course, is the dilemma of a commercial news system. In the United States, that news system receives constitutional protection because it represents the public sphere. But its own perceived economic self interest may lead it elsewhere. And this is precisely the dilemma that we now face with the emergence of multimedia journalism. As we have seen, the centrifugal tendencies that lead to the unbundling of traditional journalism have not necessarily originated with the new multimedia. But multimedia greatly accelerate these tendencies. The convergence of the unbundling of traditional news, multimedia competition, and the fragmentation of the mass market may bring traditional news organizations to a crisis point before they understand these effects and learn to manage them.

One of the most important of these effects is the further erosion of the public sphere constituted by American journalism. Despite the constant tension between commercialism and the public sphere, American journalism has, in fact, been constitutive of many of the positive elements of public life that do exist in the U.S. Newspapers, especially, but also local television stations, have been central in constituting community identity, which in turn, leads to the possibility of public life.

This "imagined community," to use Benedict Anderson's term, is the framework in which individuals and groups who would otherwise never come in contact with each other imagine themselves as part of a city, state, or nation, and the mass media are the irreducible precondition of these larger identities.

The term "imagined" might lead one to believe that imagined community is purely subjective or normative concept. Rather, it describes the very real, connective functions that mass media perform in order to make civil society and public life possible. Without these boundary-spanning media institutions no contemporary public sphere would be possible.

This ability of journalism to reach across boundaries, to tie disparate groups in society together, and to form the connective tissue that makes imagined community possible underpins the possibility of public life. And it is in this sense that we ask whether multimedia journalism is a contradiction. In a multimedia world marked by the progressive fragmentation of both the presentation of news and of the communities that receive it, is it meaningful to continue talk about journalism as a public sphere institution?

Emerging Forms of Public Communication

Part of the answer to this question lies in the explanation of how media industries and audiences shaped by the structures of mass communication are likely to change under the pressures of new media. In The Future of the Mass Audience, Russell Neuman describes the emergence of a realm of "mini-communication" derived from Tetsuro Tomita's concept of "media gap." Neuman calls this discovery "a gap in the structure of the personal and mass media at the critical intermediate level of the small interest group or the community organization." New media are best able to address this quasi-group, participative activity most closely linked with associative democracy and civil society. In otherwords, in the gap between micro-communications - the one-to-one medium of the telephone - and mass communication - the one-to-many media of broadcast and newspapers - there is an area in which the public sphere functions of the traditional mass media and the communicative qualities of new media potentially begin to converge.

The question before us is not whether convergence will take place but whether journalism is possible in this converged environment and what it might look like. For journalism to endure it will, paradoxically, have to return to an older set of core values, those of Öffentlichkeit, without, however, the secure economic structure of the mass market. These will be difficult and treacherous waters to navigate and many venerable journalism institutions may find themselves struggling to survive. Some will turn to better marketing as a strategy. For example, the Times Mirror Company, publisher of the Los Angeles Time and New York Newsday, recently hired a new chief executive from the consumer goods giant Procter and Gamble who immediately made clear that he will apply a "new consumer orientation" to new media ventures. When asked to clarify he offered the examples of the successful marketing of cereals, cake mixes, and "Hamburger Helper."

It is too early to know whether this emphasis on packaging will be successful in the marketplace. But it seems clear that it could be fatal to the public values of journalism. Beyond this, I believe it could cripple the news industries themselves. By aggressively pursuing commodity information strategies aimed at the so-called upscale markets of current online users, newspapers may find themselves abandoning the very publics that they need to survive and prosper in the future. In a cycle of unintended consequences, the pursuit of niche strategies and minority markets erodes the very public that can serve as the foundation of a mass market in news.

How might this public be preserved, reinvigorated, and extended in an era of multimedia? There are some directions that we can look toward and they reside precisely in this realm of group-to-group communication. The most successful online services to date have been discussion groups in which users talk to one another. These virtual communities have driven the major commercial online services, like Prodigy. But we also have examples of small local services like the WELL in San Francisco, or New York Online, which draw together users oriented toward each other on the basis of both interest and geography.

These successful online discussions started with local user groups, but they have extended beyond local boundaries to include like-minded individuals from across the United States and around the world. The online discussions express a desire for community and public connection.

These same desires are expressed at the institutional level in the public journalism movement in the United States which has grown rapidly in the past several years. Public journalism, briefly, is an approach to news that sees its main goal as helping to develop public solutions to problems. It holds that rather than simply describe the breakdown of public life, news organizations should educate citizens and provide them with avenues to participate in public life and civil society. For example, in Wisconsin, the governor faced a panel of citizens who had met for weeks in advance to analyze the state budget. Seated below the panel, the governor answered pointed and detailed budget questions posed by truck drivers and teachers (which were often better than those asked by professional journalists). Other projects have included in-depth reporting on local community problems in which public solutions are also proposed and debated; town hall meetings where citizens directly question politicians with advance discussion and preparation; and citizen panels which grapple with complicated issues like government budgets, taxes, and health care.

Since 1992, more than 60 ongoing public journalism projects and experiments have grown up in the U.S., with more added each month. Proponents and practitioners range from the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, to the Wichita Eagle in the middle of Kansas.

The desire for communities that work and deliberate together is a powerful counterweight to those forces that would split communities apart. This is also the space in which multimedia journalism might emerge, taking advantage of both the peculiar conversational possibilities of the new media, and the values of Öffentlichkeit that inhere in the old. Whether these possibilities will be realized is difficult to say. But there is some hope that the American traditions of local democracy and decentralization can also lead to a period of experimentation in that quintessential local institution, the newspaper. Online services can complement the traditional newspaper by adding a new dimension of community dialogue, an ongoing conversation about public life that was simply not possible before. If communications technology is used to reinvigorate civil society, rather than to fragment it, then multimedia journalism might, indeed, be possible.

Stand: Juni 1995