Thoughts on last night's talk...

I went to a talk yesterday which looked at the media's responsibility to inform the public. These are some of my reflections on what was said/discussed....

Topic: Democracy and an Informed Populace
Speaker: Antonia Zerbisias (Toronto Star columnist)

•Fear of the media and social networking sites (by large media suppliers- ie. newspapers)
•They are afraid bc they are not monitored
•But they don’t understand the power and potential of using these sites to diffuse information

•Online hits are the only way that newspapers can get an understanding of their demographics (how many people read online news stories). Things that get the most hits however are the stories that have the least substance (contain main words such as ‘facebook’, ‘breast’, etc. which pull in people’s curiosity). Bc it is getting the most hits, these are the kinds of stories that papers will continue to create, so that they can remain popular, but this is perpetuating the circulation and creation of ‘crap’ stories that are unsubstantial and/or not very important
•There is a need to bring these important, substantial stories and events to the editor’s boardrooms BUT if the public is not interested in this stuff, how do we get people to care about the substantial stories, and subsequently support the writing of such stories within these media?

•We don’t need to watch tv anymore bc Twitter will ‘tell you’ whether there is anything worth watching. Don’t want to watch the news for latest events, bc you can get important event information within seconds through people Tweeting it. But doesn’t this limit someone’s scope or knowledge of what’s going on if they are only waiting for the most important information to be Tweeted? Do news broadcasts still have the importance of spreading information on the general events going on locally and nationally? Or is this information too ‘dumbed down’ (to attract the general viewer to watch) to provide any meaningful information on what’s really going on?

•Print vs. online newspapers – are they complimentary or do they have different roles? Print paper demographics are older crowds, whereas younger generations are finding it easier and more convenient (and cheaper) to get information online. Will this cause the death of print media? If we do not pay for this information (through paying to have a paper delivered, or even for an online subscription) newspapers will have decreasing funds to put out the stories that are the most important. Less resources also means that journalists and reporters are stretched to cover too many stories, so the quality of articles written may also suffer.

•There are some website that reprints articles from around the web in full. This is good for viewers since it brings together a lot of stories from a bunch of different sources to one location, so it’s easier to get the information. This is bad from the author/journalist’s point of view since (although it is spreading and popularizing their stories), the newspapers they are working for are not seeing the popularity of these stories. Where papers can monitor hits to a given story on their own website, when these stories are diffused to other sites, newspapers (and employers) can no longer monitor the hits to that same story. Therefore a story may only get 1000 hits on the newspaper’s website but another 50,000 on these other sites that reprint their stories. This means that the journalist may not receive the credit they deserve or recognition that the stories they write are important and need to continue being published. This further leads to ‘crap’ being produced as those are the stories that get the most hits on the newspaper’s official website.
•This is also an issue when you consider that information sought out online is taken from niche sources. For example, if you are interested in the oil spill, you may not go to a large newspaper’s website to get the latest information, but you may choose to look at a specialized oil website to get information that pertains more specifically to your interest. Therefore, these important stories (the substantial ones) are getting even less hits since people may be going to these niche sites to get this type of information (even though this information is very popular and the general population may want to be kept up to date with what’s going on)