The Future of Journalism in Asia is….Entrepreneurial
[Source: Open Spaces, by Patricia Zimmermann, March 2, 2010]
WAN IFRA
I’m sitting in the back row of the banquet room on the tenth floor of
the upscale M Hotel in downtown Singapore.
I’m freezing—the air conditioning is so crisp and cold it’s almost an
electro-shock after the 93 degree heat and humidity of walking through
the business district in Tanjong Pagar.
I’m listening to speakers from Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Germany,
the United States and Malaysia describe the changing topography of
journalism in Asia.
Summary: the future of journalism is…business and marketing on 24/7
social media platforms.
This gathering is an intense two day working conference for news
organizations and news professionals called The Future of Journalism and
News Media, sponsored by the World
Association of Newspaper and News Publishers (WAN IFRA), Nanyang Technological University and
the Asian Journalism Fellowship.
Go to Where the People Are
“Media are no longer about a brand and people coming to you,” asserted
Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at the City
University of New York graduate school of journalism . “Now you have to
go where the people are—media are more distributed than centralized.” On
vacation in Florida, Jarvis was skyped into the conference.
Over 100 journalists from Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia,
Bhutan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, France, Germany and the
United States crowd the round tables. I talked to a lot of them at the
cocktail party, which featured copious amounts of satay and sashimi.
I really liked and admired the people I met.
The q and a sessions after each session feel more like press
conferences where journalists drill into undeveloped points for
clarification and exposure. It’s a long way from academics in the US who
often start their questions with “let me make an intervention” or “I’d
like to problematize your position a bit.”
I like their agility in cutting to the bone of ideas. A spirit of
harmony and collegiality pervades this conference.
Malaysiakini, Passion and the Internet
Malaysiakini.com is a website
that pushed the boundaries of press freedom in Malaysia,
explained Premesh Chandran, one of its founders. The Malaysian
government loosened press censorship on the internet in the late 1990s
when it was pushing its multimedia corridor—Malaysiakini took advantage
of this opening and launched in 1999.
With passion and commitment to breaking stories on government and
business scandals, Malaysiakini focused on fast news underrepresented in
the mainstream and offered diverse viewpoints.
Chandran contends that where you publish is irrelevant now. Brand name
and credibility are Malaysiakini’s number one asset. By 2004, the
website was profitable. By 2008, it was ranked #1 for news in Malaysia.
A lot of the questions volleyed here seem to pivot around how news
organizations in Thailand or Indonesia can steer through the
swift-moving rapids of multiplatformed social media. J
Journalists here wonder out loud how their jobs will change from doing
stories to branding themselves as specialists across blogs, Twitter,
Facebook, and other social media.
Old Dead Tree Journalism and New Social Media Journalism
I’m jamming my notebook with percentages on everything from who reads
newspapers (older people) to who uses Twitter (younger people),
aphorisms about social media engagement strategies (twitter and blog and
post 24/7) and exhortations to invent a new business model for
journalism (make money by branding and sponsoring meet ups and
trainings).
The old journalism (what some here call dead tree journalism) of a daily
newspaper, loyal readers, and highly trained journalists with
authority is extinct.
The new journalism (an endlessly swirling concoction of citizen
journalism, blogs, Twitter, engagement strategies, branding, mobile
interfaces and aggregation) is in Darwinian ascendance. But it doesn’t
yet have a viable business model for what many speakers call
“monetization.”
Some Facts and Observations on the New Landscape
Consider the following facts and arguments offered at this conference
about the future of journalism:
* Journalism is not a product but a process, and journalists must adopt
an “entrepreneurial spirit” to capitalize on low cost platforms,
according to Jeff Jarvis
* The South China Morning Post, a major high prestige Asian
newspaper, is now competing with blogs, contends Reginald Chua, editor
in chief of the Hong Kong-based paper. Large organizations may, as a
result, be handicapped in this new landscape.
* In Singapore, 1 out of 2 people trust blogs. Chew Ming, editor of the
Singapore-based, user-generated site Stomp,
pointed out that citizen journalism captures news as it is happening—a
much different timeline than traditional journalism. But it’s better at
who , what, when, and where, than why and how.
* Creation is aggregation—use people as our agents to spread our brand,
claimed Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review.
* Listen, plan, engage, amplify, optimize, urged Thomas Crampton, a
former New York Times and International Herald Tribune
journalist now Asia Pacific director fo 360 Digital Influence, Ogilvy,
Hong Kong. Journalism is a “three legged stool” of online, in person,
and in print.
* People will pay for quality journalism, argued Premesh Chandran from
Malaysiakini.com
* “Leisurization” is a growing market for online news. 91% of people in a
recent survey think the internet is the most effective way to get
leisure information. People want and need to escape, and these desires
can be “monetized” online, according to Jerome Doncieux, co-CEO of AFP
Relaxnews in France.
Where do nonprofit news/public affairs organizations fit in?
Walter Lim, who helped launch the imaginative, compelling and useful
Singapore heritage project Yesterday.sg,
and I are the only speakers from the nonprofit realm. His
user-generated historical archive--which had several fans and users in
this esteemed audience--is funded by the National Heritage Board of
Singapore.
I guess I represented what we in the US call “public media,” that range
of works that open up concerns and debates about civil society. I asked
the audience to consider shifting from considering business models
to the conceptual, philosophical and ethical models of this new social
media landscape—all of which are unresolved and thorny issues despite
the euphoria over twittering in Iran.
My colleague Cherian
George, himself a former Singapore Straits Times
journalist who is now a professor at NTU with a Ph.D., invited me to
speak about an on-going research and theoretical project I am
collaborating on with filmmaker , writer and non profit arts
administrator Helen de Michiel
called the Open Space Project, a theoretical model of collaborative,
participatory relational practice that pulls in community rather than
pushes out ideas.
I must admit, I wasn’t quite sure how this model for nonprofit social
media mobilization might mesh with the rhetorics of business models,
entrepreneurialism, branding, and pushing out ideas to capture eyeballs
for advertizers.
I didn't want to alienate the audience, but to invite them into a
slightly different conversation. Open Space media, in our model, is
where technology meets people meets places.
Social Media in Asia and the US: Similiar and Different
In the end, I’m struck by how the pumped-up-pitch-man rhetoric,
the engagement strategies, the euphoria about new media, the
multiplatforming, the evangelism that the old forms are dead and the new
forms need our embrace, and even the adoption of the “indie rock
model” to commoditize ancillary products at live events, is almost
identical to what I heard from the nonprofit social media pundits at
the National Alliance of Media Arts and
Culture Commonwealth Conference last August in Boston.
The only difference was that the nonprofit NAMAC crowd shuffled
around the term sustainability, while the for-profit WAN IFRA
group lobbed the term monetization. An uncritical optimism about social
media coupled with horror-film like warnings about ignoring it
pervaded both the WAN IFRA and NAMAC gatherings.
At NAMAC after hours, at the hotel bar, nonprofit administrators
described how they spent most of their time chained to laptops sending
out Tweets and being clever on Facebook updates and pumping out
e-blasts and building dynamic websites. They shared they were exhausted
by it all and missed the days of engaging audiences and ideas more
directly.
At a WAN IFRA luncheon where I ate lamb laksa and fish
curry, I listened to seasoned journalists from four different
countries in southeast Asia worry that younger journalists never leave
the newsroom or make phone calls—they google and surf the internet and
then remix what they find. They have not done the “death knock”—where
someone dies and you interview their family or friends.
The Future Needs Restructuring
Both conversations give me pause.
It seems like social media is actually not social—in the Habermasian
sense—at all.
Perhaps it has created a cordon sanitaire around ideas and news
that matter, trapping nonprofits, for-profits, and entrepreneurial
freelancers from both sectors in a digital quarantine. As a result, the
traumas, pain, messiness, and conflicts of the powerful and the
powerless--defining features of journalism, public affairs,
documentary, and nonprofit public media around the globe for at least
two centuries--are cordoned off, outside, far away, unnecessary,
neutralized.
So maybe the future of journalism and nonprofit media in Asia and the
United States are the same: a tectonic restructuring of the
relationships between producers, users, institutions, technological
platforms, labor, and business models .
And maybe the future of journalism and nonprofit media everywhere should
also include some vigorous discussion of the whys and hows of ethics.
And what it means to get away from your iPhone and into the streets
again, interacting with, uh, that old platform which is always
new, called real people.
