Does journalism have a healthy future?

[RSS News]

London’s evening newspaper will be distributed free, its publishers say. Is this a wise decision?

(Feed provided by BBC News | Have your Say (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm))

[Raúl Duke]

Not sure if it's wise but I like it....since it's free.

Does journalism have a healthy future? Depends on what you mean...mainstream journalism probably does not since it's being more and more centralized (in the U.S.) to a few corporations. Alternative journalism might have a better future.

In Italy, the prime-minister I think is a media-tycoon and I think that's a conflict of interest.

[yuon]

I don't think that capitalism has a future.

Journalism, of course, still has a future. People still want to know about the news.

Of course, as time goes on, "mainstream" sources may become crapper and crapper...

But, there will always be a market for news.

[MilitantAnarchist]

Journalism will always have a healthy future... maybe it will get more and more tainted by government influence, but there will always be writers who will expose the truth, which will continue to inspire people who want to do the same.

[Spawn of Stalin]

So The Evening Standard is going to be free huh? Just means more people will be subjected to its pseudo-fascist Tory crap, this is terrible news.

[bricolage]

So The Evening Standard is going to be free huh? Just means more people will be subjected to its pseudo-fascist Tory crap, this is terrible news.

Innit. Fuck the Standard.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Red Son is spot on. Making it free means more people will read the bourgeois and Conservative ridiculousness of it.

[jake williams]

I think this is actually unusually appropriate for discussion here compared to most other Newsbot posts. I think there's a lot of space for like a Marxist analysis of the crises in print journalism right now that hasn't, as far as I know, even been attempted.

It might be fruitless, but this is worth considering (I'm speaking roughly, but think about it): the most financially secure sectors of the news business are outlets like the WSJ and the Financial Times, where almost the entire market is, well, the capitalist class, and it uses this reporting explicitly in pursuit of its material and class interest. And it's fully conscious. The least secure media is, a lot of the time, the popular local press which provides basic information about political and economic workings in local communities. It's the media with the most direct link to informing local democracy.

There's lots of pretty stable indie activist press and online blog-style journalism, or things like activist-focused community radio, but we're talking about a minority of the population that either has the resources to maintain an independent (self-serving, and I use the term objectively and not evaluatively) media because they have petty bourgeois backgrounds with relative job security and high incomes, and thus can, for example, donate a lot of money to Democracy Now... or, probably less controversially, the activists that support activist media are of the belief that that media is extremely important and thus dedicate an unusual amount of their personal resources in sustaining that media.

But this subsection is not something which is really helpful for the general population. It's just not an easy thing to do for an ordinary working person to sit down on the internet for a couple years and find good media. It is easy to read the local newspaper. And however corporate-controlled and shitty and whatever else things like local newspapers might be - they really do provide significant informational content to ordinary workers.

[Invincible Summer]

"Free" newspapers... kind of an ironic name, don't you think? Monetarily free means more advertising, which means more condensed news and having to play to advertiser's interests. It means (even) less information freedom.

[blake 3:17]

I don't think the exact form and distribution matter all that much. What I am concerned about is that enough relatively independent journalism takes place. Proper interviews, proper research, proper fact checking and editing take a lot of material resources. While I totally support community/left/alternative media, and have been involved in a few such projects, we can't do our job commenting without basic journalism being done. Most alternative media outlets can't afford to provide the allowances that proper journalism needs.