Are reporters’ days numbered? Full-time reporters are being displaced by ‘citizen’ journalists:-

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When newspapers become entertainment products, journalists become the casualty. Slowly, the printed word has been dumbing down. The future journo will be an accumulator of data and an interpreter. Citizen journalism, introduced by TV channels as a cost-saving measure, though they would like to pretend otherwise, is spreading to newspapers and magazines. The local supplements of national dailies are brought out almost entirely by wannabe journalists and college students. They cost — if they are at all paid — one-tenth the rate for regular journalists.

Freelance writers have always been around, but they built up trust and normally wrote features which could be subject to checks. Today, they have invaded the newsroom. The key difference is that these new “freelancers” are prepared to work for free and, of course, their 15 minutes of fame.

It’s a sign of the times. “Open-source, volunteer-created computer software like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser have established themselves as significant and lasting economic realities,” says Time magazine in a 2007 essay. “That’s not true yet in the worlds of science, news and entertainment: we’re still figuring out what the role of volunteers will be, but that it will be much bigger than in the past seems obvious.”

The prime mover in this development has, of course, been technology. The scribe is being replaced by amateurs the same way that the horse-and-buggy driver was driven out by the automobile. It takes skill to drive a horse cart; anyone (excepting women: “They use the mirrors to look at themselves,” says AskMen.com) can drive a car.

The other contributing factor is the sacrifice of quality at the altar of economy. Quality does not matter in a world where you can’t distinguish between advertising and editorial. But this article is not an obituary for the talking heads who have taken over TV (these people actually move from studio to studio and participate in several talk shows a day) or the pompous editorial writers who always use 10 words when one will do. It’s about the ordinary scribe whose days are numbered. The proof reader joined the extinct species once Microsoft invented the spell check. The chief subeditor and his cohorts bit the dust when reporters were expected to lay out their stories. Now full-time reporters are also being displaced by “citizens”. Anchors, today’s superstars, will also go. As it is, they are using all sorts of gimmicks to gather eyeballs. Naked News has anchors doing a striptease. But would anybody like to see Indian anchors in underwear?

The farsighted employee — and not just in the media — needs to see himself through Theodore Levitt’s lenses. In Marketing Myopia, Levitt posited that you should start with the question: What business are you in? If the horse-and-buggy driver sees himself as being in the transportation business, he can graduate to bigger things. If he doesn’t, he will disappear with the horse droppings.

So where does the threatened scribe go? (One can apply this principal to other professions too.) He can become a town crier, a muezzin or, if he has his feet firmly on the ground, a PR man. And don’t sneer at PR as a profession; at least, there aren’t any citizen PR people around. The only folks who can fill that role are journalists (and they never come for free).

Incidentally, what’s the Kindle — Amazon’s e-reader — doing in the list of straws in the wind? Well, a media baron once said that he would start worrying about the Web threat to printed newspapers when you could carry your computer to the loo. With the Kindle, you can. The publisher’s empire is now going to pot.

HEADLINE HUNTERS ARE A THREATENED SPECIES

Straws in the wind :

• YouTube has just launched a channel for citizen journalists styled YouTube Direct. Through this, TV and online news editors can obtain video from so-called “citizen journalists” — and even request such video be shot by amateurs seeking attention.

• In October, Forbes laid off nearly 100 employees out of 600. Fortune is planning 18 issues a year instead of 24. BusinessWeek has been sold to Bloomberg.

• Time Inc — which includes People, Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money — will have a new owner soon.

• In the US, UNITY’s 2009 Layoff Tracker Report shows an average 22 per cent increase in journalism jobs lost each month from September 2008 through August 2009. In contrast, the economy shed jobs at an average pace of plus 8 per cent each month during the same period.

• Media research agency Enders expects the number of jobs in the UK industry to halve between now and 2013. The last couple of months has seen accelerated downsizing from a glut of publishers, TV and other groups.

• Network 18 is laying off 12 per cent of its permanent staffers (about 200 people) as part of a major restructuring exercise, which will see the broadcast operations of the company’s Hindi and English business news channels getting merged.

• The US and Canada have seen 383 magazine closures and 259 new launches in the first nine months of 2009, according to the MediaFinder.com database, which reports that magazine closures continue to outpace launches as publishers face mounting difficulties in today’s tough economic environment.

• The Associated Press, which has about 4,000 employees worldwide, aims to reduce global payroll costs by 10 per cent in 2009.

• The Kindle — the e-reader from Amazon — was launched globally in October. It will eventually catalyse seismic changes in both reading and entertainment.

Source:The Telegraph (kolkata, India)