As the quality of journalism depreciates and citizen journalism rises to take it’s place, we prefer quickness over quality.
“From editors to consumers, everyone wants their images faster and cheaper. Quality photography? That’s for coffee table books.” said Bill Green on a professional photography blog. While this is cynical, it’s also realistic. A grainy photo taken during a bomb explosion speaks louder and gets more play time than a beautifully constructed photo of the aftermath.
But what causes this shift in what we want? Our lowered expectations are the result of three things.
Firstly, we expect everything instantly and we’ll take something small and fast over extensive quality. Cases in point: Twitter, mass-produced fast food, CNN’s breaking news. The media has adapted to our shortened patience with 24-hour news channels but this isn’t enough when we have a computer on our laps. We type keywords into a search engine to get the “full” story. In the quest for facts, we don’t discriminate the source, Twitter is just as reliable as media conglomerates when it comes to break neck speed news.
Interestingly, “keyword news” falls apart when something unexpected happens. When Steve Irwin died in 2006, the ABC, Australia’s version of BBC, had their biggest rise in the number of hits to their website. Nobody in the country believed that Irwin had died and went to a source that they trusted for it’s truthful and balanced reports. I like Twit’s idea of making all media non-profit so we, as an audience, would place more trust in their voice.
Secondly, the quality of what we expect from photography/video has been lowered by the advent of phone cameras and small point and films. I’m not worried about these growing pains, technology is bound to evolve so your phone has the same capabilities as the Canon 5D Mark II, it’s just a matter of time before everyone has the same quality of media as the journalists that make the news.
Thirdly, the media industry has made drastic budget cuts. Journalists that were once expected to stick to their beat and get 800 words out by the end of the day are expected to shoot video and photos of the people they interviewed, have to write three daily blog posts and work overtime to keep up with all the staff cuts.
When you overwork someone, they will make more mistakes, when you’re mistakes are getting broadcast/read by thousands of people, that’s no good for you or for your company’s reputation.
The essence of journalism is the eye-witness report. And a lot more eye witnesses are talking. I predict that the news is eventually going to be a distillation process for all these voices, the best rise to the top of the media heap and the rest are heard in page 2 and onwards on Google Search. What do you think?
If you liked this, you might get something out of What I learnt from photojournalism and why I chose creative writing.