Category: Media Industry Author : Duncan Riley Posted: January 21, 2009
Tags : newspapers
A report to be released by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism recommends a digital apartheid scheme that defines journalists ahead of bloggers, and tax breaks for newspapers.
The proposal of a “kitemark,” in the form of a visual or digital watermark, would be used to “identify and differentiate professional journalism amidst the noise of the web,” the report says.
“Paired with a kitemark, an indicator of digital transparency could convey to the audience that the content offered on a website had been subjected to a rigorous series of checks, and further, had been created by a professional journalist employed to write in a specific field of coverage – as opposed to a blogger, writing for free and outside any formal editorial process or code of conduct.“
The emphasis is mine, but it’s the flaw of the proposal: the presumption that bloggers all write for free, and are all outside an editorial process: a digital apartheid that favors old media over new media.
According to the Press Gazette, the report also suggests a review of newspaper tax, in particular on newspaper websites:
“The purpose would be to minimize the current disparity between the costs and revenue-generating potential of news websites.” In other words: instead of cutting costs, newspapers should be given tax breaks to subsidize their newsrooms because web ads aren’t paying them enough to continue to support their often bloated, archaic business structures.
The proposal of a kitemark wouldn’t change the online dynamics of news, but it would serve one purpose: to further divide old journalism and new media. This is a hark back to journalist supremacy, an elitist view that shares much in common with the practices of minority white populations in Africa in the 20th century; this idea that somehow based on race, or in this case employment, you are more privileged than someone else, irrespective of the quality of the content and the work produced. There will always be a market for news, but automatically labeling some content as being superior to other content, not based on the content itself but by who wrote it is cultural apartheid, and only goes to show how out of touch, and lost the last vestiges of old media really are.
Jan 22, 2009
The basic premise of this part of our report is that a digital 'kitemark' (signifying participation in a voluntary and open source system of meta-tagging around the news – e.g. who wrote an article, when, where, was it funded by a PR agency or a charity) might help to make web news more transparent, navigable and ultimately more useful.
Contrary to the claim of apartheid, such a system would work better if old and new media alike took part together. That includes the vibrant world of blogging. What we are thinking of is not a top-down, archaic system of division, but rather a bottom-up culture of tagging and intelligent labelling (that is both consistent and transparent) to improve the value of the news.
What we envision is a hybrid 21st century news media; populated, yes, by citizens and bloggers but also by a commercially viable, independent, diverse, professional corps of journalists. The point is we need both. I hope that clarifies.
Jan 22, 2009
I think the thing that has caused an issue here is the term “kitemark”. Most associate this as being a mark distributed by a central authority who approve that product. The core idea of labelling news articles with a statement of principles that is being followed is an important one, but the kneejerk reaction when people here the word “kitemark” is “I'm not having my work defined as journalism by some outside authority”. As you say, it's just as valuable for bloggers and more traditional journalists (and those in between!) to publish the rules to which they produce their work.
Of course, a central authority isn't what you're suggesting, but the use of the word kitemark means it ends up being understood that way by alot of people.
(Full disclosure: I act as a consultant to the Media Standards Trust, working on the newscredit project, where part of our work is defining a labelling system for solving this problem).
Jan 23, 2009
Thanks for the follow up. Yes, perhaps we should have avoided the term kitemark… it appears to be something of a minefield! We interviewed the Media Standards Trust for our study; their ideas on transparency informed our description of meta tagging, which perhaps could have been framed with less ambiguity – e.g. about the failings of top-down authority vs. the strengths of bottom-up design.