My name is Mathew Ingram, and I’ve spent the majority of my career working for newspapers — including about 15 years at one of Canada’s national newspapers, where I was a reporter, editor and columnist and wrote about everything from the stock market to the oil industry. After being asked to join the paper’s online group, I started writing on the Internet, started a blog and began writing about technology, and eventually I left and joined an online media company based in San Francisco called Gigaom. We covered technology fairly intensively, from cellphones to new kinds of Internet services, Facebook, etc. And my specialty was the disruption and transformation of the media industry.
If any of you are familiar with the name Gigaom or have Googled it recently, you may know that the company shut down recently, after eight years, and so I guess in a sense we were also disrupted, in much the same way as many traditional media entities have been. I’m happy to talk more about that after the presentation if anyone wants to.
So let’s get started — some of you might be familiar with a lot of what I’m talking about but others may not, so I’m going to try and go slowly enough that we cover all the bases, but quickly enough that no one who already gets all of this winds up being bored to tears. I don’t want to spend too much time on my presentation, because for me presentations are just a way of jump-starting a discussion, and so I want to get to that as quickly as possible. And at any point, if anyone has a question, feel free to just put up your hand and wave or jump up and down or do something to catch my attention.
Note: This is the text of a presentation I gave in 2015 to a journalism conference
Does anyone know what this is a painting of? I know it looks like a violin recital or something, but it’s actually a coffee shop, probably in Britain around the middle of the 1800s. Right now, many of you are probably saying to yourselves “Wait, you mean Starbucks didn’t invent coffee?” No, they didn’t. It’s actually an Arabic invention, which priests somehow stumbled across and took a liking to because it allowed them to stay up late praying. In any case, it eventually made its way to the Western world, and people started hanging around in coffee houses.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because there’s a fascinating theory that says coffee shops in many ways were the internet of the 19th century. Before the telegraph came along, the way that news travelled was by word of mouth — and the central place where news and gossip and other kinds of information were exchanged was coffee shops. Traders and merchant seamen and soldiers and all kinds of travellers would sit and talk about what was going on in the Far East, or what they had heard about the king or who was taking power in Prussia or whatever. What became the insurance company Lloyd’s of London started in a coffee shop, and the first stock markets involved traders swapping shares in a coffee shop, because they were considered too rude for the Royal Exchange.
If you look at some of the earliest newspapers from the mid-1800s, this is the kind of thing you see, except in print. And it’s amazing how much it feels like conversation, instead of the modern forms of journalism that we see now — and also how much it feels like blogging or social media like Twitter or Facebook. There are front-page columns that are basically just blogs, with someone who recently visited Britain or Germany talking about their impressions of what they saw there, or maybe a second or third-hand report about a boat sinking or a fire somewhere. And of course there are pages and pages of ads for things like boot black, and oak barrels, which people apparently used a lot of.
Over time, newspapers — and the telegraph, and then the telephone and then radio and TV — took over from coffee shops as the way that information got around, and the way rumors and stories turned into facts and became history. And for half a century or so, newspapers were the internet — they pulled together all those bits and pieces of information that came in from news wires or other sources, and from society as a whole, and they made sense of them and fact-checked them and then passed them on. And that turned out to be a pretty good business, because advertisers also wanted to reach those readers so they could sell them boot black and oak barrels or whatever. And they were willing to pay newspapers handsomely in order to do that.
So far, so good. But then the internet came along. And we all know what happened next — not only did people start reading a lot fewer newspapers, but advertising also started to plunge, as those advertisers found new ways to reach the audiences they wanted to target. I’m not telling any of you anything you don’t already know, of course, but stay with me for a moment. Did people stop spending as much time with newspapers because there were all sorts of competing sources of excellent journalism? No. The whole point of my talk is that what we think of as journalism, the business of newspapers, has never been just about hard-hitting, investigative news features that win awards — although that’s the part we usually like to think of when we say the word journalism. But newspapers have always been about much more than just that, and it’s all those other pieces of the puzzle that have been gradually taken away by things that aren’t even related to journalism.
If you think about the purpose of a newspaper, it has dozens or even hundreds of different purposes, depending on who is reading it. For some people it’s just a way of getting sports scores, and for others it’s a way of finding out about a new book or a new restaurant. For some, it’s a way of learning about their city or town Council and how incompetent they are, but for others it’s mostly about the comics, or the horoscopes, or the crossword puzzle. Clay Christensen, the Harvard business professor who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, looked at the disruption of the media industry recently in a paper he wrote with a friend of mine, and he talked about what he calls “jobs to be done.” Everyone who reads a newspaper — or the Internet for that matter — has a list of jobs they need done, whether it’s explicit or not. One job might be to find out enough about what’s going on in the world so that you don’t sound stupid while making conversation at a party later. Or you may need information that will help you make money in your job. Or you might just want to be entertained for a few minutes.
What was so magical about the newspaper is that it was able to do all of these things at once — maybe not perfectly, but adequately. A good newspaper was like the best coffee shop from the 18th century: filled with an incredible variety of information about the world, some of it interesting, some of it important, some of it just entertaining. Unfortunately, we now have an even more incredible source of all those things, and that’s the internet. Almost all of Clay Christensen’s jobs to be done can be accomplished using the Internet far easier than they can by reading a newspaper. It’s not that the internet is a huge source of competition for the journalism that we think of when it comes to newspapers — it’s that it competes with all the other aspects of what a newspaper is.
If you want entertainment, you have an endless supply of it at your fingertips, and it makes the comic section look like something from the 18th century. If you want sports scores or the latest stock prices, or to find out the answer to a specific question, there are literally thousands of ways to do that — including dedicated apps for your phone that cost nothing and give you the information you want in seconds. Soon you’ll be able to get that kind of information on your watch, if you want to do that. If you’re looking for a new restaurant, you can use Yelp or Urbanspoon or Foursquare. If you are looking for book or movie reviews, there are sites that specialize in just doing that, not to mention all the user reviews you can get from Amazon or IMDB. Every time someone uses one of those sites or apps, it’s another chunk of a reader’s attention that isn’t going to the newspaper.
So gradually, the internet has siphoned off or carved away the pieces of the paper that have always surrounded the news and the capital J journalism — the sports section, the stock listings, the comics, the entertainment section. And of course the classifieds as well. I could give you the figures related to how much classified advertising revenue has declined across the newspaper industry in the past 15 years, thanks to Craigslist and Google, but it would be so depressing that I don’t even want to go into it. Suffice it to say that tens of billions of dollars has been wiped out in only a couple of decades. And that’s because if you have some boot black or oak barrels to sell, the internet is actually a much better way of reaching a potential buyer than printing a bunch of words on a piece of paper. That’s just a fact.
Believe it or not, this isn’t the whole story. It gets worse. Because it’s not just that the internet has taken over a lot of the jobs that newspapers used to do when it comes to sports or business or entertainment or even advertising — online sources have also taken over much of the market for news, broadly speaking. And that’s actually a much bigger problem in many ways. It’s not just that there are hundreds of sources of journalism that are available to us now that we could never have accessed before the internet, without spending thousands of dollars buying every newspaper on the planet. It’s that there are sources of news broadly speaking that we probably don’t even think of as journalism — and whether we like it or not, for many people those sources may be good enough. In other words, they may succeed in doing the job that a reader needs to be done, whether we choose to see them as competition or not.
Take Twitter, for example. It’s a massive time-wasting exercise in many cases, filled with noise and garbage — useless conversation about whatever is on television or celebrity news, etc. In other words, very much like a giant coffee shop in the days before the internet and before newspapers. But just like that coffee shop, it also has nuggets of information and gossip and news floating around in it, and that’s what people gravitate towards. Sure, it’s not fact-checked, and it’s not spelled properly, and it may not even be true. But for large numbers of people, that doesn’t matter, as much as we might hate to admit it. They may just want to know that something has happened in Iraq, or that Russia has invaded Ukraine — and those pieces of information they can get just as easily from Twitter or a Facebook post as they can from reading a newspaper.
There’s a principle in economics that says your competition isn’t the thing that is better than you, it’s the thing that is good enough to serve the needs of your users or potential buyers. And when it comes to news and the discussion around that news, there is an endless supply of competition that is good enough for the average reader — in the same way that Yelp is a good enough replacement for your restaurant reviewer, and IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes are a good enough replacement for your movie reviewer.
But it actually goes further than just that, I think. Tom Standage, an editor at The Economist, argues that what the internet and social media like Twitter have done is return us to a time when the majority of our news and information and entertainment came to us by word of mouth — the days when the coffee shop or the bar or the vegetable stand was the place where you caught up with what was going on in the world. And most of that information was poorly sourced and poorly fact-checked and in many cases just flat-out wrong. But sociologists would argue that the social aspect of getting our information in that way was almost as important as the information itself — the way it allowed us to connect with each other, to share knowledge, to socialize. And that’s something that newspapers have never been all that good at doing, to be honest — the sharing and the connecting and the socializing.
That’s not to say that there is no market need any more for fact-checked news and information. There’s still a huge demand for it. But there are also many more sources of it than there used to be, some of which may not even see themselves as doing what we call journalism. Just think about sites like Reddit, which is a massive community with an almost endless number of forums devoted to Star Trek and other arcane or nerdy topics — and yet, during a mass shooting in my home town, Reddit became the single best source of information about that incident, because someone was essentially using it to report in real time about what was happening. Is that journalism? I don’t really know, but it was fascinating, and it’s happening all the time. Snapchat, Kik, WhatsApp, Instagram — apps you’ve never even heard of are being used in this way.
There’s a fascinating group in Turkey called 140journo that came together in the runup to that country’s recent elections, and they have used Twitter to both collect and report on election fraud and other allegations involving the government, because the traditional media in their country wasn’t doing it. They don’t even think of themselves as journalists — but they are arguably performing a journalistic function by challenging the official version of events and by empowering their readers to find out information they aren’t getting from other sources. In effect, Twitter has allowed them to compete with existing news entities in a way that would never have been possible before the internet.
It’s that kind of thing that I find simultaneously optimistic and depressing as a journalist. It’s great in the sense that people can use these kinds of tools to do their own news-gathering and their own reporting and to connect with each other and with people who need that information. If you care about those aspects of journalism, broadly defined, then there has never been a better time than right now. Journalism has never been better off, there’s never been more of it, and it’s never reached as many people in as many ways as it can now.
The business of journalism, however, is a very different story. All of the things that I’ve described — most of which are free — have chipped away at the underpinnings of the journalism business in a thousand different ways. So journalism itself is doing just fine, but the ways in which we used to pay for that journalism have been disrupted, or in some cases even extinguished. How do we pay the bills for all our journalists and photographers and printing presses and trucks when advertising brings in a tenth of what it used to, and all of the things that people are actually interested in paying for have been carved off by websites like Craigslist and Facebook and Yelp and Google?
But that’s a topic for another presentation altogether I’m afraid. I do think there are ways that we can recover some of the position we used to have as information gatherers, and that there are ways to monetize that, but it is going to be a hard road, I’m not going to lie. The market for what we do has effectively been blown up by the internet, and we are trying to pick up the pieces. I wish I had a more cheerful message for you today, but I don’t. I’m happy to take whatever questions you might have.