There is an ongoing global debate concerning the quality of journalism, or rather its decline. The reduction in printed media, online advertising models, reduced government funding, increased demands for speedy delivery, an increase in tabloidization, and even Google and Wikipedia have been mentioned as reasons for the perceived decline in journalism quality.
This certainly isn’t a new debate. It goes all the way back to the advent of online newspapers and probably all new media. However, an interesting development is that it’s not just journalists who are waving the red flag. An increasing number of non-journalist bloggers vent their frustrations. It would appear journalism quality might have reached an all-time low in the recession, with the crisis eating into advertising income and more cost cuts finding their way to the editorial boards.
Market researchers who turn to news articles as a source of information continually face the challenges of journalism quality. While the average news consumer might be annoyed by spelling mistakes, casual stories being treated like “the latest scoop” in terms of headlining (which can even be directly misleading to attract clicks), and celebrity gossip and sports news finding their way into other content categories, market researchers face other challenges.
For example, the widespread use of cut+paste journalism, which eventually leads to articles becoming less than a stub – in some instances an article was only a stub to begin with. Unfortunately, this not only removes what can be important contextual or additional information, but it also can lead to extensive hunting in search of the original source due to a lack of or incomplete quoting practices. As a policy, market researchers should always go to the original source, which can involve following a surprisingly long trail of bread crumbs which might abruptly result in a dead-end.
Another concern for market researchers is the use of Wikipedia and Google as sources by journalists. Wikipedia is not an objective, quality-assured source, despite how intriguing it is and practical for instant look-up for less professional occasions, such as when discussing at a party whether the CD or LaserDisc came first, or who won the 2004 Eurovision song contest. Google uses a number of algorithms for determining search engine results, some of which are based on external references. Thus sites that fulfill certain criteria will get a higher rating, and thus come up early in journalist’s search results. This can create biased results, which are transferred to media sites and magnified by journalists who reference the found pages in their articles, thus creating further bias towards their sources. Popularity does not by itself determine truth. Google doesn’t separate right from wrong, that’s the time-pressed journalist’s job.
This leads to the question “who is the author of a given article?” In a number of countries, journalist is not a protected title. Even if it is, news articles can be written by “unlicensed” news desk workers, who aren’t specifically trained in critical journalism. Some newspapers only list an article sponsor, for instance “This article was sponsored by Company X”. All this makes it difficult to trust a growing number of online media sites in a professional research context. Market researchers need to choose their sources carefully in today’s online media jungle.
We await the day when new incentives surface which will encourage the rise of journalism quality again. And, as the critical reader will have determined, this post can easily be picked apart with regards to elements required to qualify as high quality journalism. That is because it is not meant to be such, rather an informal blog post on a topic of interest to us – and hopefully to other market research professionals as well.
