#10764
take me to your reader
#75 - Summer 2018
It is hardly a novelty to claim that news – not just as a global industry but as a narrative form woven into the fabric of modern civilisation – is in deep trouble, possibly even terminal decline. It has been almost three decades since the fourth estate were first confronted by the fork in the road that the world wide web represented. One road was marked “volume and traffic”, and those who took it – such as the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the New York Times – were promised a pot of gold, to be found at the end of a rainbow of millions of eyeballs. This road has given us clickbait culture. A fish may rot from the head, but with web pages, it’s from the bottom, in the section marked “related content” and “from around the web”. Algorithms run by search engines afflict the way journalists and leader writers work and think.
The comedy in this tragedy is not only that this road has led to a decline in professional standards, but also that the promised rewards have failed to materialise. Once august institutions of news have fallen victim to a simple bait- and-switch. There really was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it’s being safely banked by Google and Facebook, thank you very much.
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