Eurozine is a Vienna-based non-profit network of over 75 journals and small publications throughout Europe. It aggregates and often translates content from its partner publications for eurozine.com.
Its annual conference this year brought people together to ruminate on the theme ‘Changing Media – Media in Change’. And while ‘change’ is a perpetual condition of the field, organizers wanted answers to the pressing economic and political challenges specific to digital media.
I kept notes on the panels devoted to journalism and copyright. The questions weren’t entirely novel, but the conversation represented some of the dominant currents in these debates.
Panel on Future of Journalism
‘Truth has become an amateur project.’ – Geert Lovink
Jacques Verges, the panel’s chair, introduced his session with this quote from Lovink in order to ask the panelists what to make of so-called amateurs churning out content, often without consideration for the ethics of reporting specific to traditional journalism. Has the internet really turned traditional media into yesterday’s news? And is news really democratizing into a collaborative affair among non-experts?
Not so much, said panelist and media scientist Tamara Witschge. Journalists continue their specific role through processing events and by informed commentary. The important difference is that they’re more often seeking sources from the rest of us.
Which means that for any debate about the future of publishing, this ‘amateur project’ goes in two directions: you could also claim that a process of amateurization is taking place in the newsroom as traditional reporters take tips from civilians. More and more often we find that sources are unnamed and unaccounted for and that ‘desktop journalism’ replaces aggressive on-the-ground fact checking. This potentially leads to homogeneity and news cycling, with stories and press releases moving from blogosphere to newsites and back.
Not all is bleak. New models of news production are taking off, like Pro Publica, a digital-based news organization that makes most of its money from foundations and donors and that aims for high standards amidst a general decline of investigative reporting. Their website puts the problem in economic terms: ‘Time and budget constraints are curbing the ability of journalists not specifically designated “investigative” to do this kind of reporting in addition to their regular beats. This is therefore a moment when new models are necessary to carry forward some of the great work of journalism in the public interest that is such an integral part of self-government, and thus an important bulwark of our democracy.’
If investigative reporting is no longer a product of traditional news agencies, then maybe competently run non-profits like Pro Publica (which was founded by Paul Steiger, founder of the Wall Street Journal, and won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its reports on Wall Street) will fill the gap.
Also couldn’t audience participation be considered good reason to promote a new kind of ethical imperative for ‘digital citizens’ in need of a general level of literacy as producers/publishers? The discussion made me think again that general grade-school education reform is one way to address this issue of accountability to facts.
And just as readers must learn ethical standards and literacies, so reporters must work with new practices, including crowd sourcing and on-line investigation, and to develop rigorous methods of research native to digital media. (Research in this area is being done, for instance, by Richard Rogers’ Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam.)
Finally, there are interesting examples of collaboration between readers and reporters and editors that still upholds their distinctive roles. The panel’s second speaker, Krystian Woznicki of the The Berliner Gazette, showed how the Gazette used ‘radical transparency’ by allowing reader comments to filter back into a story, making its development – both corrections and additions – transparent and wiki-like.
What if machines themselves also take part in the filtering? An audience member asked a provocative question: can a software platform reflect the stability or confirmation of accepted verses disputed facts?
With this, we get back to the heart of things, the representation of the truth. But is it truth vs fiction we need, or, in the age of massive leaks, the ability to know what to do once a glut of truths are outed? It certainly seems that journalists and editors of any esteemed platform now must take on the role of synthesizer and filterer, as much as that of fact-gathering muckracker.
Knut Olav Åmås, culture editor of Norwegian daily Aftenposten, was the last speaker. He championed the traditional sector as the central font of ideas and looked-to content. And he points out that we shouldn’t be so scared. He showed us sales figures of a healthy journalism sector, for Scandinavians at least.
Panel on ‘Open or Closed’
Pirjo Hiidenmaa, President of the European Writers’ Council, asked the audience: what exactly are we so afraid of losing? We have more platforms than ever to read on and storytelling and content of all kind are proliferating as new forms. Perhaps we’re what we’re desperately trying to hold onto is the long format book, along with its authors and publishers.
They seem to be threatened, she claimed, by the technological imperative: If piracy is so easy, it will eventually become legal. But how can authors live if they can’t sell their ideas, and, more to the point, how should you sell an idea today?
The go-to answer is still copyright. Put a monetary claim on a text (in the abstract) and then on any physical manifestation it takes. There are now several business models adapting copyright to various physical forms:
-Publish and sell a bounded print book
-Sell ebook files
-License a file (to libraries, schools, and ebook readers)
-Sell a collection to a database for search (mostly libraries and schools)
-Reissue an out of print work (this seems to be catching on for small and large presses)
She also mentioned that individuals could turn to licensing companies to manage collective copyright, often done in the music business and for dramatic works. This is evidently done for writers in Scandinavian countries.
Leonard Dobusch from the Free University of Berlin rebutted that the problem isn’t digital technology but rather finding remuneration for artists – and we should get over our habit of seeing copyright as the solution.
Campaigns depicting how new uses of technologies can starve artists and impoverish creative output go back to cassette tapes. Actually, he showed that there’s been an increase in cultural content between 2002 and 2007: 66% more books, 30% more films, 50% more music.
According to a 2007 study (pdf) by Kretschmer and Hardwick on authors’ earnings from copyright and non-copyright sources, 40% of authors live on writing alone. It’s a monetary distribution problem among writers, and copyright generally means that a smaller number makes a larger amount. Most books don’t live on markets anyway, so copyright makes little sense for niche areas such as linguistic minorities or avant garde literature.
Felix Stalder, a lecturer in digital culture and network theory at the Zürich University of Arts, pointed out that copyright is doing more than just tipping the scales towards the few – it’s a serious societal tax. It makes it harder to access materials and so requires more human labor to find stuff; it implies licensing and lawyer fees, and it has led to the enclosure of three million orphan works that could be feeding into the public domain.
Says Stalder, the economic situation of cultural producers has historically often been poor, forcing artists to find ways to make a living on the side of their craft. But today it’s much worse, with money concentrated at big firms with massive back catalogs and that can afford attorneys to defend their trove – a concentration of cultural economy directly related to copyright. Copyright strengthens blockbuster culture, not the individual artist.
Even worse, mechanisms for enforcing copyright once only included law and the courts to lengthen contracts, but now monopolistic companies use digital surveillance to enforce copyright online.
Stalder called traditional publishing the last vestiges of Fordism, a collapsing frame. Today’s writers will employ new forms of cultural production such as remixing, and publishers will start to promote innovative work that doesn’t jive with copyright. So is it worth enforcing the law if costs of enforcing it are too high (Stalder?
He looked at a few new approaches to sustainability without copyright:
-The cultural flatrate used by a collecting society. But what works should be included? Tweets, blogs? How do you measure what each artist receives? Will surveillance be a problem? How do you distribute money?
-Long tail aggregation that can create mechanisms to relegate income based on attention. But he pointed out this wouldn’t be suitable for minority or niche content. Examples include small-scale donation sites such as flattr.
-Project centered approaches including community financial investments for pre-production. Authors can sell things that can’t be copied, using an economy of affection by building a fan base or rematerialization (books as well-designed fetish objects).
-A final solution could be state or private funding.
A few questions lingered. Why would a publisher pay a writer any advances if there is no copyrighted ‘thing’ to sell in the end, since anyone else could make use of the text as well? If there is no distinctive product or service for a reader, how can artists, editors, and publishers make a living? How can we sell something that doesn’t require the creation of material difference?
Also, with the rise of free and open movements, open access, and open data, new predators come into the mix. Google, Facebook and telecoms are also fighting against copyright. Will they be the new profiteers in a more open setting? If so, how can we move forward in a way that benefits cultural producers and not corporations who see flowing content as integral to their entire business model?
Side note: I spoke with a Finnish editor at the conference who told me about Finland’s model: if you write three books and the books sell decently, then the government pays you an indefinite salary to keep going. Reward for labor well done, plus a general acknowledgment for our need for storytellers. The Scandinavian bard system sounds too good to be true, but could we imagine paying the individual laborer, not their product?