Blog 100: More Challenges and Less Money.

Currently journalism is going through a massive decline as the traditional revenue sources prove no longer viable to support the large legacy organizations required to investigate, verify, record and achieve information on a large scale. The primary method of monetization is still advertising the main revenue source for journalism , even for online organizations. This has and will produce two main effects, namely the lack of incentive to produce substantive (and costly) investigative articles over cheaper and shallower "clickbait" articles as well as the decrease in funding overall as expensive subscriptions and print advertising is replaced with extremely low return online advertising. As the money continue to leave journalism numbers of journalists who do anything other then rewrite others articles and local Twitter reports will continue to decrease.

One aspect, far less talked about, is the problem of digital decay making journalism a very much quickly expiring product. The internet in constantly in turmoil, editing, replacing and going offline. This means that citations and sources that may have been valid when the article was written disappear with alarming rapidity. This is most obvious in the case of reports on the Middle East North Africa region, where it is a very real necessity to read reports as soon as they are released as much of their source materiel is removed extremely quickly. There was at least one article I read that cited a video which was taken down the day after the article was published by YouTubes automated information control system.As such automated systems are improved and spread through the major corporate and governmental structures there continued use is guaranteed , and the continued quick removal of primary sources will be a staple of future issues. This means that journalistic endeavors will either have to become archives of primary material, copying and hosting source material to prevent it from being purged, or simply depend on the reader to take their word that the source did indeed exist at some point.*

The overall outlook is not a good one.


*I had been planning on including a few examples of this from my own digital archive of the Syrian Civil War, including a screengrab from the first (and long gone) video recorded loss of a SAA T-72 but my PC motherboard failed, removing my access to the images and illustrating the problems with digital storage at the same time.