Abstract
Like virtually everyone else in the United States, today, even my 74-year-old mother has remarked on how profoundly digital networks have changed the way that she looks for news and information. John Wihbey, who teaches journalism and media innovation at Northeastern’s School of Journalism, explains clearly both why that is and how it affects the news industry and its consumers in his book The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2019).
At its core, Wihbey’s engaging book takes a close look at some of the changes going on in the news industry and suggests what has now become a common refrain among researchers and the public—that traditional journalism needs to change or die. While this certainly is not a new argument, it’s one that gets a thorough vetting with in-depth references and original research in this book. Wihbey uses numerous studies, examples, and informative illustrations to make his key points, including (a) how such digital networks use algorithms that reinforce users’ “echo chambers” and (b) how misinformation spreads.
Wihbey is not afraid to take on the digital big boys in his theorizing, including Google, Twitter, and Facebook in Chapter 5, Bias in Network Architectures and Platforms. We all know by now that computer algorithms create what appears on your Facebook News Feed. But how many of us think about how the Google programmers also decide what results pop up on your search queries or how those results might create divisions in society?
In a similar vein, Wihbey says clearly what many journalists and industry-watchers feel have gotten lost in the discussion, lately—the web cannot continue to be useful or popular if no one is around to produce what he calls “quality news.” Even though this might sound like restating the obvious to anyone who has thought about the current predicament that the local news industry finds itself in, it bears repeating as many times as possible to help people understand that if news producers go away, many of the platforms and networks that currently benefit from it would suffer.
Wihbey also unveils a new concept in the book that should alarm anyone interested in keeping our U.S. democracy free and open. He says that the way information spreads quickly across social media networks is weakening something that he calls “canonical sources of authority.” He calls the result: “information disease”—that consumers are drowning in information, making many of them unable to differentiate between what they might need to know and what they do know. Wihbey explains at length why is the problem is a potentially dire one for the United States, if we want to keep our public sphere healthy.
There has been much gnashing of teeth by news industry executives about how to change the current free nature of the news content online, which has created the digital network that Wihbey discusses in the book. This crux issue is right on the money as the major problem facing the news industry today.
However, while Wihbey’s ideas are spot-on, he leaves the reader to figure out why the news industry is in such turmoil rather than explain that the problem facing the mostly private news industry is largely a financial one. Since social media companies reap millions of dollars in advertising that used to go to traditional news organizations, a writer might want to document those revenues to put things in perspective for the lay reader, for example. The more than 1,800 local newsrooms that have gone out of business in the last 10 years and the thousands of journalists who are now out of jobs could be mentioned too (Abernathy, 2018).
In addition, Wihbey suggests that “solutions-focused journalism” might be a good way for news organizations to remain relevant to their communities. But he neglects to say why journalists have not embraced this credo to date. This could leave an uninformed reader wondering if journalists are clueless about how to create successful business models, rather than knowing that journalists have always tried to remain independent of their audiences and their advertisers to retain reputations of impartiality and unbiased reporting.
He goes on to say that only journalists who understand that the news landscape must include reader interests will be able to survive. It’s a provocative statement and one that bears more attention since traditional journalism always has been about remaining independent of outside interests. For example, while journalists generally love to write stories that shine a light on corruption and keeps government officials honest, research has shown that the public prefers more “soft news” and entertainment (Boczkowski & Mitchelstein, 2013), something that journalists continue to grapple with as revenues dry up.
It’s crucial for news organizations to make their wares engaging and to package them well, as Wibhey suggests. But don’t forget that the public also has its role to play in a democracy. Consumers should care what journalism has to offer, not just complain when they feel that news outlets don’t cater to their wants and whims. Journalism programs (and newsrooms!) teach undergraduate students and young reporters about the news values of impact, timeliness, prominence, proximity, bizarreness, conflict, and currency and why those values are important when deciding what to cover. Researchers would do well to remember why news values were created in the first place rather than blame journalists for the public’s apparent disinterest in much of what goes on around them.
Ultimately, Wihbey says that many legacy media outlets will stick with traditional formats, but he doesn’t explain the “why” perhaps as well as he might. The most important job of a journalist in an American democracy is to serve as a watchdog over government institutions. Instead, Wihbey says that journalists cannot police democracy in any general way, leaving the unspoken question with an uninformed reader about why they would worry about trying to do so in the modern-day.
All in all, Wihbey’s book is a good commentary on our times, in which he takes on both social media and technology industry interests and the journalist interests on the other side. This extensively resourced book is sure to serve as a bulwark against the current industry turmoil in that it brings new research and concepts to the fore that exist both now and in the years to come.