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News media: A source of light

So said Alexander Lebedev, at the time the owner of the Standard and Independent, talking to newspaper executives in Glasgow: ‘a source of light shining into the dark areas where the powerful and corrupt want to keep things hidden’. It’s a noble thought. Inspiring.

Journalists have long been motivated by the idea that they fearlessly ‘speak truth to power’. We owe the unmasking of scandals from Thalidomide to Enron to the media working away, sometimes for years, shining light into dark areas.

This costs money. Before 1996 there was plenty of money available; according to a study this year by Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas, margins of 25-35 per cent were nothing unusual in the days when corporate and classified advertisers supported print titles (because they had to).

Obviously, times have changed. The Newspaper Association of America says that advertising revenue fell from $50 bn to less than $20 bn in just twenty years from 1990 to 2010. The money didn’t go to digital versions of those newspapers, however hard publishers tried to replicate their business model online. It went to other sources of information, leaving most traditional newspapers out in the cold.

But here’s the thing. We live in an age of electronic confetti, when – according to a Stanford report – 82 per cent of young people cannot distinguish between real news and fake news. If you can afford to subscribe to the FT, the Times or the Wall Street Journal this isn’t an issue for you. For society at large, it is.

Jack Shafer (Politico) says that, for all their shortcomings, conventional newspapers remain the best source of information about the workings of our government, of industry and of the major institutions which dominate our lives. ‘If we give up print newspapers for dead we stand to lose one of the vital bulwarks that protect and sustain our culture’.

Roy Greenslade (Guardian) agrees: ‘I’ve found myself edging backwards to this position for a while’. Morley Safer, a CBS veteran, makes the same point in caustic terms: ‘I would as soon trust citizen journalism as citizen surgery’.

There’s no easy solution. Advertising used to support something important – a free and powerful press – and now it doesn’t. We rely on properly-trained, properly-paid journalists (and editors, and subs) to tell us what we need to know. Without them we are prey to myth, rumour, deliberate misinformation, propaganda, fabrication, malicious gossip masquerading as ‘news’ and sheer nonsense by the bucket-load.

This matters to us as citizens and also as PR people. No real media, no real PR budgets.

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Any ideas?