An assessment of the seven theses of my book News 2.0 (Jan 2011) 18 months later in July 2012.

1. A re-assessment
A/Prof Martin Hirst
July 2012

2. News 2.0: what next?
 18 months after publication of News 2.0 what‟s
changed?
 A reassessment of the seven theses of the book
 A look at recent developments
 What are the new questions
 Are there any new answers

3. News as conversation
 Journalists no longer control the distribution of the
content they produce.
 This is a very scary thought for many journalists,
but the reality is that once something is published
(usually on Web sites), it belongs to the audience
of readers and becomes part of a conversation
about the news.

4. News 2.0
 the news industry is seen to be failing our
democratic ideals
 journalists are low on international surveys of
people we trust
 the professional ethos of journalism is under
threat from UGC
 the commodity form of news is no longer
providing the profits it once did

5. Phone-hacking says it all?
 The phone-hacking scandal demonstrates the
basic thrust of News 2.0
 A crisis of trust and credibility
 Journalists stuffed up badly
 But it is also an economic crisis caused by a
failure of management
 Journalists were encouraged into hacking in pursuit
of profits
 Ethics goes out the window in favour of money-
grubbing and base motives

6. Thesis 1: news is a universal
human need
 news has been around for thousands of years
 because of market forces the mainstream media has let
down the public
 pursuit of profits has led the MSM down market
 we are living in a sick celebrity culture that distorts our self-
perception and slowly drives us all insane
We are consuming as much as we did, if
not more news today, but not in the same
way we used to.
News is coming to us from a variety of
sources and we are consuming in more
mobile ways.

7. Thesis 2: digital technologies
are changing how we
consume news
 globally, television is still the dominant news and
entertainment media, but for how much longer?
 news is going mobile and it's being condensed
 the 140 character text message and “tweet” could be the
future of news
The curating of news – what Axel Bruns calls „gate-
watching – is now much easier and more
widespread.
Apps like storify, pintrest, paper.li and instapaper
make it much easier to collate „bricolage‟ and
curate MSM and other materials to re-publish to
friends and networks.

8. Thesis 3: the singularity of
convergence has
changed news forever
 professionalism has become a trap for journalists - they
are tied into a corporate culture that is losing its shine
 perhaps, as Robert McChesney suggests, journalists have
to become "unprofessional" in order to reconnect with
audiences
 D-I-Y & UGC news via social networking is on the rise
 we are no longer reliant only on MSM for news.

9. Thesis 4: the crisis in the news
business is not the same as the
crisis in journalism
 they are related, but different
 a crisis of trust and credibility and a crisis of profitability
 we are now in a critical juncture and the global financial
crisis is a further threat to the political economy of the news
business

10. Thesis 5: new online business
models are not yet proven
 advertising – most likely in market economy
 user pays – subscription model
 public service broadcasting – not politically supported
 online only publishing – unknown quantity
 public trust model – expensive to establish
 philanthropy – peanuts really
 Who pays the piper?

11. Thesis 6: there are positives
in social networking and
Web 2.0
 some parts of the world are more connected than they‟ve
every been
 the collective nature of trust and verification is a key
element of peer-to-peer sharing of information and can
apply to news
 we need to position journalism as the collective wisdom of
the public interest and speaking truth to power

12. Thesis 7: Can journalism survive
the Internet?
 what happens to “journalism" when the economics of the news
business are no longer working?
 if news is a universal trait of human society (thesis 1) then a
method needs to be developed of continuing to provide
reliable and common news-like information from trusted public
sources

13. What happens next?
 The slow decline of newspapers will continue
 Time-shifting and on-demand will continue to
grow for video content
 Daily news will be largely web and broadcast
based
 Newspapers will need to become more like
magazines to survive