Too Much (Bad) Information

If there's a shortage of any commodity in the communications industry right now, it's not information. It's editorial judgement.

'News', or what's packaged as news, is in our faces almost constantly, helped by an information revolution that has given each person a computer in their pocket, one faster and more powerful than the old mainframe computers that drove the Apollo moonshots 55 years ago.

With the internet busting the business model of legacy media since the turn of the century, a multitude of new digital platforms has emerged, none of whom employ editors and all of whom have built attention mousetraps more powerful than anything devised in the analog media era.

The consequences of a constant flow of undifferentiated, unfiltered and uncontexted information coming at people through their devices we are now living with. Tens of thousands of journalists have left the trade, while the few remaining are asked to do more and more with less and less.

On this score, the always reliable and comprehensive annual Digital News Report from Reuters, this year covering data from six continents and 47 markets, is a stark illustration of the devastation in the industry and the effects it is having on people's trust in the information they are receiving.

"In these troubled times, a supply of accurate, independent journalism remains more important than ever, and yet in many of the countries covered in our survey we find the news media increasingly challenged by rising mis- and disinformation, low trust, attacks by politicians, and an uncertain business environment," the survey authors write.

As traditional media markets enact wave after wave of layoffs, closures, and other cuts due to a combination of rising costs, falling advertising revenues, and sharp declines in traffic from social media, audiences are fragmenting and drifting towards social media sites like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Whatsapp.

Some platforms, such as Facebook, are deprioritising news entirely, while others have switched focus from publishers to ‘creators’, and are pushing more fun and engaging formats – including video – to quarantine attention within their own platforms.

Perhaps what the wider public does not fully appreciate is that these platforms do not have any obligations to the news or to editorial standards that require information to be factual, fair, balanced and accurate. Consequently, people increasingly hive to their own tribes within information silos that reinforce their prejuidices and feed them either misinformation or outright disinformation.

"With many people now getting much of their information via these competing platforms, these shifts have consequences not only for the news industry, but also our societies, " the Reuters report says. " As if this were not enough, rapid advances in artificial intelligence are about to set in motion a further series of changes including AI-driven search interfaces and chatbots that could further reduce traffic flows to news websites and apps."

While the new digital platforms eschew any sense of social responsibility other than making a buck for their shareholders, one should not let traditional media completely off the hook here. The decline of trust (the real currency of journalism) was happening even before the web platforms emerged. And the legacy media companies, sometimes in desperation, have resorted to turning their once respected news assets over to the same gimmickry that prevails on the digital platforms.

The takeout of all this for the rest of us is the need to be ever more discerning in our news consumption - learning to identify misinformation and disinformation, being able to spot product- selling and ideological barrow-pushing dressed up as news, and developing advanced 'BS' filters.

That's hard at the best of times. But when our lives are so busy and our capacity for filtering constant information flows often severely compromised, the role of a trusted source, and a keen editorial eye, have arguably never been greater.

That's partly why I set up Jim Parker Media - to offer a highly experienced editor's perspective on the world of communication, news and information flows, but also to point people to interesting and thought-provoking perspectives outside the mainstream.

Back in the 1990s, as the information revolution was getting underway, many of we journalists were reassured by news executives that content would be king in the new era. They were wrong. What sits upon the information throne in this digital, connected age is the power to build audiences through manufactured outrage and opinion. And the currency of the new realm is your data.