Steinar Ellingsen

 

Convergence revolution: Change, confusion …and The Long Tail

Part of a literature review for a PhD application

submitted to La Trobe University 2009.

Written by Steinar Ellingsen

Introduction

It is argued that the application of particular online characteristics not only has consequences for the type of journalism produced on the web, but that these characteristics and online journalism indeed connect to broader and more profound changes and redefinitions of professional journalism and its (news) culture as a whole.
Mark Deuze[i]

 

Meanwhile, in the newsroom staff numbers are slashed in a desperate bid to save money. Worldwide, rapid changes in technology have proven disturbing to many established journalists. Mark Deuze (2003) stated that research at the BBC in the UK revealed “unrest that new media technologies have created in the newsroom: journalists reported lack of time to adequately use and master the technology, feeling stressed because of the ‘immediate’ nature of the internet.”[ii] Digitalization and the Internet command an increased work-pace for multi-tasking journalists. Phillips and Lindgren note: “Online reporters need to be able to switch effortlessly between different media […] In the digital world it is only content that matter, not the distribution platform.”[iii]

The workplace has changed, the economy is in turmoil, and consumer habits are also changing rapidly. Recent developments suggest that contemporary journalism, to some extent, is out of touch with its audience, and has a somewhat distorted image of self and its place. Statistics show that public trust in journalists is also at a critical low. In 2007 Roy Morgan reported that 85 per cent of the Australian population thinks that newspaper journalists are often biased. 62 per cent believes newspaper journalists often also get their facts wrong.[iv] On a more positive note, the interactivity provided by the Internet has brought journalists closer to their audiences, to their sources, and to each other.

But, it doesn’t stop there. Another battle for contemporary news media is grabbing the attention of the younger demographic who appear to reject traditional news formats. Stephen Harrington argues that the existing generation gap, and the reason young people are switching off TV news and finding their information elsewhere, is largely due to the ‘monotonous’ and ‘alienating’ presentational style. Young people are turning to shows like The Chaser and Good News Week in Australia and The Daily Show in the US, for their news updates. In a broader context, this development is seen as a sign of a bigger change, beyond news broadcasting, in how entertainment has become part of the political discourse. Henry Jenkins also acknowledges this, and asks: “Does making politics into a kind of popular culture allow consumers to apply fan expertise to their civic responsibilities? Parody newscasts like The Daily Show (1996) may be teaching us to do just that.”[v]

The ramifications of these developments could be summed up with one word: ‘convergence.’ It is perhaps one of the most descriptive, albeit confusing terms that define contemporary society’s media practices. Convergence illustrates and defines how we relate to media, how we consume and share media content.  It attempts to describe the occurring changes – as they happen – as well as what allows them to happen. Arbitrariness gone mad? Jenkins illustrates the somewhat paradoxical meaning of convergence, stating that it “is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking about.”[vi]

What is convergence?

Although my main focus is on the role of journalists, it is necessary to contextualize both industry and audience. Like Jenkins, I am likely to be ‘mixing and matching terms’ depending on the perspective.

In its most simplistic terms, convergent journalism is the phenomenon of multi-media publishing, or “integrated journalism,” across new and existing platforms.[vii] But, Australian scholar Stephen Quinn reminds us, beyond this rough and unsatisfactory notion, “it would be safe to say that convergence ha[s] almost as many forms and models as it ha[s] advocates.”[viii] Quinn refers to a plethora of industry and academic conferences in which professionals and educators and scholars have tried to approach common ground to better identify convergence, highlighting the necessity of a shared definition and the need for a universal vocabulary. He cites Larry Pryor, interim editor of the Online Journalism Review:

If we all have a different concept of what convergence means, we are making it difficult to progress […] Getting the right name goes beyond utility. It touches ethics and civic life…. If our language sinks below the clear understanding of things, then we loose the bonds that bring us to speak the same language.[ix]

 

Quinn’s book Convergent Journalism (2005) deals extensively with different convergence models and strategies. The main exceptions are corporate convergence (business mergers) and technological convergence (multiple gadgets merging into one box – that is, beyond the Internet and computerized functions). With the help of Pryor, Quinn highlights some new forms of journalism that have been brought on by multi-platform reporting, such as websites, email newsletters, email alerts, wireless feeds, mobile phone content and blogs.

Three convergence models

Quinn presents two American convergence models. The first, from Rich Gordon of the Northwestern University, identifies five general types of convergence in the US. In brief, Gordon’s categories are: ownership convergence (lower costs, larger audiences); tactical convergence (PR related partnerships); structural convergence (reorganizing the newsroom and appointing new multi-media positions); information gathering convergence (demands for multi-skilled reporters); and storytelling/presentation convergence (evolves with technology). Notes Quinn: “Gordon’s five categories described convergence from the perspective of ownership and newsroom structures.”[x] He also stresses certain criticisms towards the fourth category – information-gathering convergence. This refers to Gordon’s description of the requirement for reporters to have multimedia skills, which has also received labels such as “platypus,” “Inspector Gadget” or “boat-car” journalism.[xi]

From a somewhat different vantage point comes the notion of a convergence continuum – a model describing the behaviour of (and between) media organizations – as offered by Larry Dailey and a group of academics from Ball University. The continuum moves from cross-promotion (convergence as marketing tool), through cloning (republishing), ‘co-opetition’ (competitors working together on particular assignments), content sharing (publishing content from cross-media partners), and to full convergence (full cross-media partnership in gathering and disseminating news). Dailey adds that these activities are not fixed in any way, but that they slide back and forth, depending on the organization, the event, and the skills of the journalist(s).[xii]

Norwegian scholar Ivar John Erdal has written extensively about convergence and cross-media news production. In the introduction to his article “Repurposing of Content in Multi-Platform News Production,” Erdal presents a brief survey of existing research in the field, drawing on Quinn and Dailey – amongst a number of others. Writes Erdal:

This article argues that a cross-media production process relies on different rhetorical forms of reproduction where news content made for a specific programme on a specific platform, with a characteristic rhetoric, is adapted in part or as a whole to be published on a different platform with a different rhetoric. This corresponds to what Dailey et al. (2005) and others (Duhe et al., 2004, p. 86; Kolodzy, 2006, p. 188; Huang et al., 2006, p. 94) refer to as ‘‘repurposing’’ of content. Studying these textual strategies, I use the concept of rhetoric in the same way as Fagerjord (2003, p. 4), understood as ‘means of expression.’[xiii]

In 2006 Erdal spent four weeks with NRK (Norway’s national broadcaster) researching their repurposing processes. His case study looks closely at different strategies that NRK uses to produce and reproduce content, breaking the processes down to six main categories: Rhetoric of augmentation (Repurposing and linking texts/stories across web); Rhetoric of reversioning (repurposing from TV/radio to web by an online journalist); Rhetoric of recombination (breaking down audio-visual elements from TV/radio and re-editing for web  – with text); Single reporter multiplatform journalism (similar to Gordon’s ‘information-gathering convergence’); Cross-media coordination (planned daily publishing streams across platforms, time-slotted); and Multi-platform orchestration (live events across all platforms, based on shared A/V from TV to Radio and web).[xiv]

Call for new research and more focus on genre development

In an earlier article, “Researching Media Convergence and Crossmedia News Production: mapping the field” (2007), Erdal presents a broader literature review of research into convergence and cross-media processes. He argues that there is “a research gap in media studies concerning media production in digital, ‘crossmedia’ (sic) environments.”[xv] He cites two particular inquiries made into cross-media practices in print media; Boczkowski’s (2003) historical account of cross-media experiments and convergence strategies from the 1980s to the present, and his following three case studies from New York Times’ Web Technology section, HoustonChronicle.com and New Jersey Online;[xvi] and, Dupagne and Garrison’s (2006) qualitative inquiry into the newly opened multimedia news centre in Tampa Bay.[xvii] Additionally, Erdal notes a handful of similar studies into convergence features in broadcast media, but remains persistent in that there is much territory, new territory, still left undiscovered. “What specific research issues arise from this development?” Erdal asks.
He continues:

Related to changing professional practices, questions of how reporters relate to crossmedia strategies in their daily newswork, need to be answered. How is production for multiple media platforms conceptualized within the organization? How are news items made for and published across different media platforms? The last question is also related to genre development, as is the way in which journalists relate to news genre on different media platforms, and whether we see genre development in the form of convergence or genre hybrids.[xviii]

An immediate answer could, simply, be ‘both.’ Internet technology allows for incorporation of features of all traditional media – in their own separate rights as well as in combination with each other. But, we are still on the road to discovery at this point.

Drawing further on Quinn, Erdal notes there is also a fundamental disagreement between the business view and the journalistic view of convergence. While the business view focuses on multi-platform publishing as a tool for increased productivity and better targeted marketing, in the journalistic view, “convergence offer a potential for better journalism.”[xix] The key to this disagreement, Erdal suggests, lies in what Eugenie Siapera calls a ‘struggle for dominance.’ Digitization marks a distinctive break from the classical notion of a passive audience, and traditional media is at best slow to recognize this development. Speaking in general terms, rather than striving to realise the potential of Internet technology, television “attempts to ‘dominate’ the Internet, or at least mark it with the televisual.”[xx]

Jay Rosen and others have echoed this argument, in that contemporary news media have focused too much of their new media development on tailor making delivery for a consumer, rather than on the potential of journalistic expression in a new medium. Rosen warns that implications of convergence will drastically alter how we both produce and understand journalism, especially as free online software allows anyone with an Internet connection to publish themselves. Thus, the gate keeping function of traditional journalism is under threat – if not already made obsolete – and change seems inevitable:

Journalism in its modern guise has been successful as a vertical messaging system, connecting in the classic image the governed to the governors, or the base to the party. But as the horizontal pattern takes hold and use of the Web increases, it’s hard to imagine professional journalism staying the same.[xxi]

One particular form that appears to be struggling in transition is classical long-form journalism. Established print publications are grappling to accommodate the shift to a digital culture (I am more concerned with form than money at this point). Managing editor of TIME.com, Josh Tyrangiel, recently noted that, “Long-form journalism, as much as I wish it was thriving on the Internet, is not.” [xxii] Tyrangiel refers to the challenge of translating the content of a well-known magazine, with its well-known form and familiar types of storytelling into online content. Replicating the physical format is of no benefit to either the publication or the audience, and the managing editor acknowledges the challenge that is digital media, and the challenge of certain habits that come with consuming and interacting with digital content (e.g. at lunch time at work, or on a short break, the normally text heavy material “is just too long”). The digital arm of the publication thus needs to offer something substantially different to the paper publication, and Tyrangiel says that up to 95 per cent of their online content is made exclusively for the web. He states that awareness of the reader is essential, and that the ultimate goal for their online journalists is to “make people smarter while saving them time.” He adds, “the challenge is ‘how do I be smart and stylish, but get to the point?’” The latter refers specifically to the journalists’ ability to write SEO-friendly titles, snappy lead-ins, as well as abolishing sub-headings from the front page of the online publication. Online, features are becoming shorter, more language efficient.

There is, on the other hand, also a great deal of optimism about the changes, and there are projects dedicated to exploring the generic boundaries of the medium. One great example of experimenting with genre hybrids, and producing new long-form online journalism that works, is the critically acclaimed production company MediaStorm.org.[xxiii] Founded in 1994 at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, MediaStorm was relaunched in 2005, and appears to be ploughing grounds for new narrative expressions in the genre, aiming to “publish diverse narratives that speak to the heart of the human condition.”[xxiv] Recent stories range from portraits of American junkies, life and dread in Iowa, to the war in Congo, and the spread of HIV and generally poor conditions for women in Rwanda.[xxv] Their stories are captivating and insightful. All are beautifully crafted, and presented in somewhat groundbreaking multi-media formats, combining audio, video, still photography, text and animation.

This is high-end, costly and time-consuming material to make, no doubt. And, admiring critics have noted that as much as they really appreciate the work that goes into making these stories, they are worried that grazing audiences with limited time won’t have the patience for such lengthy material. But, Brian Storm, president of MediaStorm, says that people do take the time to watch their content through. As an example, he claims one of their 21-minute videos has a remarkable completion rate of 65 per cent. The secret to their success? Simple, yet extremely demanding: Quality content, meeting audience expectations (branching out), and displaying/linking their content wherever possible (emphasizes the benefits of social networking sites).

In an interview with the Nieman Report’s Melissa Ludtke, Storm shared some particularly uplifting views on the opportunities for contemporary journalism:

The journalism industry is not in despair, it’s simply going through a redefinition. I feel like we’re living in such an epic moment, a transformational moment. … The big opportunity is that the tools are so powerful that anyone can create high production value content and distribute it globally. I don’t need to own a printing press or a television station, but I can be on television through new distribution devices like Apple TV or TiVo. … As a storyteller, I feel empowered to do the best work of my career right now, even though I don’t have the big mainstream media infrastructure sitting underneath me that I used to have. Now I can do the kind of stories that I’ve always wanted to do without any limitations.[xxvi]

Journalism, News media and the Long Tail

Without Internet technology, Storm’s utopian outlook would still be but science fiction. Yet, according to Henry Jenkins it is the audience, and not technology, that is driving the development:

Convergence does not occur through media appliances, however sophisticated they might become. Convergence occurs within the brains of the individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. 

We, the audience, are no longer passive consumers of media; we are also producers, carriers and advertisers. We are smart, digitally savvy, empowered, independent, connected – that is, as long as we have Internet access. And this, as mentioned before, is likely to change the way we think about journalism (and ‘the media’).

Let’s go back to Rosen’s notion of old journalism being a vertical messaging system, and new journalism operating with a more horizontal model, in which sharing is key to how we interact with media culture as a whole. It does not only change the way journalists (media) work or how we produce our content, but it also challenges existing social, industrial, and business boundaries and structures. In 2004, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson wrote a highly influential article about this change, called “The Long Tail.”[xxvii] The piece was later extended into a widely recognized book by the same name. Anderson describes how peer reviews from Amazon.com was almost solely responsible for breaking Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void into the New York Times’ best seller list – a decade after it was originally published. Although Simpson’s book received some critical acclaim upon release in 1988, it was not a great seller. Ten years later, Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air. Krakauer’s book was a hit and, like Touching the Void, it told a story about a mountain climbing disaster. And that fact was going to change things for Simpson:

[Amazon’s] software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Access, sharing, reviews and recommendations are what substantiate the ‘long tail’-principle, along with the unlimited space of the Internet. Spatial restraints are nearly abolished, making business opportunities nearly endless, however radically different to existing paradigms. On a philosophical note, Anderson writes:

…constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming. The curse of broadcast technologies is that they are profligate users of limited resources. The result is yet another instance of having to aggregate large audiences in one geographic area – another high bar, above which only a fraction of potential content rises.

“The long tail” refers to the shape of the graphic curve that forms when plotting sales into a chart. It is a sharp curve that falls fast from top seller to ‘lesser hits’ and nearly flattens out. It has a head and a tail, so to speak. Anderson opposes the famous Pareto-principle (80-20) – that only 20 per cent, or less, of what is being made will be commercial hits. With online technology, the 80-20-rule is obsolete, mainly because the limits of storage space are abolishes. That is, hits will still be hits to some extent, but contemporary audiences are increasingly hungry for discovery and demand more than just hits. Tastes are becoming more personalised. Audiences are becoming increasingly scattered. As niche content becomes more readily available online, Anderson believes that the hits will eventually be less outstanding. The sales curve will begin to slope earlier (from vertical towards horizontal) and there will be even bigger potential in the tail. Henry Jenkins comments: “If Anderson is right, then niche-content stands a much better chance at turning a profit than ever before.”[xxviii]

Cheap software and publishing lower both production and distribution costs. Space is arguably unlimited. Outlets don’t have to worry about, page sizes or page numbers, time-slots or shelf space. Convergence has made it easier to increase the output and target niche audiences – and especially via social media. Niche audiences have much greater access to content – immediate and at their fingertips. Anderson uses RealNetwork’s fast-growing music subscription service Rhapsody as an example of how important the less popular 80 per cent is:

Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.[xxix]

 

It is important to note that Anderson’s theory has also been received with some skepticism. On the basis of research data from Nielsen VideoScan and Nielsen SoundScan, Harvard business scholar Anita Elberse argued the theory was somewhat flawed. After computing the data she found that the blockbuster model still applied to Rhapsody and Australian online DVD-by-mail rental service Quickflicks. In a response to Elberse’s criticism, Anderson said that the differences in outcome was largely due to how they “define the Long Tail,” and that “especially in the definitions of ‘head’ and ‘tail,’ that leads to very different results.”[xxx]

If it works, the long tail theory seems ideal for the consumer. But, when prices are lowered and consumption patterns changes, traditional formats struggle and formulas are falling apart. Print journalism is seen to be particularly under threat. Newspaper sales are dwindling, publishers are struggling capitalize on both old and new, and there is talk about a future with one-paper cities, even “no-paper” cities. In 2009, Seattle saw the collapse of a 146 year-old tradition when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March stopped printing their publication, now existing exclusively online.[xxxi] Many critics pondered the same fate for its competitor, The Seattle Times. (Including American Journalism Review[xxxii] and New York Times’ editors[xxxiii]).

But this development does not faze Anderson. (He deals with the concept of ‘Free’ in a new book by the same title). In an interview with The Spiegel International about the future of news media, Anderson says he wouldn’t even notice if his local newspaper in San Francisco would disappear, because he gets his news online via twitter, email newsletters, RSS feeds and other means. Rather than going directly to the mainstream media outlets for stories, the stories come to him. Anderson says this way of interacting with the world has somewhat obliterated the purpose of many existing publication processes, as well as the ways people understand them:

I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like ‘horseless carriage’. […] We’re in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don’t have meaning. What does news mean to you, when the vast majority of news is created by amateurs? Is news coming from a newspaper, or a news group or a friend? I just cannot come up with a definition for those words. Here at Wired, we stopped using them.[xxxiv]

This is echoed by Deuze, who ponders the end of journalism as we know it. He says it “is an industry without a public support structure (other than advertising), it delivers a product without consumers, and serves a (model of) society that, for all intents and purposes, is dead.” [xxxv] Earlier, in 2003, Deuze accounted for four different kinds of new Online Journalism, which belong to the “professional domain.”[xxxvi] First, there are mainstream news sites like the CNN, ABC, BBC etc., who produce their own content and also aggregate news from other external sources by using hyperlinks. Index and category sites like Yahoo! or Google who depend on aggregating news from other sources, but do actually sometimes write their own editorials to organize and contextualize this content. Meta- and comment sites like Poynter’s Medianews, E&P’s E-Media Tidbits and freedom forum is a kind of ‘journalism on journalism’ in which “editorial content is often produced by a variety of journalists and basically discusses content found elsewhere on the internet […] they can be seen to act as more or less ‘participatory’ metasites.”[xxxvii] In Australia, sites like Crikey.com, MuMbrella.com.au, and ThePunch.com.au are good examples of the latter. Finally, share and discussion sites employ the Internet’s potential to connect people by providing a hub “described as ‘group weblogs, offering personal accounts of individual experience.”[xxxviii]

These avenues, described by Deuze, are the ones that wag the long tail of journalism, along with the increased news ‘advertising’ via social media. In 2006 Slate magazine’s deputy editor Julia Turner tested the principle on their own website, and the result did to some extent agree with Anderson’s theory. Although it didn’t, perhaps, paint a picture quite as bright as Anderson is presenting it. Turner says they publish approximately 20 stories every day on average, and that they have a backlog of 33,000 articles. The top 100 articles counted for 86 per cent of their hits, and articles that were more than a week old only counted for 22 per cent of their traffic.

It turned out a two-year old story about exhibitionism and the making of a Girls Gone Wild video stood out as one old article with a remarkable number of hits. It had over 1,700 per day, without there being a link to the article anywhere on Slate’s pages. How, then, do so many people find that particular article? In this case, via Google. At the time of the probe, when typing ‘girls gone wild’ into Google, Slate’s article appeared as the fourth hit. Says Turner:

The story here, of course, is not that [author Ariel] Levy’s dispatches got 2,354 hits last Tuesday; Slate as a whole pulled in about 1.9 million hits that day. The story is that that traffic was free—we paid for the piece years ago, and we didn’t expend any additional man-hours last week assigning, editing, or producing it. That means Levy’s dispatches provided 2,354 chances for our advertisers to reach our readers—and pay us for the privilege of doing so—without costing us a thing.[xxxix]

But, I suspect, it didn’t immediately pay them that much either. Although Anderson doesn’t offer any plausible answers to questions on how to capitalize on the developments for journalism just yet, he is certain the only way to survive is to embrace the change and experiment with possible solutions.

Endnotes