Broadening the scope

The challenge of Internet audience measurement is just one part of a larger shift in the media landscape, brought about by a rapid evolution of communications technology. These changes are ongoing — innovations in mobile devices, tablet computing, and other new platforms and content models may challenge the dominance of content delivered by Web browsers on personal computers. Furthermore, the growing importance of social media as the navigational frame that brings eyeballs to content will alter dynamics of exposure and impact in unforeseeable ways. Media industries will face an evolving challenge to their business models, and better solutions to today’s problems may not have a long shelf life. The news media face an indefinite period of uncertainty, with few anchors to hold old business models in place. Furthermore, advertising faces a challenge larger than just changes in the way people consume professionally produced media content. The Internet collapses the social and communicative distance between all parties: individuals, businesses, government, civil society, celebrities, subcultures, and knowledge elites, etc. For marketers, camping their signal onto professional media of any kind is no longer the obvious primary strategy. As Clay Shirky put it in his much‐cited essay on the Internet’s challenge to newspapers, “That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.” To paraphrase Doc Searls, the fact that all parties are now one degree away from each other changes everything. In fact, as this report has documented, improvements in online measurement may harm rather than help advertising as traditionally understood. As Searls says, “Advertising amounts to buying guesswork, and technology will reduce the guesswork in ways that will not be friendly to the business. The frontier of the media industry is not advertisement.” Whether Searls’s claim will hold is far from certain, but the scope of the uncertainty itself is the point. Confused audience measurement is just part of a larger problem facing professional media, and journalism in particular. In contemplating a role for Columbia’s new Tow Center, it is important to bring a wider landscape into the picture. How might an academic center make a meaningful contribution to the future of journalism, one that embraces advanced Internet data and metrics without being constrained by them? A good way to start is by rethinking the question: How can academic research contribute to preserving and improving the practice of journalism as the institutional foundations of the profession shift unpredictably in the face of rapidly evolving technologies and consumer behavior? Analysis of Internet data can be enormously valuable, used in the service of examining the right questions. A focus on accurate audience estimates and better behavior metrics draws the eye away from more basic questions of impact which capture the social value of journalism: Did this story spread? How has it made a difference? Does the work of reporters lead to more public accountability? Just what, actually, is the emerging role professional journalism in what The news profession and the society it serves need to know how journalistic outputs affect public affairs and political processes in a time when Internet data show so powerfully what survey research has always suggested: that the distribution of knowledge and attention to public affairs is extremely unequal. The current crisis in commercial media is an opportunity for the profession to reexamine old assumptions about the relationship between the press, the public, and democracy. It is not enough for journalists and editors to fall back on abstract moral claims about the profession’s public role, while telling the business side of their organizations to get savvy about metrics for the sake of saving old business models. Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism at New York University, says this about the collision of established forms of journalism with new kinds of data: “The difficulty with Internet data is that the reaction to it is one of two extremes: journalists either ignore it completely, or become slaves to it. Neither is a rational position for 21st Century journalists.” An opportunity exists for the Tow Center to help the profession move past this first‐generation reaction of denial or submission, toward a more mature position of knowledge. Sophisticated empirical analysis can help understand the role of journalism in the evolving media ecosystem, in ways that better equip journalists to make a difference, get credit for the difference they are making, and find ways to get paid, whether through old or new models. Let us consider three approaches in turn.