Challenges of Changing Media Landscape: Marius Dragomir, Policy reports Editor, Open Society Foundation

Dragomir’s talk on Thursday revolved around the following:

· Changes in the way journalism is produced and distributed

· The need for “legacy” journalism to adapt to new platforms or die

· The crisis of public sector broadcasting

· New patterns of news packaging brought on by the Internet

· Increased need for new technical skills for journalists

· Over regulation and over control of news

· The collapse of the traditional business model

· Dismay at the direction in which quality journalism was going.

His thoughts were distilled from the report “Mapping Digital Media” (www.mediapolicy.org) a global project covering 60 countries, undertaken by the Open Society Foundation (www.osf-eu.org) and to be released next summer. The project looks at the state of journalism across Europe, Africa, Latin America, India, Japan and the Middle East to decipher how traditional journalism has responded to the changes brought about by the digital media.

Within the above broad parameters the report finds that

· There is a major refocusing of consumption of news from traditional to digital media

· Public sector broadcasting is languishing (in Macedonia when the government made it optional to pay for such broadcasting, collections fell from 83 percent to 0.01 percent). This could be because of the politicization of stations (eg. in appointment of key personnel) and the following loss of credibility leading to a loss of almost 90 percent market share

· Within society digital media is giving rise to digital activism (eg the Twitter Revolution in Iran)

· There is increase in the amount of available information and the speed with which sources of information can be reached although on the downside this is leading to the death of investigative reporting and giving a fillip to recycling and repackaging of verified and unverified information

· For a lot of the younger generation the main source of information and news is often in the form of non-serious, colourful websites like kissfm.com where news is a hotch potch of other content

· Only one or two established media outlets feature in the list of top 10 news websites, where social networks are most visible

· Changing technology affects journalists in myriad ways. For example the allocation of spectrum permits the number of channels to increase exponentially and one broadcaster might get more frequency to keep new players out

· There is growing ownership of telecom companies of media outlets, especially in the US and Europe which is not good.

· There are new gate keepers in the digital age who package and relay content to the viewer’s home. This includes the producers of Electronic Programming Guides who can put down or yank off the list a particular programme

· There is growing legislation regarding who owns content on the Internet. (In Romania for example Internet bloggers deemed offensive are punished by asking the ISP to cut off their connection)

For more information e mail Dragomir at: marius.dragomir@osf-eu.org

Nathaniel Carden

Puja Awasthi