The team trying to get Bill Clinton re-elected in 1996 had a mantra: ”It’s the economy, stupid.” Forget the Whitewater scandal, Monika Lewinsky and other distractions; what got their man a second term in the White House was a focus on how policies affected Americans financially.
Ten years later, anyone trying to make sense of the international media should consider a similar mantra: ”It’s the internet, stupid.” From the Glazer family’s takeover of Manchester United to the rumoured $200 Google PC, the motivation behind most big business decisions in the sector will increasingly be the world wide web.
The Mail & Guardian‘s business section ran stories late last year on how advances in voice-over-internet protocol present a huge challenge to Telkom. The telecommunications giant’s discomfort — and its frequently unsuccessful efforts to defend its turf on the broadband issue — was reported with no little glee in the media. It was David vs Goliath, with the big guy getting thoroughly beaten.
However, the media are soon to find out that the internet is a creature from a different mythology. The Hydra of Greek mythology — where each of the heads has the face and serpentine hair of the Gorgon — comes closer to its essence than a plucky youngster with a sling and good aim.
World Cup
The item that provokes these musings came via a link from Play the Game, a Danish-based collective of sports journalists interested in maintaining some ethics in the profession. What it reported was that the World Association of Newspapers (Wan, a great acronym for this wishy-washy bunch) had recently met representatives of football’s governing body, Fifa, to discuss internet coverage of this year’s World Cup.
Apparently Fifa, which has an excellent eye for maximising profits, had decreed that no media other than its own website would be allowed to present images from any World Cup match until fully two hours after that match had ended. The Wan team managed to negotiate this time period down to one hour. A similar embargo on publishing simple results was also on the agenda, but Fifa graciously gave way — this time.
The happy-go-lucky webmaster who puts up a picture on his site — sent from the digital camera of his properly accredited photographer in Germany — at half-time of the opening match in June can expect a visit from some serious suits.
Another football-related internet issue concerns television companies bidding for the rights to screen the European (Uefa) Champions League. From next year, which is when TV companies will compete for the next three-year package, any broadcast bid must be bundled with one for internet rights. The bidder must be able to stream the matches live on the internet as well as via satellite or terrestrial TV. This will also affect those who buy regional rights from the primary bidders.
Why this Uefa ruling has people at BSkyB (one of the primary bidders) tearing their hair out is that the internet is so difficult to control. Programs are being devised to limit access on a geographical basis, preventing someone from Ghana, for example, from logging on to the Sky site, paying the fee and watching the matches — which would put Sky in trouble as it has United Kingdom rights only. But that is only the legitimate, expressed problem — the one the Sky executives will talk about.
Hacking
What concerns every broadcaster thinking of bidding is hacking. Although satellite piracy exists, it takes know-how and very expensive equipment. Internet piracy is rife and cheap and before the first match of the 2007 Champions League has kicked off, I’m sure there will be dozens of sites that offer the package at little or no cost. It is those who buy the rights, not Uefa, who will be expected to police the net — which will force them to make their sites so secure that the average, genuine viewer might struggle to gain access.
But football is just one, very visible, example of the internet’s growing influence on other media. Staying with television, a British poll earlier this month, reported in The Guardian, suggests that what 15 years ago was heralded as the wave of the future, the 24-hour news channel, is now little more than an eddy in a stagnant pond.
CNN earned its spurs with coverage of the first Gulf War and these channels proliferated. The DStv bouquet offers South Africans at least three rolling-news channels in English alone. UK viewership figures show that the average person watched 24-hour TV for several hours a week in the early Nineties. Once the novelty wore off, that figure settled down to about half an hour a week by the first years of this decade, spiking dramatically in November 2001 for the World Trade Centre attack and its aftermath.
But by last year the figure was down to seven minutes in Britain, and this was despite the London bombings in July. People are tired of waiting an hour for their item of interest to come around, or trying to read the hectically scrolling text across the bottom of the screen. In a desperate bid to catch casual viewers’ attention, more and more items are billed in flashing lights as ”breaking news”. But, as the cynical viewer soon discovers, the big breaking news story can be anything from the rumour of a new signing for Dullsville United or the death of a pontiff.
Internet
Contrary to what the viewership figures suggest, however, people have not lost interest in news — they just go on to the internet to get it. News is almost instantly available via blogs, with pictures taken on cellphones, and from dedicated news sites. Their advantages are their immediacy, that they can offer both words and video and, most importantly, they offer choice. The reader/viewer selects what information is received. As yet, the impact of this trend has not been felt as strongly in South Africa as in Europe, for example, because broadband is both expensive and not easily accessible here.
But those local traditional media companies — newspaper, radio and television — that indulged in a bit of Schadenfreude over Telkom’s plight will soon have to face the Hydra themselves. For big business is way ahead of the news media in understanding the growing power of the internet. The one-hour decree from Fifa — a corporation with increasingly tenuous links to sport — is a model that will soon be taken up by others. Want to know who won the 2008 Oscars? Register on the academy’s site to find out.
Uefa’s example has other, equally serious implications. In cleverly using television companies as the stalking horse, it is setting up a scenario — for the not-too-distant future — when it could keep the internet rights to its matches and rake in millions. The television rights — for delayed coverage only, naturally — would become completely insignificant. (This is why the Glazers bought Manchester United, of course. When the technology is in place, they will cut the number of televised matches allowed and use the internet to show games. Considering the club’s worldwide fan base, £5 a game on a pay-per-view site could eliminate their £700-million debt within a season. And at the cost of just a few high-quality servers — they already have the cameras.)
Most forward-thinking newspapers have established their own sites to take advantage of the move to the net. But if businesses — and, probably, government and other traditional sources or news — continue to write the rules when it comes to content, those websites will become increasingly marginalised. Forced by convention to play by the rules of embargoes and copyright, the traditional news media will have to reinvent themselves to maintain any relevance.
Avenues
At this early stage of the revolution, two avenues appear open. One is to fight; to try to prevent organisations from writing new rules for internet content, and to try to be the first with the news. Some other figures from Greek legend come to mind here: Pandora and Canute.
The second option is to ride the wave, using existing resources to present news in a format unavailable to independent sites and bloggers. Analysis and interpretation will be key: instead of trying to compete in an unwinnable war, the printed media and television will have to rely on providing background and context.
This, of course, is expensive. Any TV executive will tell you that it is cheaper to fly a Christiane Amanpour to a trouble spot and show hours of her reporting ”live” while bombs go off in the background than cobble together a well-researched 10-minute segment on why those bombs are exploding.
Similarly, it is much cheaper to hire a few tech-savvy twentysomethings to select hundreds of items from the newswires — that are increasingly available to everyone — than to pay one experienced journalist to investigate a single story. (I enjoy my current job, so I’ll ignore the third option — which is for owners of traditional media to close up shop and buy as many Google shares as they can with the proceeds of the fire sale.)
The current path — pretending the internet isn’t a serious issue, or that it can be moulded to become just another string to a news organisation’s bow — leads the way of the dinosaurs. Or, more aptly, the way of the medieval illuminated manuscript. Believing that because print media survived the advent of television, with few real changes to the way they did business, they can survive the internet is to misunderstand the nature of the beast.
For this is not merely an external threat that can be tackled with conventional weapons or talked into a truce; the ”enemy” is already inside the walls. No modern news organisation can exist without the internet, but more and more people are finding they can exist without traditional news media.
What is needed is some lateral thinking: to coexist with this Medusa-headed Hydra we must start polishing our shields. The M&G‘s most powerful shield has always been the accuracy, depth and quality of its writing. It implies a wholesale rethink and significant costs — but it’s better than being turned to stone.