David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest provides an alternate reality where television channels become obsolete as individual viewing choices take precedence over channel timetables. Eventually, entertainment and news were reduced to videocassettes that people watched at their leisure.
Today television channels are slowly shifting to rely on viewer preferences, streaming, and personal information—but not to such an extreme where scheduled programs will become completely obsolete. Arguably, the changes began with viewers’ ability to record and watch shows at their leisure, and peaked with the rise of the Internet. Both of these things (recording and the Internet) free viewers from stringent network schedules.
Peter Hamby, a national political reporter for CNN Digital, said in an interview with the HPR, “I think it’s undoubtedly a positive development that the technology is allowing people to get as much information as they want about the things they care about.” Nevertheless, the news broadcasters still feel building pressure from these changes and many are rushing to adapt to this movement towards personalization.
If news channels had infinite resources, they could maintain their niche in the market and plenty of people would still watch their broadcasts. However, this is obviously not the case. With this industry-wide switch towards a more individualized approach to consuming content, companies need to keep up. The state of broadcast news is definitely changing, but what is changing is its form, not content.
Attention Deficit
One of the main reasons for this change is a familiar one: media shortens our attention spans. This idea, as Hamby said, “places added pressure on journalists to make their content even smarter, even more compelling, even more essential.” The same content needs to be consumed differently. Politico released a poll that said 29% of voters do not watch TV anymore. This number that increases to 43% with younger voters aged 18-24. Although that still leaves over half of the voter population, these statistics imply significant changes in the rates and types of news that people are watching.
Right now, the move is towards mobile-friendly content. To grab people’s attention, news organizations take their print content and turn it into engaging bytes made for speedy interactions. According to a Time article, 55% of people online spend fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page. That’s an unbelievably short amount of time to get people interested and, more importantly, informed.
“There’s space to fill. People have busy days and they’re choosing what they want to read and look at on their phones when they’re at a stoplight or at Starbucks. You have to compete for those two minute windows and you’re really not going to do it with generalist content, you’re going to do it with stuff that’s either really eye catching or great or is designed to appeal to people that care about what you’re writing about,” said Hamby.
Yet these new, catchier projects must be incorporated into the bigger organization and can’t just be seen as distinct and separate appendages. In an attempt to incorporate the Internet and mobile forms to their larger organizations, many media corporations have created new individualized sites, apps, and other ventures for their viewers to use quickly and on the go. These often center on the idea of giving people a single specific thing.
Power to the People
In the Nieman Lab article “CNN, Anywhere,” Alex Wellen, the Senior Vice President of CNN Digital, said “CNNx is all about control, whether it’s controlling what you watch or when you watch, how much depth you get around a particular segment, how you share it, how you personalize it—it really was about control.”
CNNgo (previously the CNNx Wellen mentioned) gives viewers the opportunity to choose any news broadcasted within the last 24 hours, giving them the agency to sort through content. The same article says that CNNgo “offers something more [than just personalization]—data about individual users and the exact segments they do and don’t want to watch.”
This seems innocent enough. Personalization gives users the chance to really focus their attention on stories that interest them, giving them reason to continue their engagement with news channels. However, “CNN, Anywhere” speculates, “Someday, information on what content viewers click on and what content they choose to ignore might even inform coverage.”
This is where problems begin to surface. Although it may make sense, economically, to base content off of what will get the most views, the change is ethically questionable. Restricting content in any manner can be problematic, as it limits unanticipated exploration and discovery of important topics. Also, issues that are either upcoming or more obscure rely on broad, unbiased coverage from news companies to get their stories told.
How Much is Too Much?
There is a lot more news and information than most people can follow at any given time, even more so today since people have more outlets to follow and have much deeper access to all issues and topics. What journalist Jonathan Stray says is also true, that “each person not only has unique interests, but is uniquely affected by larger events, and has a unique capacity to act.” People’s effect on the world, according to Stray, is limited by proximity.
Stray also suggests that because of people’s unique interests, and the unrealistic amount of content available, readers should focus only on what directly affects them and on issues that they can directly take action on. This type of thinking is easily implemented through ventures like CNNgo. However, technology, along with increasing the amount of news available, has made the world into a unified and globalized society, where local communities have expanded over country borders. What directly affects us is no longer limited to what we like or what we can immediately change.
Stray is correct in saying that “journalism must facilitate change.” However, this does not mean changing coverage to appease personal preferences. This means getting news broadcasters to learn how to change their platform and outreach methods in order to continue informing people on all subjects and issues, which is what Hamby says places like CNN are doing. It’s not about changing content; it’s about changing the way people interact with it.
As Neil J Thurman, a senior lecturer at the Department of Journalism in City University, London, wrote, some say that personalizing content reduces “opportunities for serendipitous discovery, particularly of ‘what matters,’ as well as reducing exposure to alternative points of view.”
Too much personalization will not just hurt content, but readers and society as well. He goes on to say that a lack of serendipity prevents people from creative exploration of content. Limiting open and accidental learning hinders individuals and society as a whole from developing organically through premeditated or unexpected interest and knowledge.
This phenomenon also predicts the weakening of “deliberative democracy,” which believes that authentic deliberation, not just voting, is central to law and to democracy. This deliberation takes place with equal distribution of power. In turn, deliberation formulates authentic public opinion about societal and political issues through majority rule. The people decide what the people’s opinion is and they do so by having informed conversations with each other.
The role of news in this case is to provide the space for that deliberation and to allow people to build up their personal knowledge base to inform themselves and others. Similarly, equal coverage gives people equal access to the information that would allow them to decide on their majority values.
Keeping It Relevant
News organizations, like CNN, that adopt new technologies such as online streaming, social networks for personal news posts, and other similar ventures are changing in a way that still leaves room for viewers to be fully informed and to discover information outside the boundaries of their personal interests. Although some writers and researchers may speculate about a future in which news is completely individualized and close-minded, this is not actually realistic.
This idea of user control infuses all of the digital and personalized news technologies – CNN is just one example. The Washington Post’s Trove and The New York Times’ News.me are two other similar ventures within the news industry. These ventures are ways that news corporations maintain their standards for worldwide coverage while still giving readers the opportunity to specify what part of that coverage they read and discover. More importantly, they make sure to present the coverage in a new catchy way so that it survives this era of shortened attention spans.
As Hamby said, “There is definitely still a place for the bigger-picture general audience stuff, and I hope that people continue to go there because it illuminates things that you don’t necessarily catch on a day to day basis when you’re wired to your phone.”
At times the future of broadcast journalism and television looks as bleak as Infinite Jest makes it seem. Yet the main news channels are not dropping out of the market and disappearing. On the contrary, these new types of personalized news sites prove that journalism can keep up with technology and social media. They can maintain their niche, they can allow people to dive deep into issues that interest them, and they can maintain full news coverage too—the audience now just has more hands in the control room. As long as viewers still have the option to revel in serendipity and look at big headlines, all while still learning about other aspects of the world, broadcast media will be just fine.