On Media Failure and Decline – dialogue with Roberto Savio

What is the state of the media right now and why is it like this? What has happened? 

It might be relevant to what you said, you just told me that we’re not in the Gutenberg era, we’re in the Zuckerberg era, from which I infer that social media had something to do with it but can you  unpack that a little more?   

Well look, my view is very simple. When we were in the era of information, information was the central tool for society, for individuals, for knowledge, for science. There was information and that was meant that information had a market value. So that if you printed the newspaper you would make money – also because advertisement which was nearly eighty percent of the budget of any newspaper, of the income of the newspaper, and only media were to go. So the media were powerful, were money making and were very professional in general. There was the idea that the media should compete in quality. Even if you were a local newspaper you always look at the big newspapers as a paradigm of journalism, editorial style and accountability to the readers and so on. What has happened since the arrival of the Zuckerberg era is that “information” is no longer the tool for the society to have a window over the world. Information was the window over the world, over your town, over your country, over your region and over the world. The individual was able to read all this and get his conclusions. Of course there was bias in the media. There were right-wing papers, left-wings paper, elite papers, popular newspapers, but by and large there was an horizon that provided the citizen with a view of the world.   

The radio which came, and TV later did not change that system much because it also was a system of information, and you could discuss if visual images were more powerful than written words. That was the problem of which media you would use. Media were all instruments to reach people. You could use radio, tv, newspapers, whatever.   

With the arrival of the Zuckerberg era, three things have been happening. The first: all the advertisements went to the internet, to Google and so on. In fact they make their money by selling us as a product. This is how these companies make money. They’re free, there is no subscription, and they make the money by using the people, their customers, for anything from politics to marketing. That made a very very heavy loss for the information system and that is something that should never be under evaluated, because that loss of financial strength for the media meant a second consequence. To compete, to stay in the market, information became more and more a market value and market oriented, with information left by a large process to concentrate on events and gave privilege more and more to known people (celebrities) not to unknown people. 

This meant the number of selections which were in fact selections of marketing, and the information became much more market oriented and market dependent than before. The third phenomenon about this is the fact that professionally, this profession has been slowly, I do not want to say disappearing, but certainly this profession will not last for long. When artificial intelligence will arrive, well you will see that artificial intelligence can do many of the jobs a journalist is doing today, and  journalism will disappear as we know it now. It will remain in some few outlets but they will go, will have to go to the digital. If you will be able to remain printed and only two kind of newspaper will emerge: the very very good ones that elite need to read to know what happens, but there could be two, three, in Canada maybe two, no more, and then the local newspaper which are going to be even free, in which you find which pharmacies are open, what isn’t a movie of your town, information which have to do with your local life, but they will completely abandon any potential of global coverage of international vision, even of national vision. 

So the market is changing this, the second point, but the second point brings to the third point. The arrival of the internet has also created a generational difference. Young people don’t buy newspapers any longer because they are not able to read any longer in length. There’s a lot of scrolling. Microsoft says that today’s essential span of a teenager is seven seconds! That is exactly the opposite to what you need to read a newspaper, unless you make a newspaper of titles of 150 characters, like twitter, because you cannot ask young people to have more attention than this. We are speaking in general terms, we are not speaking of  all young people, we are speaking of the majority of young people. 

The result is that this other world which has come out which is a communication world in which everybody is equal –  you can be the most brilliant scientist but in what you write in the social net it does not have much more power than somebody who theorized on a conspiracy fantasy. On the contrary, the guy who makes a conspiracy fantasy has many more chances to have readers than the scientists. And the search engines of the three big tech companies are oriented to keep you there as much as possible. So they always give you the most sensational, unusual, exceptional things to read, so you will be there, you will be there. 

Certainly the system has totally destroyed the content value of information, and with results like the one you know of – Mr. Trump who has 86 million followers on twitter. He says sometimes even 20 tweets in a day, and all American media combined make 50 million copies a day. Of these 50 million, 10 millions are for the quality papers, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, something like The Boston are disappearing, The Christian Science Monitor is no longer printed. I mean that is a group of newspapers which is slowly, slowly reducing, and if you reach 80 million people directly you do not need a 50 million copies of the press, much less the 10 million copies of the quality paper, usually overpassed. 

So the result is that today journalists, I’m not talking about media, journalists, are becoming paid less and less. Today in Europe we have lots of young journalists who write articles for 20 euro a piece. They need to get loans. So the market exploits them by paying them less. A maid makes 10 euro an hour so a journalist is paid two hours of a maid. When I was a junior journalist my monthly income was 30 000 lira, as a young journalist. Well we can say a journalist of some success, but still I had 30 000 lira every month. My secretary costed exactly thirty thousand lira a month and I got thirty thousand lira with two articles. Today is the opposite. There are no more contracts for unions, many newspapers do not have a generic contract, and the unions are unable to oblige them to adopt a general contract. In Italy now, I do not know how many years that we are working without a general contract. So the profession is in decline, the rewards for the press are in decline, the media are in decline. All this is a world which is going through very very deep changes. 

I have a friend of mine who called me to say: “Roberto my son wants to become a journalist, my daughter wants to become a journalist, can you meet them and give advice”? I said: “Wait a moment, first of all are you able to keep them for 10 years paying for their life? If you’re able to do so let us go, if not it’s going to be a frustration, because they will start to write they will find the media punish them for talking about… they cannot live with it, they will have probably a girlfriend, somebody, how do you expect them to survive without your support?” 

So I was reading few days ago a very interesting article made by artificial intelligence, who was given the key words and the system, Deep View went over the internet, gathered all elements which are coming from internet data and wrote an article, which was how we, robots want to reassure you, men that we are not going to take your place. But then I found out that this was the instruction given to Deep Mind. If the instruction to Deep Mind was: “Write that robots were going to overtake humanity”, they would have without any problem written the exact opposite article. And how it was written was not a very good language because it was somehow a mechanical language but was perfectly published in a newspaper. That’s an experiment from just a few weeks ago. And once we will have this artificial intelligence going up and an editor say to the robot there was a crash of a plane in the town of “so”, write the story, it will be easy for the robot to describe the crash, the cry of horror of people, the ambulance arriving on the runway, because what are these? Manifestations. If there is a manifestation in the street, they will have the same story: how many people…? So for a robot to do this kind of journalism would be very simple, events, chronicles… And at the same time today to be able to make global journalism is very difficult because… 

I have to tell you I have to read at least five hours every day to have an approximate idea of what is happening in the world. You have to know what happens in Asia, in Africa, Latin America, Europe, the United States… it takes a lot of reading… And when I write an article today, the syndicate service of newspapers does not take anything longer than 650 words. I write an article of two thousand, two thousand five hundred, because to explain the complexity I have to bring out a holistic approach. I cannot write about Syria without involving Turkey, United Arab Emirates Saudi Arabia. I mean everything is just many angles of observation. So if I write such an article I don’t know where to publish it. And if I get it published, “El País”, in Spain, which is the most important newspaper in Spain, the pay for very good columnists, very famous writers, is 80 euro per article. So I have to read five hours every day with the hope that I will be paid 80 euro – which is what you need to have a good lunch with your friend. 

So the decline is a decline by many many angles. I have given you the most important ones. There are also many more, but these are the critical ones. 

Thank you that was incredibly interesting. Another point I’d like you to go back on a little bit because I didn’t completely get it, and maybe unpack it, was the impact of the market on the media.  

Well let me let me go on the market, because it is important. 

Yes, please, please –    

because this is important – 

please go back  and correct some of the things that I wasn’t able to get. 

Okay.

What do you teach on the first day of a class of journalism? 

Who, How, Where, Why, When. The 5w. 

Remember this is the first thing you will learn. In fact this was to create a code of communication with people which would fulfill these points which are necessary for people to fully understand an event. But this has nothing to do with analysis. This is how you report. How is this happening? Why is this happening? Who was there when this happened? Where is this happening? These five W are very useful for covering an event. Let us remember that newspapers were competing with each other for who would be the first to cover an event, because at that time it was a very important element. But these kinds of lessons that you get into journalism school do not prepare you for a more complex work which is an analytical work. If you write in an article normally you must go beyond the event. You must put that event in its framework to give to this event a real significance. Otherwise it is just an event by itself –  but events are just the basis of reality, you have to build over this reality to give to the lector, to the reader the ability to go beyond the events. Let us say the price of tea has increased. Why has it been increased? Who are the beneficiaries? Who works in the field? Only women. The change of the price, did it affect the life of these women? Where did the money for the increase go? Because the fact that price increased by seven cents does not mean anything by itself. So I mean real journalism is to be able to analyze, gather all the data, so that your reader has many elements on which to be able to understand. Now what has been happening is the market has been reducing that kind of journalism because that kind of journalism will cost money, will cost time. If you send a reporter to let’s just say now Yemen with a teleporter, maximum after two, three days he must start to send articles. Now, to go to Yemen and to understand the situation you will need at least a week. So journalism is becoming more and more superficial because the market does not reward journalists simply because the money is elsewhere. So if you are an editor, the publisher of a newspaper, and you have to survive you have to make choices. And what choice will you make? I will sell what is more simple, not what is more complex. I will sell what is more familiar, not something for which I do a lot of explanation to situate the reader with a process. So the quality of journals we have is declining because the market is not rewarding media. The market went elsewhere, went to social media. And the media to survive had to cut their quality, their analysis. 

Also because at the same time the people who read have less and less attention span, less and less time. They are overwhelmed by millions of information in which they need to choose to be able to find out what they want. And in this, the search engine, or Google, Facebook, does not help –  because they do not help you to find what is more important, but what is more glamorous. 

So the market has changed the relation of the media with the reader and the media with quality. 

When “Prensa Latina” the press agency of Cuba was started, it was started by a guy that was an Argentinean journalist. He went there and there was still the dictatorship of Batista so he dressed as a priest to reach the guerilla zone. He spent some days with  Fidel Castro and so on. So he went out and wrote the book about the guerrilla, which was the first book to explain what was really happening, because until then the american press agencies were Pro-Batista not for Fidel Castro. So this guy was called Masetti. Masetti went back to Cuba when there was the end of the dictatorship. And he made a program on radio saying: This is terrible, nobody knows the situation in Cuba, because journalists write about Cuba from outside, American front is united against Fidel Castro, therefore Europe follows…a lot of intellectuals follow… So one day Che Guevara called him and he said to Masetti: You know what: make a press agency so we can rebut AP, UP, all these words of international agencies. And Masetti, he was not a real big journalist, and not a manager, found himself in charge of creating a news agency. What he did is he took the best people in Latin America, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the best people and hired them as journalists. And Prensa Latina made articles much, much, much superior to what was circulating. They were written by artists, really important artists. And what they did was… I will tell you, you have the map of the towns full of Latin America and then they went to AP, where in a flash they said there is a manifestation in Guatemala, about these flashes, so they took the map of the town of Guatemala and wrote an article. “In front of the people there is a group of young people who are shouting Freedom! Freedom! The police are charging from the street.” –  They were inventing everything but as all manifestations go like this, the story went in AP and in the press. Prensa Latina had  plains who parachuted journalists in the moments of events to cover this event. There were so few people in Havana and this went nowhere. 

To tell you that this scripture of an event is simple because it’s always the same. The analysis of an event it’s very complicated and to have authority over events you must have: A – a guy able to do it; B – a newspaper able to publish it; C – a public interest in reading it. These three things have been declining, and that is the real decline of journalism. 

Thank you. I think I understood everything, the part about the market, as well as this as this part so I’m not gonna go over it. If I could I would ask some questions about some stories that are out there, floating, which have to do with the decline, just to get your perspective on them. So one of them is kind of, I’m gonna bundle it together, so it is the view that  Noam Chomsky has about propaganda, like, Manufacturing Consent and it also goes into what Edward Bernays did – I mean how Public Relations in the United States took this  propagandist view.

Sorin it depends on which angle you look at this issue. If you look from the angle of a journalist and of the media, the answer is very simple. There have always been two powers who try to control communication: the state and the market. People with commercial interest try to control media to enhance their commercial interest. People with the political view try to use the media to present their political view. And it is with the arrival of mass media that they start. If you take the times of let’s just say 1820, The Times was a newspaper for elites. It sold 25 000 copies. It was extremely well written. Once they were writers, there were also journalists. Now these do not exist anymore. 

So The Citizen Kane, who invents a war with Cuba is a manipulation. But of all the time people of financial power or people of political interests try to control the media. That of course, if you look by sociological point of view, is a much wider phenomenon –  which is how the system tries to reach and control society. In that sense until 50s, the 1950, the media was the only conduit. So they were much more important than today. So again from looking to the society as such media was not –  really, well it was important because there weren’t other things – but you had a lot of other techniques to reach people – but look at them, of the technique that was: you had to write a book about, a fake book, like The Whites, The Whites of Zion – to have people becoming anti-semitist – but that was Gutenberg era – you have to print the book, distribute the book, organize a system to make political propaganda, or voice in the street. Now you have 1000 ways of making political propaganda. Fake News are the best example. We have today a number of Fake News every day, who come on our screen, which are impressive. Look how Bannon or Trump, have used the media, social media overtaking over the media to convince people that there will be fraud in elections. Did he care about the media? He did care at all. And yet he was able to reach 71 million people, and today 83 percent of Republicans believe that there has been a fraud. So this is something which goes from Goebbels time. But Goebbels, as a Minister of Hitler, to reach people he could only use radio, mass manifestation, and media. Today for Goebbels, it would be immensely easier to do his job. Because you… in this world of Zuckerberg everything is equal. There is no longer any local value system. 

So I relate to it, I understand there were always two powers that were trying to capture the media which is the corporate we could say and the state. But at the same time, the people are the ones that are supposed to be able to control, or at least elect the state who’s supposed to keep the market in check. So two questions arise for me from that, or emerge. The corporate, the market, Wall Street was trying to capture the state and control what’s happening. So are they different at this point and how does this relate to the world of media?  

Here you have to make a very basic difference. There are three angles. The first is if you are in a democracy or in an autocratic or dictatorial regime. In the dictatorial regime the state and the market coincide. The Chinese economy coincides with the state. This is not the situation, let us say, of the United States. But in the United States the value system of Trump and the corporations is very much the same. So in democracy you’re gonna have a value system where both interests could coincide or  both these do not coincide at all. In Argentina corporations are always against the government. And in Chile the corporations basically are by the side of the government. It means that when the government has the same value over the economy as the market there is no difference. 

What is important to note in all of this, is how things have changed since the arrival of the Zuckerberg Era, because the Zuckerberg era has created a system unknown in history, in which readers become objects, become consumers. The citizens become first a consumer, because it pushes you to buy these and this, but also they become an object because they classify you by your interest, your choices, your taste, and group you together with similar people. So if Nestle wants to sell a very good chocolate, you go there and you say: Who are the people who have exquisite taste and we will say, okay, I can give you two million emails, how much do you give me? And so we become objects. We are not any longer just consumers. This with information was impossible. It was impossible. So this has changed the relation between market and media. Media became not as relevant, as before, social media became more relevant. 

But what is the value system of the great Silicon Valley corporation? Exactly the same of the profit which is what is shared by fossil fuel companies, like coal companies. You certainly can say the coal companies have nothing to do with Zuckerberg. Up to a certain point, because in real life they share the same interest. So if you want to make a newspaper, you have the usual traditional attack of the corporations, but now you have a new attack which is the domination without precedence of people, by a few technological companies. Today Facebook has 2 billion readers, billion users. I mean China has 1.350 billion people. The world of Facebook has more. And they globalize the world and put people from Africa, Asia, Latin America in the same category group – so they’re standardizing the world. The world will become less and less democratic, because democracy is made by plural viewpoints and from this debate the more plural viewpoints comes democracy. Today we are having less and less viewpoints. And differences between regions are truly disappearing, Europe to Japan. Go to a Japanese marriage, there is nothing original, traditional, Japanese marriages is western marriage, western music, western style. All this is due to globalization which has a political value, neoliberal value, but a technological value, which is these extraction companies, Google, Facebook and so on. Sociologically we are going in the same direction. 

I feel this is a very interesting point, but I think that now we’re growing more in the political part than the media role part, so I’ll try to bring it back to the subject which is the media role part, because I have a million more questions about just this like everything that you just said now but perhaps that can uh we can i can keep it for like another time.  The media role is like the ones that are so so this is a this is a harder question because a kind of like a how to question the media is the one who is supposed to inform the public and the people so that they can exert in a democratic society at least some kind of checking and control and elections, on the state. So if the media is captured either by the state either by the market either by both either completely in a state of um completely in this state, where the Zuckerberg era as you as you call it has like so many like points of views which are like the glamour one that counts not the real ones that counts and journalists can’t like actually make like good informative pieces out there like. What hope do you see for us and what path do you see for us out of this vicious circle, I would call it, in order to have good information so that people can have good perspectives of reality so they can elect good officials so that the officials can. 

Yes I told you there will be few high quality newspapers. In the United States there will be three: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. I don’t think many more will survive. And then you will have the user of the net to distribute specialized information. I made this an experiment myself with Other News. I started to distribute to my friends every day two news, two items, which are analytical, which would not normally come out in the newspaper. Well I have 20000 people who read the Other News, because they find out that somebody read for them a lot of news, find them, select the two, and save a lot of work for them. The same will happen with people interested in how to destroy plastic, if there is a good service which keeps today how to destroy plastic, we’ll have lots of people go there because they have a specific interest. Other News is a globalist. There will not be many globalists. The example on it is a good example. We never made any advertisements, but we are at twenty thousand. That’s nothing. It’s a lot, because it is people who read long and complex material, but that is the limit. So I think in the future there will be few high quality newspapers, some system of information will use internet to give information on specialized issue, global issue in which people from every part of the world can identify in, climate change, if you have a good system of climate change you will have people ready to read this. But this is a problem. Nobody pays anything on the internet. Everybody is accustomed to getting it free. And if you want to introduce a system of subscription, you must do like the New York Times, now I think it is two dollar per month, 0.49 per week, something like this. So with this, you will never be able to get the money that you had before, with advertisement which is good, to pay really good investigative journalists. You will have material that you will pick up from your front air. And that will be an engine made by humans, will search the most significant material, on a theme, on the subject and put that together for a world audience which is shaping up. This is what I think will happen. Few high quality papers and the number of information systems, not communication because in Other News for instance we don’t ask readers to give their view. It is not a horizontal space. We use the internet as a vertical system, because if you open it as a horizontal space, you’re going to become crazy. We’re going to have people writing the most extravagant stories. If you have to answer them then you must have people able to answer with competence and common sense. That costs money. So my point is that we do not have any longer the means for good journalism unless in a few cases. 

Okay thank you. I am subscribed to Other News and I’ve been enjoying it. I trust Other News because I know that you do it. But for other ones, I’m not really sure myself how I would build my trust, in this era of un-trust, where there’s so many things that’s like that’s because there’s those main newspapers that you said, New York Times Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, and they have been losing like a lot of like readership and trust I would say so I’m not even sure myself, should I read the New York Times, is there value in reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, is there value in reading them. And if if we do not read those who have some kind of like I assume bias I’m not sure how bad it is but I think it’s like pretty bad – How do we find this alternative medias like Other News in which we can trust or how do we build trust in that, like I know how to trust Other News because I know you but how do I trust other ones? 

Well you have to look for four questions: 1 –  Who is the owner, how is the ownership, if the ownership is divided among different people you will have more trust than if it is one person. Second is it for profit not for profit, what is this? Three the goals, which are the goals of this association. And four, how much is it accountable to his members? These are the four questions. So in Other News we say: we are non-profit, we are an association of journalists, any leader can become a member of the association and vote for the board. In our budget, which is transparent, and this usually solves many of the problems. Of course people will ask: these people are right wing, left wing, believe in God, do not believe in God? And this you cannot avoid, because that is how we have been dividing readers today thanks to Facebook, Google. People are divided in bubbles, and people, bubble A will try to understand if you can be put into bubble A or you are too far from bubble A. But you know what will happen trust will happen having these questions answered. Who are the owners, why do they do this a publication… I did that choosing the famous five W that we were taught in school. Why is this publication, who is making this publication, where is this publication, for who is made in publication? When you understand these issues, well you have been playing as fair as you can.   

My last question is about one last perspective on the media decline which is out there, flowing, everywhere that I’ve seen and that I wonder how you relate to it, if you’ve seen it, if you haven’t. There’s this storyline which I’ll try to resume and I’m not very good at resuming things but I’ll do my best. It’s uh it’s about it’s the postmodernism explanation. So there is this storyline that slowly, that slowly after the fall of, well the fall of communism I guess, or like when communism was shown to do atrocious things because it became Stalinism, the Marxist view from from intellectuals, like Michel Foucault and others like him, they went into a postmodernist phase, saying there is no such thing as reality, there is no such thing as a story that doesn’t, that isn’t viewed from a certain point of view. And this has evolved through the ages so the post-modernist view isn’t exactly the same. It has evolved, it has gone like it has kind of gone from intellectuals into left activism and the left progressive activism and now there’s a lot of factions who are putting forward a lot of, a lot of stories. 

The problem is that this which is a conceptual issue, coincides with a particular moment of our history, which is that we have been going from the fall of communism, from the fall of the Berlin Wall, l into 20 years of absolute neoliberalism without any criticism, capitalism without any control, unchecked capitalism.Not only but the state was an enemy, society was an enemy. Capitalism was the solution to everything, the market replaced the men, and this went on for 20 years without any debate. Then in 2008 we had the financial crisis. And then fear started to come. Fear of immigrants, which become the scapegoat, fear of, would I find a job, what will be my life, will I be able to have a pension when I retire. Young people especially have a lot of incertitude and fears. And when you put incertitude, when you put… greed and fear together, you put the two engines of history in march. So while we have this thing going on, parallel to the various factions of what you are talking, of the postmodernist world, there was another factor coming, which in my view was much more relevant than intellectual debate, which was that people started to not believe any longer in anything which could be accused of cooperating with the elite. The people of the countryside were against the town. There were clubs that divided the town. There was a group who thought that red meat is a serious problem, people look at the Syrian issue, I mean there were a lot of one single issue factions. And these one single faction were much, much, more numerous and much more emotional than the debate of postmodernism. So I think that what you are saying is being deluged in this world in which we are, which is a world in transition –  to where, frankly I do not know. But I know that the system in which we are is finished. There’s no more legitimacy, there’s no more credibility, and there is no participation of people. Today people were totally separated from the official structures. So I think that what you say should be seen as part of a much wider sociological, cultural and even anthropological change. 

Today if you take a… I was last weekend with some friends who have a five years old girl. So we’re eating and this girl was sitting at the table. At ten o’clock, I say: when do you go to sleep? She says eight. It is ten o’clock. She says, ah but when there are grown ups I like to stay because I like to hear the conversation. Now we are talking about the Middle East, so I was very surprised. I said this: How old are you? She says five. So I do not know what to say, I say well it’s a good age. She pointed the finger across the table and said to me “It’s the most difficult age!” which if you ask me which is the most difficult age I have to think a little bit. Now the parents, they said, bring her to bed. So I brought her to bed, and she went to bed because with me she would go to bed and she said: Tell me a tale. Now I have no sons, I do not know stories for children. I didn’t remember something about White Neige, I remember the story of a girl with a red hat, which was in a wood with a wolf, the grandmother, do you remember? Red wood I think? Yes, yes, Little Red Riding Hood. So I invent a new Red Hood and when I say” and then Redwood gets lost in the woods – she looks at me and says:  why didn’t she call by telephone? Now that is an anthropological change because if you look at things with the eyes of this girl, this little girl, Romeo and Juliet would not have happened. Juliet would have called Romeo and said look I’m going to take a drug which is going like I’m dead. Don’t worry I’m not dead just wait a little bit and I will awake. Romero would never kill himself, Juliet would not have killed herself. We would have no Romeo and Juliet. So it is a new anthropological, cultural society which is coming up. In which intelligent, artificial intelligence is going to make many jobs disappear, it’s going to be a society which I can only foresee. So your question is not what is happening now but will happen in 20 years, not 100, 20. When cars will drive by themselves, you will have no more drivers. All your time will be very different, because you will be working mainly not on social context but on the internet. I mean it’s a different society. It will be different people. So make a little projection of that question. 

Amazing okay thank you thank you very much for everything i think we should keep it at that for today as i’ve you’ve been very very generous of your time and i’ve uh you’ve given me a lot of points to like think about so thank you very very much.