Jon Snow on the future of journalism: It’s all out there to be grasped, and we will do it
Have you seen Man On Wire, a documentary about a French tightrope walker who decides that he’s going to walk the tightrope between the Twin Towers (pre- 9?11)? That’s the analogy that Channel 4 News front man and journalist Jon Snow applied to the current state of the media industry last night, during a talk looking back at his career at London’s Frontline Club.
“I see in one of those towers new technology, new media, cyber space providers – Google, Apple, Microsoft – whoever it is – Yahoo – They’re all there in that tower. And we’re in the second tower and we’re the content providers. We are cutting the mustard, we are the investigative journalists, we are the people who go to these places, we are the people who send the helicopters, we are the people that they need and we need them to transmit what we’ve got.
“Somehow, although none of us can walk a tightrope, none of us even has a fucking tightrope, we will find a tightrope. And we will put it across, we will find a way of getting it across and we will walk across and in the middle we will meet them coming the other way. They need us as much as we need them. OK, they’re having the best of money making now but there’s going to come a time, quite soon, when they’re going to realize that they need us much more than they know. And what we’ve got to ensure is that we’ve not so collapsed and disintegrated our capacity to do the job that we can’t rise to this need that mankind will need,” said Snow.
I found myself nodding over-eagerly in agreement as I heard what to me sounded like a rallying cry, especially to those doomsayers in the journalism industry who keep telling us that the end is nigh.
Snow used the example of Gordon Brown’s resignation earlier this year as an example of why journalists and the new media masters will eventually have to find a solution together. You can’t generate content without organization, he said, describing how the UK’s media industry sprung into action when Mr Brown resigned as prime minister.
“Google’s not going to do that. Google wouldn’t put the helicopter up. That’s not what they do. They need us. They need us for this enterprise, for this content. And just in the same way Google is not going to investigate MP’s and whether they’re abiding by their expenses in election fights, there is a case for us,” said Snow.
“You’ve got to have people like ourselves telling each other what’s going on, and you can’t just depend on Twitter to do that. We have a future – we’re the best, the very best.”
Snow’s optimism and excitement of what is to come for journalism was contagious.
“It’s all out there to be grasped, and we will do it. We’ve got to keep our nerve, we’ve got to keep it all together, we’ve got to keep on producing more young talent, more young people out in Mexico scrambling on their one camera, VJs and the rest of it, and we can make it. We’ll get the tightrope across, we’ll start making money together, we’ll make music together, we’ll make the world a better place.
His comment on Mexico VJ’s referred to a question I asked him earlier in the evening. Having spent the last three years there working on MexicoReporter.com, an independent multimedia journalism project, I was also really keen to hear Jon’s views on what the future of foreign video news coverage is. Encouragingly, he said that projects like MexicoReporter.com are at least a big part of the future in journalism.
“I want to see every news organization, every TV news organisation have an independent budget, i.e a budget which is ring-fenced only for deploying independents. People who are either living in Mexico or people who offer to go and have got some particular reason for us to believe in them – because they’ve got good contacts or great filming capacities or whatever it is. I think if you have an independent budget that can only be spent on these kinds of enterprises, and that’s how we work at Channel 4 news, then you have a very good chance of protecting some element of foreign news.”
He also made the point that with the reduced cost of technologies, cameras and the entire news production process, traditional news organizations can still maintain their foreign coverage on tight budgets.
“I actually think news organizations will recover their confidence. The fact is, actually…it’s possible to do foreign coverage quite inexpensively if you’re clever.”
Doomsayers be damned – the future of journalism not only exists, but it looks pretty bright from where we were standing last night.
Category: Featured, Frontline Club, editorial, journalism, media, video
Video has been replaced. Link to video and audio is here: http://frontlineclub.com/events/2010/07/reflections-jon-snow.html.