Breaking: UK news consumers prefer their news online rather than TV. Is it time to shake-up its producers.
We’re watching Trump Vs Harris debate in the UK and the BBC Correspondent says Harris had a good day, but she still has work to be done.
On BBC television they’re playing a documentary showing the lead up to Russia invading Ukraine. My jaw’s on the floor: a scene when Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Emmanuel Macron finish a meeting with Putin and Ukraine’s fresh-face president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They move towards Putin, like old pals, visibly abandoning Zelenskya. He looks lost.
The doc ends series one, with the invasion starting, and a now rising in stature Zelenskyy shrugging of danger and stating he and his team are staying put in Ukraine.
What if there was an Internet blackout? Or there was no news, international news? The former actually happened in 2008 from a severed underwater cable line. The latter occured on 18th April 1930 when a BBC news announcer said “There is no news,” in the 8.45pm news bulletin.
Who needs Foreign Correspondents is a question my Masters students face every year. The answer looks simple. What’s required is the art of a persuasive argument.
At a supra level, foreign, or my preferred label, international correspondents are part of a billion pound industry in the trade of information for democracies to thrive and help shape government policies. Their impact is such that today, unfathomably, bad actors have made them targets to quell or deny them reporting.
At a consumer level, international correspondents sate the appetite for the acquisition of knowledge and how we comprehend the world. When surveys are carried out, one of the age-groups least interested in foreign news have tended to be younger people.
But such surveys mar a complexity. Young people and Black Lives, Palestine or Climate (International issues) makes it clear. And Vice, the platform, and related outlets receive/d commendable attention from younger audiences about international stories.
Skate to the future
“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” is a quote attributed to star Hockey player Canadian Wayne Gretzky. There’s some dispute about whether he did say it, but the saying more or less captures a desire to forecast the future.
This approach is not unlike the work of Professor Phillip Tetlock. I’m a big fan of this, believing tertiary education is about imparting what’s already known, listed in periodicals, but also how experts can imagine possible futures from existing data.
This is a moot point now, but I recall an interview in 2001 with a BBC figure. Consumer modem speeds were 28k-56k. The magic number set in publications like Video Age was 8–12mbs. Once speeds approached this, you could watch TV online.
Often, as with this interview with a BBC figure, people chuckled. Never going to happen was the rebuttal. Soon as a visiting lecture at a university, I started teaching TV online and soon came a silver lining. I built one of the first online video platforms in the UK, entered it into a global competition, competing with the BBC and it, er, won.
Skate to the future. Who would have dreamt up the role of influencers? Individuals whom user the personal cache, persuasiveness and knowledge to build huge followings. Could this role be a role adopted by a new breed of news correspondents, specifically international news? There are precedents of a kind.
News has changed
This week Britain’s media regulator OFCOM published data stating for the first time news consumers were accessing more of their news online, rather than TV.
This posits a challenge for broadcast news’ content and consumption. If the trend continues, with fewer and fewer people getting their news from TV, what happens to TV? More to the point, if we as educators are training the next generation of media practitioners, how do we layout career-choices?
Foreign correspondents have a rich legacy — from proto correspondents as travellers in the 17th century, such as Sir Thomas Herbert, to the 19th century Times Newspaper’s William Russell covering the Crimean War, captured in Tennyson’s despairing poem The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The 20th century with the famous Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn and Maria Colvin are just a few. Yet it’s apparent how things are changing. For instance there are now more international reporters who are from the regions from which they’re reporting. Some experts talk about next gen requiring skills that include OSINT for verification.
Online, as a medium offers different schemas to TV. So whilst you will always need international correspondents in some shape and form because they play an invaluable role, If you’re graduating into journalism, and given the competition, what are your alternatives? Alternatives, could be TikTok, or YouTube’s existing Partner Program — which enables YouTubers to make a living.
This is a fairly vacant field at the moment for a perceived different kind of correspondent, though yes there are hordes of YouTubers engaged in their own fields of reporting on YouTube Partner Programme. Coupled with live streams and Patreon subscriptions, you make your living by subs, retention of played out views, and ad revenue — the market decides.
I might suggest a name in keeping with Net nomenclature for an emerging breed of international correspondents in, say, 2030. They’re social influencer correspondents or simply influencer correspondents (ic).
Theirs is a focus on social interactions with people, whilst probing issues and their interactions. Remember the film Babel (2006) and how three different places were connected through circumstances and a firearm.
Meanwhile, Ghanaian vlogger Kobina Ackon known, who is commonly called Wode Maya has carved out a career making videos around social and personal issues. He was an Aeronautical Engineering grad from Shenyang Aerospace University, China before turning to the Net and now has over a million subscribers.
And there’s Nuseir Yassin from NAS DAILY with 47m followers.
Wode Maya, like Nuseir aren’t International correspondents in the definition of the term, but their reports are highly entertaining, socially connected and they’re not afraid of getting into scrapes.
Wode’s “The Safest & Most Peaceful Country In Africa Is NOT Recognized?Somaliland”, reminds me of my first travels to South Africa in 1991 and being surprised by the numerous stories that remained untold.
What if ICs could elide between the international correspondent we know of in TV and the vloggers mentioned. Should universities not be teaching that? Yassin’s academy was born out of universities failing to provide for a new generation.
These in-betweeners would benefit from a systems-thinking approach that linked international issues directly to the viewers.
By systems-thinking I mean finding connections between interdisciplinary issues and how they may impact viewers directly or indirectly — Babel.
These go beyond normative journalism as current knowledge, because it embeds histories, legacies, and personalisation, while framed by being impartiality. This doesn’t negate the importance of the present foreign correspondent, and more than traditional PR and Marketing has been replaced by brand influencers.
It’s merely a pivot into a third space to accommodate an appetite in current information with new technique and styles for capturing audienvces
So can it be taught? Of course! Will it in be tertiary education? Perhaps, when five years down the line new OFCOM data tells of how overwhelmingly people are getting their news from online and AI.
We might be in peril by then, a net suffocated by disinformation. Times ticking!
