Attention to detail

Legacy media's decline and the rise of citizen journalism; focus on details and challenge biases to build credibility

For a long time in my writing and journalism career, young people routinely contacted me, asking me for help getting published or finding exposure on television. As someone who has never allowed any form of restrictions, bans or adverse economy to come in the way of my free expression, I kept reminding them that we live in the most miraculous age of the democratisation of free expression. Glitchy and problematic, as sometimes our online experience might be, the advent of the internet, of cheap dotcoms with software like WordPress ushering in the era of the blogosphere and now social media offer simply delicious avenues for expressing yourself. You can even learn to reach an audience beyond your wildest dreams with small skills like SEO customisation. That is, of course, if you are not obsessed with finding a foothold in the legacy media. I take no pleasure in declaring that the legacy media now operates far beyond its expiry date.

This end of the shelf life and growing irrelevance are partly explained by and partly responsible for the lousy journalism you witness in the country. Ask yourself why, in a country where fifty to sixty news channels operate, none except a few regional news channels have a full-time operational studio in Peshawar, Quetta, Muzaffarabad or other growing cities. Do these provincial capitals or big cities have nothing to add to the national discourse, or do their voices not matter to the media conglomerates? These cities and provinces contribute to their revenue streams but somehow do not deserve representation. And before you offer me some flimsy excuse and an explanation, let me pre-empt it by saying that I could understand it if there were only five to ten news channels. But with this staggering number, all excuses are lame. So, irrelevance was inevitable, and their output is symptomatic of this decline. Government regulators like PEMRA that issue these licences have much to answer for, but that is a conversation for another time.

What has changed so subtly is the organising principle of the content. In the olden days, when you needed to read or watch a report, you needed to wait a considerable amount of time to get to it. For example, a newspaper in the morning or special supplements in the evening. Or sitting through an entire bulletin to get to a story. But now, if you go to the website of a newspaper or a news channel, you can get to what you are looking for instantaneously. And if you are an extensive news network, if you snooze, you lose. But that, too, is yesterday's news. Media executives practically killed the institution of editors. Oh, the positions exist, of course. But we know the business executives get to have the final say in the content of the non-niche organisations. Perpetual disruptor that the technology is it exacted revenge on the behalf of editors. With dwindling revenue streams and a plethora of free content on social media sites, these media houses have to compete with an individual citizen's ingenuity. It is like Innovative Online Industries (IOI) competing with individual gunters in Ready Player One's Oasis world. Man, is there any dearth of talent out there?

A few years ago, all these young people wanted to get associated with these big media houses because only there could you achieve a measure of financial stability. But there is a problem with that. We live in a country where privilege is everything. Here, the rich and the privileged like to give only to the rich and the privileged. I do not forget the dramatic transformation in the demeanour of an editor in my early career when I told him that, being a student, it was not affordable for me to commute from my hostel to the office on the meagre salary being offered and I might need a pick-and-drop service which was incidentally available for that area. Another editor/director I knew as a friend liked to provide paid internships to promising, bright young people. But was it a coincidence that all such internees used to arrive in either BMWs or Mercedes? If you were from a working-class background, you needed to go through impossible pressures. And there are disturbing, unprintable stories that I do not even want to talk about. Mercifully, that era is over. Now, you are the king if you have a decent midrange smartphone, a corner to sit in, or a working computer with decent internet connectivity.

If you think this only marks the end of the legacy media, do not be so sure. In my humble opinion, this is the start of the dissolution of the journalism profession. What replaces it is the real question. The smart money is on what we call citizen journalism for the time being. Will it last? There is no way to know that. Technology continues to disrupt. YouTubers never saw TikTok coming. Attention spans are shrinking. The generative AI ambushed Wikipedia in the same way wikis made Britannica and Encarta irrelevant. And the devices keep changing, too. In the age of acceleration, where Moore's law makes everything smarter every year, Elon Musk is still experimenting with brain interfaces. We, ladies and gentlemen, live in the era once imagined by science fiction. Hence, it is impossible now to predict what comes next.

The query I now get apart from your disarming affection is regarding methodology. While many try to vilify online content creators, from their eager queries, I know they want to do justice to their work. I ask them to do just one thing. Pay attention to details. This is the whole point of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, The Black Swan. Our cognitive biases and shortcomings force us to ignore many developments happening in the background. It takes these developments only a little prodding to take over the story and reshape it. It is important to work against these biases and limitations. An analyst needs to separate themselves from their immediate sense perception and view their analysis from a different vantage point. This becomes second nature with effort and time, and attention to detail always helps. Also, reading books helps a lot. No matter how often you are told books are boring, uncool, and a waste of time, they are always helpful. And there is no single book that can get you there. Consider it a journey and take a few steps in any direction.

I will write another piece dedicated to my methodology. But right now, I need to posit that this affection and love you folks shower me with seemed to become unavoidable when I amended my methodology with more attention to detail and an ability to challenge my own biases. This, your originality and your readiness to accept your mistakes will go a long way in helping you in establishing your credibility and winning a loyal audience that withstands all the tests of technological transformations and time.