DUMBING UP of online news content will help the traditional media survive the challenges it faces from new media outlets in the digital age, broadcaster Jon Snow said yesterday.
Mr Snow, the Channel 4 news anchorman, said print, radio and television find themselves in a difficult position at present, as they attempt to compete with free online news outlets, but he was confident they can overcome these problems.
“They’re in a strange hinterland now where they are unsure how they are going to make money, whether it will be through advertising, or if it will be through charging,” he said. “I feel fantastically optimistic. I know Channel 4 is running out of money, I know we’re under siege, but I feel confident.”
Speaking as part of a series of talks on the digital age at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, Mr Snow said the internet was no longer primarily a source of pornography or information that was dumbing people down. He was confident Channel 4, and other traditional media outlets, would find their own online niche.
“We will join Google . . . We will provide a service and excellent content will prevail . . . We have to be commercially successful in the digital age and we will do it by dumbing up, not down.”
Mr Snow (61) said his career had straddled the stone age and the digital age and that the world of news is moving faster than ever before with journalists now facing greater pressures than in the past.
“The process has changed beyond recognition . . . The digital age has to some extent led to less consideration of facts, less verification of facts. In many ways, the journalist has been besieged by the capacity to go live.”
Mr Snow said these pressures often mean a journalist does not have time to travel to the place where a story is developing and that viewers do not feel the same impact as a result.
However, he said he was “entirely in favour” of the digital revolution as the viewer has become increasingly involved in the news process.
“Now we have a fabulously democratic and open relationship with the viewer. The viewer knows my e-mail, the e-mail of the station and the editor.”
He said he was now “getting far more of a sense of what people think”, which was a more “holistic” way to operate.
“We can no longer simply throw information out into the ether and expect no consequence. That’s a wonderful thing. I don’t know how we got away with it in the past, but we did.”
