A conference on media diversity in Dublin organised by Nessa Childers MEP witnessed what can only be described as an extraordinary outburst of opinion by Alan Crosbie, the chairman of Thomas Crosbie Holdings.
Crosbie is the chairman of an ‘old media’ company that owns such newspapers as The Sunday Business Post and the Irish Examiner and he called on the Irish government to “address the threat to humanity posed by the tsunami of unverifiable data, opinion, libel and vulgar abuse in new media”.
He also pointed out that newspapers must pay journalists to write articles. “The fact is that to generate good information carries a cost. It requires money. Unless you steal it like most new media companies do.”

Talking s***e
There are two points to be made here. Firstly, the ‘tsunami of unverifiable data’ is actually for the most part opinion and conversation. It’s what happens when people share information and opinion across the web. Does Crosbie storm into busy pubs in Cork at the weekend and berate the people gathered there for talking s***e? Hopefully not.
Secondly, “to generate good information carries a cost”. Yes it does. To get good writing you must pay good writers. To get good investigative journalists you must pay them. The better your writers, the better your newspaper sales, and if you are determined to survive in the new media age you would also employ great online journalists who are deeply aware of the role social media plays in promoting your great writers and great stories.
In today’s new media age, you can’t just run a great newspaper without also running a powerful digital division.

Cozy with PR
Crosbie is not the first old media baron to lament the demise of his industry. The most famous of them all is Rupert Murdoch, who misunderstands the digital age so much he believes Google is a ‘blood sucking parasite’, stealing other publishers’ content and selling ads around it.
These are the men who were brought up to believe that in media ‘content is king’, and to a point they are correct. Content to them is something valuable, it’s a tangible asset,

Alan Crosbie

and they pay people to create it much as factory bosses pay their employees to create stuff.
There was no mention, by the way, of the role that the public relations (PR) industry plays in what people read in newspapers. A vast number of the articles and stories that appear in Crosbie’s papers have their origin in a press release or piece of ‘research’ commissioned by a private company. No mention also of the close relationship many crime journalists have with the police forces. No mention of the cozy relationship many Dáil reporters have with TDs and their mandarins. In other words, the content that appears in many newspapers may not be as objective as it appears – there is always some interested party behind a story.

Rivers of gold
What Crosbie doesn’t appear to grasp is that ‘old media’ still plays a role in the overall media landscape but it no longer owns the space as it once did.
The biggest threat to newspapers and the regional press is not the odd site that ‘aggregates’ content and tries to build an audience using clever headlines pushed out via social media channels. No. It’s sites like DoneDeal.ie and Adverts.ie and CBG.ie. The biggest threat to newspapers is the demise of the classified ads, or as Rupert Murdoch called them ‘The rivers of gold’. Why pay €40 for an ad that will appear once in print to a limited audience of thousands when the same ad, plus pictures, plus video can appear on a website (until it is sold) for just a few euro?
Then there’s the rise in popularity of Facebook and Twitter and the part they will play in the death of many newspapers in the coming years. And what about smartphones and the iPad and the emergence of the citizen journalist? Anyone armed with a camera phone can now shoot, record and upload content to the web for people to form opinions on. You don’t need highly paid editors for that and besides, how objective are such editors anyway?
Disruptive forces in media emerge all the time. Television news didn’t kill the newspaper, nor did 24 hour news channels. TV didn’t kill cinema. Bit torrents won’t kill TV; and new media sites won’t kill newspapers.
Crosbie’s belief that the web “has the capacity to destroy civil society and cause unimaginable suffering”, sounds like something Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would say.
John Lloyd, an editor with the Financial Times, said Crosbie’s talk showed ‘the passion of desperation’ and indeed these are desperate times for newspapers. Many will not survive the next couple of years as more and more people go online; and when such newspapers are gone the world will not fall apart. People will still write, people will still read and people will still make up their own minds if what they read is correct.
It would be foolish to believe anything written in a newspaper is fact, much in the same way it would be foolish to believe a press release, a government statement or a blog. At the end of the day people will gravitate towards good writing that informs them. It doesn’t matter to most people where that writing is published.

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