Deregulation is not convergence.
Deregulation is about the rules of ownership. Convergence is about … well, it’s about many things. It depends on your vantage point.
For technologists, convergence is the term for combining personal computers, telecommunications, and television into a single user device.
For some scientists, convergence means the meeting of two opposing currents of water or air.
You can find an investor’s definition, a mathematical definition, and a biological definition.
But what matters today is a definition for the media. Monday’s announcement by the Federal Communications Commission of the new rules governing media ownership puts great pressure on us to be clear as to:
- what convergence is
- what it means to our readers and viewers
- its importance to journalists
The easing of the rules that regulate the media industry, especially the ability of a company to own a television station and a newspaper in the same market, is seen by many as a convergence issue.
For many others, the change in media ownership rules is about politics and economics.
Economy Technology
For journalists, these economic issues -– the deregulation issues –- should matter a great deal. Ultimately, they’re about who you work for.
The economic factors have created the current media industry landscape, which is filled with large companies looking to find new revenue opportunities and new ways to reduce expenses. In theory, this is capitalism; it is the marketplace at work. At least, that’s the theory of deregulation proponents at the FCC.
However, economic issues are not convergence issues.
The ownership changes that are likely to follow the changes in the FCC’s rules for the media industry aren’t dependent upon any technological advancement. Consolidation as a result of deregulation is not driven by whether journalists have the ability to report for one, two, or even three different mediums. Those opportunities have been around for a long time.
Even the idea of putting broadcast and newsprint operations in the same building isn’t that new. In 1940, St. Petersburg Times owner Nelson Poynter purchased radio station WTSP [Welcome to St. Petersburg] for $80,000. Four years, later he moved into the Times offices, creating what was described in the Poynter biography “A Sacred Trust,” as adding “a circus air to a newspaper office already accustomed to hijinks.”
And while those St. Petersburg print and broadcast journalists shared resources 50 years ago, that wasn’t convergence. Much like many of today’s efforts across the country, those efforts were more a matter of cooperation.
Why do we worry about defining what convergence is or isn’t?
Defining Convergence
Poynter Launches Convergence Catalog
Help us catalog the news industry’s partnerships, collaborations, and convergence efforts by filling out this 5-minute form.
Convergence Chaser is a Poynter Online weblog focusing on multiple media. Sign up to receive it by e-mail.Journalists, industry executives, and educators hunt for the right vocabulary and standards. Without common language, it is hard to understand what others in the industry are doing. Without standards, it is hard to understand what is working –- for readers and journalists -– and what isn’t.
“The definition does matter because we are trying to come up with a common vocabulary in this new medium and if we all have a different concept of what convergence means, we are making it difficult to progress,” said Larry Pryor in an e-mail interview. Pryor is the director of the Online Journalism & Communications Program at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.
“If the industry’s convergence strategy is bound up with its appeal to the FCC to argue for cross-ownership, then one has to wonder how sincere this effort is. Cross-ownership may actually be a good thing, but when new technology is used as a justification for it, one has to wonder if there hasn’t been a hidden agenda behind the push for convergence.”
Rather than a hidden agenda, perhaps the challenge of defining convergence is just too amorphous. Or maybe convergence is more a process than an end point.
For many of the partnership experiments, convergence looks more like cooperation among groups that have little in common and few reasons to work together.
If you look at the many internal processes of gathering and organizing information that journalists use –- print, broadcast, online -– the convergence definition that describes the “meeting of opposing currents” has interesting relevance. Perhaps, the currents are less “opposing” than “differing.”
The image of flowing rivers coming together, mingling, and then flowing separately1 has appeal as it might be closer to what is actually happening today.
Swimming in Different Currents
Journalists often swim in different currents. The roles they have within their organizations depend on the medium they use. Today’s cooperation-convergence efforts might be more about finding ways to blend those different currents than about creating a single information stream that serves all readers-viewers-listeners.
Without standards, it is hard to understand what is working –- for readers and journalists -– and what isn’t? Journalists need to care about the convergence of information sources, according to Gil Thelen, senior vice president and executive editor of The Tampa Tribune. Information convergence is “where our customers are headed. News customers are agnostic about platform and typically use print, radio, TV, online [now wireless] throughout the day for news and information. A news and information organization, to be the source of choice, must ‘publish’ on a number of platforms that match customer needs.”
But is what The Tribune‘s Thelan talking about convergence? Or is it an extension of a concept developed pre-Internet called “author once, publish many,” that was the rallying cry for new forms of print publishing systems?
“A lot of the concept of convergence and the most-common working definition came out of a few industry experiences. If you take the API (American Press Institute) tour, read E&P, and corporate literature, it sounds great –- [a] bold experiment that is leading the way. But if you dig a bit, you begin to wonder if that isn’t a façade,” said Pryor.
“I’m not accusing anyone, at this point, anyway,” says Pryor. “But I’m a lot more skeptical than I was before of the standard industry definition.”
If the industry can’t define convergence or measure what’s being done, how can educators teach it as part of the journalism curriculum?
Teaching Convergence
One college journalism department says convergence is “All students working in all media in the same newsroom at the same time.” While that brings the “currents” together, or at least gives everyone a room to sit in, what happens to the journalism that will be put before readers-viewers-listeners?
USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism is trying to expose all of its incoming students to three forms of journalism: print, broadcast, and online. And, like flowing currents mingling, the school stresses the “commonalities, the concepts that cross over, such as fairness, thoroughness, balance, empathy, treatments of sources, and other ethical issues common in journalism.”
For many of the partnership experiments, convergence looks more like cooperation among groups that have little in common and few reasons to work together. USC calls this convergence, according to Pryor. “It’s worked fairly well. We’ve gotten a mixed reaction from students and are now revising our course materials to respond to their criticisms and problems we ourselves see. But every time there’s a New York Times or Wall Street Journal front page story that says ‘convergence isn’t working’ (based on AOL Time Warner quarterly statements or some obscure speech at an industry conference), everybody gets nervous and we think maybe we put our three eggs in the wrong basket.”
Getting the future right is one of the biggest challenges for journalism educators. If we can’t define convergence, how can they teach it? Andrew Nachison, director of the American Press Institute’s Media Center, has a fear that “convergence is all about creating super-journalists capable of doing everything.
“We won’t see the end of specialty skills, like video editing, graphic design, photography, TV reporting, and plain-old-text writing,” said Nachison.
He sees great potential for the role of the multi-tasking, multi-skilled journalist who will work in collaboration with specialists; the journalists who converge with colleagues before delivering news and information, regardless of the device the consumer has on the receiving end.
Moving Toward Consolidation
It is the consumer who ultimately brings this discussion back to the FCC’s action Monday. The deregulation changes, which will be cheered by some and reviled by others, will greatly affect what information is received.
For some, the consolidation in the radio industry is a painful lesson about how deregulation can change the news and information landscape at the local level. (At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on January 14, 2003, as reported by PBS, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) cited Minot, N.D., as an example of how consolidated media can negatively affect a local community, especially during an emergency.)
While deregulation isn’t convergence, it is very much about consolidation and cost-savings. API’s Nachison: The biggest myth [about convergence] is really a meta-myth. The myth is that convergence saves money. The companies that have pioneered convergence in the U.S. have not cut staff or reduced their expenses. Convergence has cost them money in equipment and training. But reality underlies the myth. Those companies haven’t saved money, but cost-savings and efficiencies remain an objective of media companies, and I have little doubt that media companies will seek ways to extract more value out of their convergence investments.”
Whether those investments will pay off depends, in part, on how convergence — and what constitutes successful convergence — is defined. One day we might all agree what the term means to journalists and journalism.
1Technical note: As interesting as the image might be, my favorite scientist tells me rivers, once together, don’t flow apart.
