(Montreal) The media still has a future, but which one, wonders the editor-in-chief of the magazine THE Diplomatic worldBenoît Bréville who was in Montreal on Sunday.
The French journalist – who studied history at UQAM – hosted a round table with Éric-Pierre Champagne, president of the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec, on the future of the media. And their analysis of the situation is not encouraging.
The Quebec and global media landscape has seen itself tossed in all directions for several years, its feet caught in the carpet of a crisis with many faces. On this side of the ocean, the standoff with the GAFAM revealed a growing dependence of the Canadian and Quebec media on these platforms which served as relays for articles and reports. Time has shown that the media needs big Silicon Valley companies more than the other way around.
Across the Atlantic, another problem has recently darkened the horizon. The news that has been shaking the Middle East for several months reveals a bias in the media of our French cousins, another face of the content provider crisis. Everything is linked by a fundamental problem, the elephant in the room that always comes up: money.
“The last 15 years have introduced bad practices among readers, notably that of free information, and bad practices among newspapers, which have begun to produce information at a discount,” said Mr. Bréville.
Column or article?
“In a certain way, Quebec is a forerunner of what media can become with very few resources […] and we can see that there is a gradation in the degradation,” observes the French journalist at La Presse Canadienne.
Mr. Bréville says he sees “how a lack of resources can reduce the quality of information.” What he sees more and more, to his great regret, is what he calls “news commentary”, from the platform. In other words, texts which do not produce new information are not necessarily written by journalists, nor by experts on the issue, who will not require a field trip and above all, which will not cost much to produce.
It is the American model and its 24-hour news channels that have won over small screens around the world. A conception of information as a product that must be profitable and not as an essential service, he explains.
On this subject, Éric-Pierre Champagne adds a relative concern, not for costs, but for the public. This, he explains, does not necessarily see the difference between the different contents, the visual border of which displays a very vague marking, and makes the amalgamation between a journalistic article and a column, between facts and an opinion . “It’s another layer of confusion. I think we overestimate the capacity of the public. The difference is not as clear as you might think. »
Two-speed journalism
To this confusion, which has been in place for a long time, has been added more recently that of the creations of AI.
There is, of course, still some room before reading a ChatGPT report on the housing issue in the pages of the Duty or Montreal Journal, but its appearance in newsrooms reinforces the spiral of reducing the costs of producing information. One day, there will be no need for humans to take over an agency report or to comment on a match; AI will always do it more quickly than its flesh-and-blood predecessor and at a negligible cost.
Éric-Pierre Champagne and Benoît Bréville see a future with two-speed journalism: on one side, low-cost information produced by AI, and on the other the rarer information provided by major reporters, journalists in the field, but which are too expensive to produce to be accessible to all sections of the population.
All this is part of a vicious circle started with the first information websites, explains the editor-in-chief of Diplomatic world. The media offered free information online, hoping to leverage a brand effect that would encourage the public to then buy their newspaper at the stands.
However, he adds, the public has acquired a taste for free information and, logically, is less and less inclined to pay for information, driving down media revenues. This explains, he says, the appearance of paywalls on newspaper sites. But to survive this drop in revenue, the media have had to reduce their costs, generating “discounted information” whose added value hardly encourages people to pay to obtain it.
“ [L’information] which helps the public to better understand an increasingly complex world, points out Mr. Champagne. This is the one that costs the most. »
We must therefore reinvest massively in information, conclude the two journalists, and produce quality information, with high added value which will restore to the public the confidence it has lost in the media.
A large task given the current level of confidence. According to the latest survey on the subject from the Reuters Institute for Study of Journalism, the degree of confidence of Quebecers in their media is around 54%. A rate barely above average which is nevertheless the highest of the 46 countries surveyed.
Ironically, both men see this loss of confidence as a positive aspect. “Because it means that people are questioning the information,” laughs Benoît Bréville. They exercise their critical thinking. »