Why is media so… conservative?

UK media can be a mess of contradictions. The perception is that most newspapers lean right, but that most journalists lean left. This is a useful generalisation from my point of view – although I have very deep respect for those journalist friends I have whose political leanings I have no idea about, even after knowing them for a couple of decades. That's an impressive commitment to impartiality…

But, subject-wise, I find journalists to be, on the whole, very conservative. One of the difficult things for me about this time of the academic year — final project time — is that students come up with the most fascinating and intriguing subjects for their final projects. The sort of things I would love to read about in the mainstream press, but rarely see.

And then they go off into good jobs, and slowly have that wide-ranging vision of what journalism could be squeezed out of them. I'm not sure we're taking gaming seriously enough as a subject for reporting and criticism yet, for example, despite the fact that's it's considerably bigger than Hollywood.

And other emerging forms of culture barely get a look-in.

Reporting on immersive theatre

Here's a very good question on exactly that topic:

Post by @philgyford@mastodon.social

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Adrian Hon had some good thoughts in response to that question:

Outlets can and do rely on freelancers and contractors to review immersive art. However, the instability of income makes it hard to find someone who can dedicate their time to have the breadth of knowledge and experience to properly contextualise what they’re seeing. The same problem exists for film and books and TV and games, but at least it’s easier for people to sample the canon from voluminous online libraries – less so for immersive art.

So, there's two distinct parts to this:

• Publications' willingness to cover these emerging forms
• Their ability to support developing expertise in their coverage

Obviously, the latter is a more complex issue. As news organisations shrink, the ability for them to hire specialists in some fields evaporates. And, even if you can develop subject specialism, that often leads to your departure from journalism…

The poacher turned gamekeeper

Adrian also makes a link back to games and games journalism here:

The same applies to games too, of course. Games, like immersive experiences, suffer from a revolving door issue where critics often end up being hired into the industry. Some of the best game developers are former academics and journalists! It’s hard to blame critics for taking a steady job and a pay increase, but it does mean that the most experienced writers are also conflicted. 

One of my best friends, the sadly deceased Andy Butcher, followed exactly this path. From university, he became a games journalist at Dennis and then Future, before moving into games community management and then finally games design. I'm (mildly) guilty of that myself. I used to review TTRPGs for Future's Arcane magazine (which Andy was deputy editor of), and when that closed, ended up writing a load of them myself. However, that branch of gaming paid terribly, and I had no incentive to leave journalism for it…

And so, as in so much of journalism today, we find ourselves in a bind. We desperately need to grow our audiences, and adapt to the times. But we no longer, in most places, have the resources to experiment with new reporting beats without a sense that it will reap an immediate commercial benefit.

The reality of the mainstream news economy

And perhaps that's where the central premise of the original question is flawed. In the current media economy, we're far more likely to see a couple of journalistically-trained immersive art enthusiasts set up something new on Substack or Ghost than are ever likely to see the mainstream titles turn their eyes that way.

Not, perhaps, what the artists want to hear; it won't bring swift mainstream attention to them. But it's probably the reality of 2020s publishing.

But, lurking behind all that is the reluctance of mainstream media to spread its reporting — or reviewing, in this case — into new areas. Perhaps it's foolish to wonder if expanding our beats earlier might have done something to stave of the decline we're seeing now. But I can't help wondering.

Still, that time is long gone. There's only a handful of titles left with the resources to even contemplate this. And that leaves a gap in the market for the independent its to rise.