NEWS | Wednesday, 25 February 2009

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Raphael Vassallo
“I’m glad nobody asked me whether the newspaper as we know it will disappear,” veteran French journalist Jean-François Fogel confessed after an hour’s talk on ‘The New Internet: Press vs Audience’, “That’s what I usually get asked…”
Journalist, writer and media consultant, Fogel has since 2000 been involved in the development of Le Monde’s web-site, France’s leading online news service.
Together with the rest of the world’s journalists – but from closer vantage point than most – he has observed, in the space of nine years, a veritable revolution in the sphere of global information gathering, consumption and delivery.
At the Chamber of Commerce in Valletta yesterday, he painted a stark but not entirely pessimistic picture of the uncertain future of journalism.
Departing from the recent world demonstration of the power of the internet – Obama’s sweeping victory at last November’s American presidential election – Fogel outlined the basic dynamic at work behind this quantum shift.
The “new tools” provided by the Internet require new ways of thinking and new adaptations to hitherto untapped resources. And as McCain discovered to his cost, this realisation enabled the Democratic candidate to reach out to a much larger audience than ever before… and more specifically, to enlist an unprecedented volume of willing and unwilling “volunteers”.
Obama’s Facebook group alone attracted two million supporters before the election: a number which has since grown to six million. With this platform already in place, all that remained was to supply his audience with his own message, and then give them the right tools and applications to disseminate it.
The implications for iconic media figureheads such as The New York Times have to date not been encouraging.
The world wide web itself has undergone a revolution in the past five years: major social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace have supplanted giant online shopping resources such as Amazon.com in the world’s top 10 websites; meanwhile, search engines like Google and online video resources such as Youtube have edged ever higher at the expense of virtually all the world’s main newspapers.
From a platform of service-provision, it seems the mainstream media now find themselves vying for public space, not with competing news providers, but with their own audience.
The result is as exciting as it is unpredictable: a constant flow of information across a broad spectrum of new media, in which there is no such thing as an “end user”: any news item can always be added to or repackaged by its own consumer.
But it is also challenging (if not downright worrying) for the professional journalist.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the traditional media still have a future,” Fogel predicted, “but to survive they will have to adapt to the new tools at their disposal and re-invent themselves, as they have already had to do with radio and television.”

Jean-François Fogel was brought to Malta by the Today Public Policy Institute and the French Embassy.

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