Why it's a worrying time for journalism graduate students like me

On Sunday (August 7), television host and comedian-turned-political commentator John Oliver, on his show Last Week Tonight, called a spade a spade and brought down contemporary multi-platform digital "journalism" (or viral content generation —  basically hogwash that passes off as news on Facebook Instant and news aggregator websites) to the ground and then shat on it before burying it six feet under. 

The next day, I saw my journalism class fellows sharing the video with smilieys and words like "Ouch”.

I belong to a fresh batch of some 190-plus J-School graduates who joined various news organisations, in various capacities, in TV, print, and digital, all over India, in the past two months and as you are reading this, most of them are disillusioned with their jobs.

They express it during private conversations, over Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, or even while catching up on the street.

"Hey man, how's your new job going?"

"F**k all bro, gotta do cat videos."

"Who are these people who share Kareena's baby bump photos? It's got like 15k shares!"

"My boss stresses on doing these puppy videos, so the readers come for this shit but then stay on the website for ISIS or Dalit stories."

"You know how I do business stories? I sold a story on rising stocks as Stocks that will see a Kabali rise, pretty neat eh?" 

If a news organisation is a business and the function of a business is to make money, then the job of a well-functioning business is to generate revenue and if revenue in the digital news business is measured by views, clicks, shares, and likes, by how viral content can get, it makes sense for newsmakers to target the lowest common denominator, who will read and share whatever appeals to their basest (*Boob pic revealed; Watch beheading video*) or the simplest (This toddler Vs kitten video will make your day) instincts. 

A 2015 research paper by Microsoft Advertising says that the average attention span of humans plunged from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013, which is a second lesser than the attention span of a goldfish.

Combine that with our propensity to get free content on the internet without paying those who generate it and you are going to witness a decline in the quality of information you consume. 

When impressionable 22-year-olds or older students who leave their plum jobs and enrol for a journalism course with hopes of becoming the next P Sainath or Ravish Kumar (if not the next George Orwell or Walter Cronkite) graduate only to sit at their desks and concentrate day in, day out to produce something silly and get those coveted numbers on Google Analytics, they are bound to question what they are doing! 

Understandably, senior editors will scoff at such idealism and one cannot blame them or the idealistic graduates.

In this story in the March issue of Fountain Ink — which investigates why Indian online content giant ScoopWhoop is what it is — a founding member of the company says, "Serious articles don't do as well, the readers leave the page" referring to a Vice-like documentary ScoopWhoop did on North India and guns that "underperformed according to ScoopWhoop's standards".

On the other hand, stories that would engage you within seconds, which would hardly put your intellect to work, and the ones that would get you the LIKES are the order of the day. Mind you, most legacy media giants, their digital wings armed for battle, crave for the kind of online popularity ScoopWhoop enjoys among millennials.

But they too are trapped in their values, perhaps, to inform you about "What that girl did in the mall's trial room will blow your mind". 

And, perhaps, the young 'uns from J-schools, high on the the kool-aid of school of slum journalism, are finding it difficult to come to terms with a world whose market is not interested in poverty, human stories, tales of oppression and struggle — stories that inspire one to become a journalist in the first place — unless they can be sold with a popular face or phenomenon that has a proven record of generating clicks, views, likes, you name it (hence, the Kabali stocks). 

Is the quality of journalism - the practice of bringing information to the public - losing in the race to go viral? Or has journalism’s meaning changed? If one argues it is the latter, it would mean what was important to us, say three decades ago, is not important to us anymore. But that's not true.

India still has the same problems — poor quality of life, inflation, price rise, corruption, religious tension, sexual violence, racism, class conflict, et al. 

So, is "kitten journalism" all smoke and mirrors? Is the contemporary business of journalism enlightening and empowering us for real? Or does it simply keep us sedated and occupied like brain-dead consumers of this cancer called "content"?