Is online journalism a dying practice?

Former Complex Media senior writer Adam Caparell opens up about the past and future of online journalism.

“We’re seeing more and more outlets disappear,” says Adam Caparell, “They can’t hack it” he adds. The media game for years has been highly volatile and hard to accurately grasp. In the last 2 decades, there has been a major shift from print media to digital media, in accordance with the global shift towards an internet-based world. Many thought this would enhance and positively revolutionize media, however, things have not quite turned out that way. With years of experience on his back, in an interview with Aurum Post, Adam Caparell reveals the ins and outs of online journalism and media.

It has been widely accepted that print media has been overtaken by digital media in the past decades. Adam mentioned that “Magazines have been a dying industry for a long time”. Although this may seem ideal as media advances digitally alongside all other fields in an internet-based world, it may not be as good as it seems. Print media required consumers to exchange their money for a magazine, newspaper, or journal. Nowadays, in the world of the internet, consumers are able to eat up as much media as they wish, in most cases, free of charge. This “opens up a pandora’s box” as Adam mentioned. Companies struggle to produce ad-based revenue too, he adds. “These entities really messed up not charging for their content”. Adam’s views on the topic are self-admittingly skeptical, however, he is not a born skeptic, but rather his experience in the world of digital media has led him down the road of pessimism.

Another issue that arises for journalists and media as a whole is people’s attention span. Adam was able to offer a statistic on the average consumer reading time when he was working at Complex. “The average amount of time that someone would spend on a story is 2 minutes. It takes a lot longer to read a 4000-word really well-reported, researched, and nuanced story”. This is what digital journalism is currently experiencing. An attention span crisis where people, in general, for a variety of reasons, cannot concentrate for longer than two minutes on an article that, ultimately, they have chosen to read.

Adam believes that “it is great that content is put out there for everyone to read”, however, he mentions that “it is even better if it is put behind a paywall." Caparell makes a fair point. Journalists, like other employees in companies, need to be rewarded for their efforts. Media companies need to make sufficient funds in order to reward the journalists, otherwise, they cannot keep them working. This gives rise to the question: Is journalism a dying practice because there is no money to support journalists, or is journalistic content slowly dying?

Adam gave us a straight answer. “To make money (as a journalist) you have to, most of the time, do content that is the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that is really appealing, that may not necessarily push the culture along” “It may not necessarily be something that gives the audience some utility in some way, shape or form, but here in America where the almighty dollar speaks more than anything else, if you are not doing stuff that brings in traffic and ad sales, then you are not going to be in the job for long.” With his experience, Adam is able to confidently state that the industry is slowly deteriorating from the inside and out. People, in general, do not want to consume informative content but rather content that entertains them for short periods of time. He even mentioned that personally a lot of the articles his editors ask him to write don’t fulfill his journalistic needs. Vague, unresearched, and hardly detailed articles are much of what editors in media companies such as Complex ask for.

Adam was able to share his honest thoughts on a highly complex industry where changes depend on society and culture, and their workings. Nonetheless, he has not lost faith in digital media or media as a whole, however, he fears that rich, nuanced, thoroughly worked journalism, is fading away and may never come back.