'Excellent content will prevail'

The “dumbing up” of online news content will help the traditional media survive the challenges it faces from new media outlets in the digital age, British broadcaster Jon Snow said today.

Mr Snow, the Channel 4 news anchorman, said print, radio and television find themselves in a difficult position at present, as they attempt to compete with free online news outlets, but that he was confident they can overcome the problems they currently face.

“They’re in a strange hinterland now where they are unsure how they are going to make money, whether it will be through advertising or if it will be through charging,” he said.

“I feel fantastically optimistic. I know Channel 4 is running out of money, I know we’re under siege, but I feel confident.”

Speaking as part of a series of talks on the digital age at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin this afternoon, Mr Snow said the internet was no longer primarily a source or pornography or information that was dumbing people down, and that he was confident Channel 4, and traditional media outlets like it, would find their own niche.

“We will join Google...We will provide a service and excellent content will prevail...We have to be in the digital age. We have to be commercially successful in the digital age and we will do it by dumbing up, not down.”

Mr Snow (61) said his career had straddled the stone age and the digital age and that the world of news is moving faster than ever before with journalists now facing greater pressures than in the past.

“Things are moving very fast,” he said. “The process has changed beyond recognition... The digital age has to some extent led to less consideration of facts, less verification of facts.

“In many ways the journalist has been besieged by the capacity to go live, the capacity to do it now, by the capacity to get things on very quickly.”

Mr Snow said these pressures often mean a journalist does not have time to travel to the place a story is developing and that viewers do not feel the same impact as a result.

“That factor of trust doesn’t really develop. You don’t make as much of an impact if you’re not seen in the place you’re reporting from. If you’re just sitting infront of a few screens in a cutting room it reduces people’s belief that you know what you’re talking about.”

However, he said he was “entirely in favour” of the digital revolution as the viewer has become increasingly involved in the news process.

“Now we have a fabulously democratic and open relationship with the viewer. The viewer knows my email, the email of the station and the editor.”

He said he was now “getting far more of a sense of what people think”, which was a more “holistic” way to operate.

“We can no longer simply throw information out into the ether and expect no consquence. That’s a wonderful thing. I don’t know how we got away with it in the past, but we did.”