A rare expert who can't decide
by Peter Preston Posted Wed, Dec 2 2009
It’s hard when people call you an expert. If I’m an expert doctor qualified in the highest reaches of medicine, then I’ve surely got all my swine flu forecasts wrong. If I’m an expert economist, then don’t crunch my recovery numbers too hard, please. If I’m an expert banker, then bury my heart at Wounded Knee. And as for an expert on media futures…
Three years ago in London, freesheets were the shape of that future as nearly two million of them a day flooded the capital’s streets. Experts hymned their inevitable rise. But did anyone, taking one thing with another, make money from this manic game? No, just huge losses. And around the world, across America and Europe, a more sombre assessment rules: perhaps you can make money from free papers if the market is right, the economy is buoyant and you’ve got no competition — but don’t bank on it.
So where can an expert turn next? To the wonders of advertising growing almost exponentially on the Internet whilst print, posters and TV stalled? Whisper it gently, but the Net is a tangle, too: stalled in the U.S. until 2013 on some forecasts and showing no sign of improving its yield elsewhere. Or the wonders of hyper-local Web sites as pioneered by the Washington Post and others? Don’t bother to whisper: the Post has just scrapped its experimental trailblazer whilst very little is heard from the small sites who made a big noise 12 months ago.
Experts (remember) told Rupert Murdoch to buy MySpace, but now his Facebook’s red. Experts invented YouTube, but forgot to find a business model for it that worked. Experts a’plenty hymn the free digital revolution in newspaper articles and books, which they expect to get paid for. The expert view on charging for newspaper site access has switched more times in a decade than prophesies of Afghanistan triumph. Frankly, honestly, humiliatingly, there is no piece of received wisdom today that can’t be proved rubbish tomorrow. And experts — because they’re supposed to have clear, decisive, incontrovertible opinions — are really the worst guides through the quagmire of the lot.
For becoming an expert also means embracing a position you need to explain or defend. That’s why we call expert witnesses to testify on our side in court. We want somebody who knows his stuff to confirm the version of events we already believe. But apply that approach to almost any media debate and see how frail it becomes. The experts who prophesy the irresistible rise of Internet advertising often work for small Internet ad companies. The experts who predict an imminent world without newspapers work for universities or companies that have signed up for the digital dream. And — yes! — those few contrary experts who still find much life in print also get their bread and butter earnings from the feeding systems of the press world.
Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of this but also nothing surprising, too. Rupert Murdoch, over the past few years, has: a) called the Internet not very important, b) hailed it as very important and, for the most part, run his Web sites free, c) turned turtle entirely and begun a rush to charge for news site access. In sum, he’s changed his mind three times, and, at each stage, experts are anxious to sign up to whatever Murdoch line is current and explain why it must be true.
What goes for the Net, moreover, also goes for iPhones, iPods and the rest — even for the great god television itself, supposedly on the point of destruction because you can stream any TV show or film you like onto your laptop. The possibilities for complication are endless. So are the resources of technology, apparently. Yet pause every once in a while and ask the question I’ve just been posing: What was the expert consensus two/five/ten years ago, and how well does that judgment survive today?
Answer (in Britain, and many places besides): it doesn’t. Television was the strongest medium going, then the most commercially threatened in a downturn, yet now it begins to look stronger again. Newspapers would either be barely affected by the Net or digitally erased from history in a trice. (Neither verdict looks true for the time being). There’s a list of duff predictions expanding day by day.
Indeed, I’ve compiled that list for so long I’m a virtual expert in dodgy decision-making. So much so, in fact, that I think there’s only one area of expertise worth the mastering, which is simply to know what nobody can possibly know. Newspapers dead in 15 years? Perhaps in some places; perhaps not.
Of course, experts can’t write columns whilst sucking their thumbs. Of course, readers want crisp certainties not soggy complexities with their cornflakes. But somewhere in the midst of that familiar melee — experts shouting the odds at each other in a TV studio — a small, quiet voice deserves its brief hearing. Don’t ask me, governor; I haven’t a clue. I’m that rarest of all big media breeds: the expert who can’t decide.
Peter Preston
Global Journalist columnist Peter Preston is editorial director of the Guardian Media Group and was the chairman of IPI from 1995 to 1997.