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RSSSome time ago, a Michael Arrington post caught my attention. It asked, "If 'Real Journalism' Fails As A Business, Should Government Step In?" The question of what becomes of journalism in a new media world is something that has me worried (see: "All The News That's Fit To Monetize.")If, as is currently the case, sensationalism and scooping trump quality and social impact for driving traffic and monetization in new media, what becomes of journalism as we know it? It's a question that we are getting closer and closer to facing, if you consider the record decline in ad revenues stated in the latest newspaper print ad sales report.
Falling revenues from print advertising have led to more and more cost cutting, which adversely affects the quality of our news. Nick Davies, an investigative reporter for Britain's Guardian newspaper who has written a book on the subject, calls the effect "churnalism" -- the propensity for journalist to "recycle" news and press releases to meet new requirements to produce more stories, at the expense of more through research and creativity. Add to this the need to infuse more "pop culture" into news as link bait, and you have a potentially devastating combination.
Erick Schonfeld is uniquely qualified as a former employee of Time Inc. and current writer for TechCrunch (one of the most influential blogs on the Web), to outline the ways in which traditional journalism is becoming more like blogging every day. From Eric's post: "Just as more and more blogs are building up professional writing staffs, more and more newspapers and magazines are requiring that their writers start blogging....
"Our philosophy is that it is better to get 70 percent of a story up fast and get the basic facts right than to wait another hour (or a day) to get the remaining 30 percent. We can always update the post or do another one as new information comes in. More often than not, putting up partial information is what leads us to the truth -- a source contacts us with more details or adds them directly into comments."
I agree that for blogging this is the most important aspect. It is why I have TechCrunch in my news feed, and start and end most days reviewing the latest. I do believe this is as much a form of journalism as anything in The New York Times or Time. And finally, Eric captures what might be the most important attribute of blogging as a new-media form of journalism: the conversation that happens around the story.
But blogging is only ONE type of journalism. It just happens to be the only journalistic form with the proper cost structure, content publishing rates and monetization capabilities to survive in the current new-media landscape.
As much as I survive on my blog news feeds, they can't be all there is. How will new media support the work of long-form journalism? This is the same issue that faces other forms of content that have survived in print and television, but have yet to find the right infrastructure in new media to support their costs. The business school in me hates that I would say this, but I don't think the potential need for government support of media should be dismissed so easily. As many replied to Arrington's post, it has worked in other countries.
There are start-ups trying to figure out how distribution and monetization of news can be more effective in new media. One model I find particularly interesting is that of Publish2. (Full disclosure: Robert Young, co-founder of Publish2, is currently a board member of my company.) The concept of journalists as a community themselves, responsible for aggregating work that they feel represents the best quality and highest impact on society, is a concept I like. The challenge to Publish2 is to get a critical mass of journalist engaged in the community (the No. 1 challenge for any social media company), which is followed by the second challenge of monetization.
Perhaps journalism as we have known it can be saved by embracing the social media system that today threatens its existence -- but the question is, how do we bridge the gap? I know (or maybe I just hope) that people want to be accurately and artfully informed of world issues besides what Paris Hilton had for breakfast, but if it doesn't make money in new media...
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What I find irritating, is imitation. When what used to be top quality news content starts to sound like blogs. I subscribe to one newspaper because I want to be able to get news based on thorough research, correct and checked facts and with out all the noise. And I'm willing to pay for that though I can get an overview and discussion for free elsewhere.
They are loosing advertising income because of the free media and therefore they start to act more like the free media. Instead they should focus on what differentiates them from the blogs and make sure people are getting what they are paying for.
I believe that there is room for Paris Hilton's breakfast AND top-level journalism. There are times when I want my pop culture fix and then there are times when I want hard facts and I have vetted my own sources for that type of content.
I think that if each content publisher could have the guts to stay true to their journalistic mission - if it's fluff, then it's fluff...if it's more substantial, then don't veer into fluff - we'd be golden. It's all about adhering to the brand promise.
For example, there are sites like Women's eNews that remain totally true to reporting on the facts even as they work to shift their site to include more social/new media elements. They have decided that fluff is NOT for them no matter how attractive it is. They have built their brand on providing the striaght dope and are unwilling to bend.
I believe that more sites like Women's eNews can happen, but I'm willing to be surprised.
This is a concept I dislike and one reason journalism as we know it is failing. I read a story recently about how a Barak Obama speach was overlooked by the community of journalists, yet caught on through YouTube and other video posting sites. People were interested and wanted to know what was said. The media were not providing that. Eventually journalists were covering the fact that the video was so popular, not the news content of the video itself -- and they still haven't.
Journalists who believe they know what is and isn't news are missing the mark as consumers of news are going after the information they want, bypassing the journalists and their media.
If journalism's purpose is to collect and distribute facts, then YouTube (and other video sharing sites) are doing that more effectively than all the newspapers and news Web sites combined. Meanwhile, "The Most Trusted Name in News" is including inflamatory comment-tainment (commentary-based entertainment) to boost ratings and revenue, taking time away from hard news. I recently read that key social issues: transportation, education, aging and more each get less than one percent of the newshole (Research Brief: The Troubled News Media).
Journalism as we know it is failing, because people can get the facts without the benefit of the gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers are not telling the stories that people want to hear.
Davies' 'churnalism' model is basically wrong, becauses he's mistaking an increase in the volume of dross (which, to be fair to him, has been pretty much exponential over the decade) for a decline in the publication of quality content. Quality content, across the professional and citizen media, and across print and the web, may have declined as a proportion of the whole, but in real terms there is more of it available than ever.
It's simply the case that media consumers are having to learn to be more discerning. It's also the case that those consumers have much more power these days: they *award* their trust to media producers rather than unquestioningly offering it to those with the highest profiles.