Scripting News: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)
Jo 'Mediamum' White
· 9 months ago
Gee, what I wouldn't give to hear this again and again and again. :) Thanks. The death of journalism? I hope not, death of a medium, yes. And I do think that death brings with it a greater scrutiny on the crappy job journalists have been doing (which arguable led to their current strife). My latest blog post also considers this, with some interesting reader comments you might enjoy. I see this as potentially an exciting time for journalism. And if they'd get past the mourning they could possibly see it too. http://mediamum.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/an-exc...
dave
· 9 months ago
It's all deliberately worded to catch the essence of the conversation that's happening RIGHT NOW.
I hope it's true and maybe the next piece can be THE REBIRTH OF JOURNALISM.
Kelby
· 9 months ago
Great post! I am a former newspaper reporter who ditched that nasty print habit. And I am sooo agreeing on "we could be booting up the next version of journalism." I am doing that right now... see http://investigativemommyblogger.com (1st investigation will hopefully post this week). There will never stop being a need for news... the need for newspapers? Long gone.
hardaway
· 9 months ago
Tough, but true, Dave. There are some awesome blogs going on by former journalists: Rogue Columnist, GoozNews, etc. Turns out they are not starving and can do good work without a newsroom. They get their news like we do, and then they interpret it.
dave
· 9 months ago
Cool. I still want a newsroom. I want to be part of it though, can I be a former journalist too?? :-)
justcorbly
· 9 months ago
"They get their news like we do, and then they interpret it."
If they get their news from reporters, then they are not adding to the pool of news. When the news producers they rely on go away, what are they going to do?
My local daily recently bought out their lead investigative reporter, someone with 30 years at the paper who typically spent weeks and months preparing and researching stories of gross behavior by the usual suspects. I think it is naive to expect that production to be replaced by unpaid bloggers. Few of us can afford to spend weeks and months doing something unless we are paid to do it.
If the Post hadn't been around, would Deep Throat have leaked to a D.C. blogger? Maybe, but would that D.C. blogger have had the resources and the financial means to stay with the story?
I hope, and expect, that we will see news production move online with commercial outlets functioning as coordinators and publishers for decentralized news producers. (Whether that can work locally and regionally is a good question.) But, that's not blogging, it's news production.
hardaway
· 9 months ago
Well, Merrill Goozner still attends the same hearings he used to when he was a reporter to produce GoozNews. Does he have resources, no. But in his segment, where he reports on Big Pharma, he is able to produce both news (what happened at the hearing) and interpretation (why it happened.
person of choler
· 9 months ago
I took a look at Rogue Columnist and gooznews. The authors view the news through the same left wing filters used by the traditional news industry. More Obama cheerleading. Snore.
David Temkin
· 9 months ago
No, the obvious take-away of the downward spiral of the news industry is not that readers aren't happy with what the news business is producing. In fact, a lack of readers isn't the problem -- do some research into how many people read the NY Times, for example, now vs. pre-web. More, not fewer.
The problem is that the news industry's business model is being deconstructed. Classified ads, job listings -- they've been unbundled from the news, where they used to support reporting. No longer possible. So there's less and less money to fund reporting.
A more productive discussion would address the issue of how to support reporting in a world where the old business models don't work. What's your take on that question?
dave
· 9 months ago
If people loved the news organizations we'd be working our asses off to keep them going as-is. You don't see that happening. What you ask has been asked over and over, it's a way for corporate media to ask for their handout. They get the reporters to beg on their behalf. Maybe -- but first tell us what's in it for us. Isn't that fair, shouldn't you first sell us a little, romance us a bit, rather than just assume the right to OUR money??
Dan Lewis
· 9 months ago
Mr. Winer:
I think you are writing off Mr. Temkin's point (which is overstated some) too quickly. He's right -- the margins that newspapers are used to have shrunk dramatically. Whether that is a proximate cause of a fall in investigative journalism is anyone's guess, but let's assume, as Mr. Temkin postulates, it is. At that point, it becomes a valid if not necessary question.
Also, I did not parse Mr. Temkin's comment re: "support[ing] reporting" to be a request for a handout. I think he is asking, fundamentally, how news organizations should structure themselves and seek revenue in a way which allows those organizations to provide the product you correctly desire.
dave
· 9 months ago
This conversation has focused on the news organizations too long. Not here too, okay -- here we talk about the whole picture and that includes the people who are part of the news equation that the news industry always leaves out. You can have that discussion elsewhere with someone else, I'm not interested -- it's about 10 years too late to be asking that question.
nstrange
· 9 months ago
I grew up with my dad delivering the nightly news back in the 70's when news was.. news. Lucky for my dad he graduated onto greener pastures in the late 80's so he didn't have to see the fact reporting turn to cinderella or "make what we want them to believe". It's as if Toto has pulled back the curtain to reveal the Oz of our nation's demise. That's for keeping the pressure on them and keep up the good journalism. The pen is mightier than the sword (or should I say Twitter rocks the free speech world) and we have the ability to get truth back out there. I have to return to helping thousands of business owners create more money to save themselves, their teams and create more money to pay for people that don't want to work.. so gotta run.
There are a number of great journalist that I love and respect - that I read every word of. Then there are the rest that made me cancel the free daily paper that I was given for order the Suday paper (for the coupons). It's just not worth waking my dog up who then wakes the wife and me up at 6am.
Cheers!
Dan Lewis
· 9 months ago
I think you are conflating "the newspaper industry" with "journalism". This is entirely understandable, because in general, newspapers house the investigative journalism we are used to, with 60 Minutes being one of the few exceptions.
But there's nothing inherent to newspapers which make it the final (and only) bastion of journalism. There probably *was* something to it for the 100 years ending in the mid 1990s, and I discuss some of that at http://www.centernetworks.com/how-to-save-newsp... -- and the formerly huge profit margins certainly helped, too. But the Web changed all that and irreversibly so.
Newspaper companies can still adapt. If they don't, they'll die, for reasons you state and many others. But journalism will still remain.
Tony
· 9 months ago
I don't think the news business is dying because people are unhappy with the job that they are doing. The business is dying because the business model doesn't make sense anymore. The revenue stream that keep the business going, classifieds and other ads, is drying up and no one knows what to do about it.
You could also argue the people don't have to wait for the news to be deliver now when they can go grab it, from multiple sources, so there is no reason to wait for the local paper to deliver the national news.
Just saying.
dave
· 9 months ago
No one knows why it's dying, there are theories and points of view. You're spinning it one way. Another way to spin it is that the news industry evolved around an assumption that distribution would always be hard and expensive. When that stopped being true, they clung to the past, or a vague belief that they could convince the government to pay their salaries. However, when they did that, they failed to consider how that would change their practice, which already couldn't look into the corporate media entities that owned them, now they wouldn't be able to look into the government too. So eventually new ways of getting news to the people had to evolve because what remained of the news industry was unable to report on any of it.
That's another way to spin it. Not saying it's true, but there might be some truth to it. All I know is what you say is what I keep hearing over and over, and I don't believe it any more than I believe any other theory.
barrybowen
· 9 months ago
Mr. Lewis,
Investigative journalism is endangered by lawyers for big media companies. I know of an investigative piece that wasn't published because the lawyers for a newspaper said they would have to spend a lot of money to fight a libel suit if the article were published. Even though the reporter had six sources backing up the story, it wasn't published.
Nice article, Dave. There is no resisting an idea who's time has come.
Zacqary Adam Green
· 9 months ago
I like the idea of politicians or well-known people responding to just about anyone, as opposed to restricting their comments to reporters. The question is, without money being made off of journalism anymore, will that make good reporting rarer? With the obligation to hold a day job at the same time, will a blogger have the time and energy to do in-depth investigative reporting?
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm skeptical about whether we'll still get coverage of some important things, like the Darfur genocide (I doubt any of the refugees have access to their WP-Admin pages at the moment), without somebody working full time to go in there and do the reporting. Do you know how that kind of thing might continue after traditional journalism dies?
mikep
· 9 months ago
How much simpler can it get than that?
I think you are exactly right. The reason the news industry is failing is because they are no longer providing any news. Certainly in Washington it is all about the access a reporter has to "inside sources" that simply lead to being a mouthpiece of those in power rather than anything remotely resembling journalism any longer.
So let me add my voice to yours... Dear news people -- WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE JOB YOU'RE DOING.
Do some journalism again that requires some critical thinking by an informed citizenry for a change and produce a product worth consuming again. Competition is tough. Produce a better product if you want to survive and you will reach your audience.
michael schrage
· 9 months ago
speaking as a former msm journalist: no - 'we' won't miss 'them' when they're gone...any more than we'll miss bad lawyers, crappy doctors and school teachers who can't teach but do know how to preserve their jobs with union muscle...
...'journalism' is changing not just because technological discontinuities have annihilated traditional msm monopoly and oligopoly and the anachronistic business models that suppor them BUT also because - objectively & subjectively - its marginal value is declining relative to its marginal cost TO THE USER...
your own knee-jerk opinionating on topics you clearly know little about (as opposed to web stuff you know ACRES about) is a good case-in-point: as a mediatech pundit, your insights are useful and your biases are clearly on the surface of your expression; as a 'sociomedia' political pundit, you couldn't be more predictable than if i had programmed you myself...
journalism isn't dying - it's committing suicide and simply refuses to be helped...it used to be tragic; now it's farce
Drive by
· 9 months ago
Rove ate your lunch. There is a psychosocial researcher at University of Virginia who spent a lot of time studying the debating techniques of liberals and conservatives. He said that, despite the fact that he was a liberal, he found that liberals don't debate, they preach out of certainty; facts be damned. The typical debate course for a liberal, which you followed almost exactly "Reject first, ask rhetorical questions later." somehow leaves you with the idea that the outcome of the debate was possibly in your favor. Only among those who agreed with you going in and are unpersuadable.
If Obama is misrepresenting Reagan, which you admitted to, he is creating a fictional character, a straw man, to argue against. Just because he lies and says it is Reagan doesn't mean that he is not indulging in the technique, it is just one more level of indirection. What really worries me about Obama is that he may not be smart enough to know that is what he is doing. He may have drunk from the Kool Aide he is serving.
dave
· 9 months ago
Hey I'm not a liberal.
malatmals
· 9 months ago
Rove ate a lot of people's lunch by the looks of him (I'm sorry I couldn't resist and don't I condone that sort of thing). When you are right how else are you supposed to preach than out of certainty?
"...A much stronger link exists between political orientation and openness, which psychologists define as including traits such as an ability to accept new ideas, a tolerance for ambiguity and an interest in different cultures. When these traits are combined, people with high openness scores turn out to be almost twice as likely to be liberals."
Now if we take Bush as an example of a conservative then I can point out dozens of cases where he seems to have intentionally swept facts under the rug (or invented new ones) to get his way. Aren't a high percentage of scientists (whose livelihoods are made from facts) liberal? Aren't a lot of conservative tenets begotten from faith and religion - some using the same fact-less arguments that lost them, in a court of law, the ability to teach creationism in the classroom?
If you want to have a debate with facts go ahead - bring 'em on. I hope you're under no false pretense that the outcome of the debate is possibly in your favor. You'll probably end up like this guy http://archive.redstate.com/blogs/kowalski/2006...
cc
· 9 months ago
Why is journalism dying ? I canceled my subscriptions years ago because i don't trust them. It really is that simple.
justcorbly
· 9 months ago
Did you lose trust in them because they made factual errors or because they took a political stance you did not agree with? If the latter, do you then assume that any newspaper that takes a disagreeable editorial position cannot be trusted to deliver the news?
John C
· 9 months ago
Dead in Chicago alright - Friday's Tea Party started across the street from the CBS station (it's the giant screen tv you see in some of the pics) and ended in front of the Chicago Tribune.
As of this Tuesday morning - IT NEVER HAPPENED. Neither CBS-WBBM, NBC-WMAQ , Tribune NOR Sun-Times had any coverage.
It's like the Midwest Division of North Korea.
Bruno Seneca
· 9 months ago
"Good reporting" has become an oxymoron. J school graduates are now partisans, advocates. You have the Olbermans, the Begalas, the Carvilles, the Stephanopouloses running the "news" now. Michael Moore has been in charge of the DP for the past 5 years and the news and entertainment media have been marching in lock step with the fat one.
justcorbly
· 9 months ago
None of those people you mention are running the news. They're performers hired and paid by corporate executives whose only concern about the product they deliver is that it make a proift.
And your list needs to include people like O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Chris Wallace, Kristol, and seveal others to be complete.
Historically, TV networks considered their news departments as public services, and did not expect them to be profitable. Not anymore. If you want to place blames the network boards and all of us who think some talking head yammneing on about what he thinks is news.
justcorbly
· 9 months ago
"The sources got blogs."
Sources tend not to call themselves out or point out their bad behavior. Newspapers are less than perfect at doing this, but if you read one newspaper you are still more likely to get a more accurate view of reality than if you read one blog.
Of course, someone in a world of a gazillion blogs is always going to be ready to point out someone else's bad behavior. But, I just can't see most people reading enough blogs -- especially blogs that carry an agenda they don't support -- for that to make much difference.
One of the reasons we have become so culturally and politically polarized is that the number and variety of media sources is so large that we can select only sources that share our points of view. If we don't want to be told the emperor has no clothes, it's easy to find sources that just won't mention it.
I don't see this changing. Maybe it might if we all started our mornings with a newsreader and a few hundred feeds, but I'm not counting on that.
On the other hand, the percent of the population that actually pays attention to the news -- e.g., that actually reads to the end of a long piece about AIG and why it failed -- has always been tiny. The rest of us just hear soundbites.
Bill
· 9 months ago
Who says blogs don't break news? Thanks Mr. Winer, for informing us that there's this entity called "The Wall Street Journal" which, from what I gather, is either a blog or a Facebook page or some other such thing, but most certainly not a "news-paper."
PD Quig
· 9 months ago
This is what happens when a profession that had few barriers to entry becomes one with zero barriers to entry. Over the years, the anointed in the media constructed a mythology around news gathering, when in reality it is nothing much more than being able to write clear, basic prose about a topic that you have adequately researched. They have really not appreciated being challenged by brash newcomers, having their premises picked apart, and having their supposed strengths (editorial review, experience and judgment) exposed as an elaborate sham. This has led to increasingly shrill denials, counterattacks, and a final abandonment of all pretense of fairness.
When the customer is always wrong, the supplier will eventually become extinct—no matter how entrenched the monopoly. I am ready for the brave new world. How could it get any worse?
justcorbly
· 9 months ago
I'm still waiting for someone to explain why people who publish on a website are immune from all the evils that so many say afflict people who publish on newsprint? If people believe newspapers are failing because of character flaws among journalists and owners, how are businesses on the web going to be different?
My point is not that newspaper people are or are not poseurs and monopolists, but that, if they are, why would we expect a change of publishing technology to render the new guys invisible to such demons?
Linda
· 9 months ago
I know I'm not very linked in but please don't make me look up imho. Just write the words and make what you are saying easier to read. Especially when you are singing a death knoll for bad journalism.
Julia Ward
· 9 months ago
"imho" could be viewed as an alternate signifier to "in my humble opinion." In which case when encountering and not knowing it, we can fix the not-knowing by looking up the definition (by say typing it into Google since we might not find "imho" in a dictionary and typing it into Google will be like looking it up in a dictionary AND like typing it into Google). That seems an approximately equivalent act (temporally) to encountering, not knowing, and so looking up (same method) a single word we don't know. Like "humble." For example. For the reader/individual/user/person-in-the-world, this does call upon the same self-reliance that's summoned if we turn away from "collective newsroom opinion" (Kurt, above) and try instead this mainlining of stories. Like many people here in these other comments are doing. That the "collective" and its many layers are long-standing is the complicating fact. But THAT'S what's changing. The times (yes, pun!), they are a changing -- cue harmonica--Yays!
Paul A'Barge
· 9 months ago
Rocky Mountain News == schadenfreude for me, baby.
Kurt
· 9 months ago
Why? Defective product. Journalists are printing collective newsroom opinion as analysis and masquerading it as news. This is not journalism, it's propaganda.
Bernie
· 9 months ago
One person commented: "if you read one newspaper you are still more likely to get a more accurate view of reality than if you read one blog. " WELL. . .InstaPundit beats The New York Tiimes any day.
PersonFromPorlock
· 9 months ago
Bias aside, there's also the question of the quality of the news. Journalists at the one state-wide Maine newspaper I read routinely rewrite press releases as 'news' and barely bother to disguise the fact. It's understandable. It's the cheapest way to fill the 'news hole' and that's what journalism has become - the craft of producing cheap, entertaining filler to go between the ads - but it isn't news as most of us mean it, or as the MSM want us to believe they mean it.
Montjoie
· 9 months ago
This is why I dropped my subscription to the Chicago Tribune. At one point I found myself writing an email to a reporter telling him about all the facts he left out of a story that he clearly got from a press release. As I was writing I suddenly realized: why am I, a reader, telling him, a reporter, what the facts are? Plain truth of it is, I already knew more about the story from other news sources than what was in the paper. So who needs it?
boblq
· 9 months ago
Newspaper like federations will regroup as collections of blogs, e.g. Huffington Post, InstaPundit. The economic model appears to be the same ... advertising. The basic transformation is essentially that the economics of electrons is cheaper than paper.
People do want aggregation of trusted sources. That is the only advantage a newspaper can claim and as DW points out that is being lost fast as they cling to outmoded and costly forms of production. The best journalists are leaving the sinking ships.
So it goes.
dave
· 9 months ago
I think those are just transitional and they will be undermined by the inexorable process of disintermediation. It's amazing we're floating in a sea of disintermediation and people think it's an experience unique to them when they get wet and then drown. It's been going on for a loooong time.
boblq
· 9 months ago
So how out of all this disintermediation do we find trusted sources?
Of news, of income, of relationships, of ... ? Well you get it.
Jack Foster Mancilla
· 9 months ago
I read all my news on the web. TV news is background noise when I have nothing else I want to hear. If something overheard, read, sent to me via email or twitter, catches my fancy, I look deeper through many online sources. A newspaper, or a TV show could never inform me that well.
Shel Holtz
· 9 months ago
It's not always about sources. Sometimes it's just good, old-fashioned legwork that most bloggers aren't willing to do in their spare time. Consider the revelation by The Los Angeles Times of state employees charging personal expenses to their expense accounts. That required a tedious, line-by-line review of expense reports. News organizations will fund such investigations. Are you willing to pay for it yourself, or just hope some blogger will take the time?
Maybe you should watch "All the President's Men" for a reminder of what goes into professional journalism that simply can't be duplicated by the crowd. There's room for both and they'll become comfortable with each other.
dave
· 9 months ago
Classic. Maybe you should watch 30 Rock for an idea how it *really* works. :-)
Or how about old reruns of Mary Tyler Moore or Lou Grant!
Robert Cox, Media Bloggers
· 9 months ago
Shel - I love the movie "All the President's Men" but...it's a movie.
Now, consider that we today know that Mark Felt, the number two guy at the FBI, was leaking information to Woodward. There were many people who knew that the Nixon campaign was using illegal contributions to fund dirty tricks and were not comfortable with it. In today's world there would be no need to Woodward to meet Deep Throat in a garage. They could send each other DMs on Twitter or SMS or otherwise communicate without actually meeting up. More to the point, Mark Felt could have set up an anonymous blog (deepthroat.blogspot.com) and posted information to the web. Staffers at the Committee to Reelect the President who wished to could have done the same sorts of things. There would be no need to Ben Bradlee to take the heat when a Woodstein story turned out wrong. There are many bloggers that would publish these sorts of stories.
If you think this is not happening then you are too focused on the big blogs and not paying attention to what is happening at the hyper-local level. I do some work on such a site called New Rochelle's Talk of the Sound. we ran a story recently in New Rochelle, NY about the Mayor telling The New York Times that he was a "full-time" Mayor. A reader sent us the files from the local Congresswoman showing that during the time the Mayor said he was "full-time" he was actually getting 40% of his income working as a consultant for our district's Congresswoman. After we ran that story, another reader -- someone in City Hall -- sent a copy of the Mayor's employment form in which the Mayor had checked the "Part-Time" box on the form. We will be running that story on Monday. On Tuesday, there will be a City Council meeting where consideration will be given to either raise the Mayor's salary to make him an actual full-time employee or change the City Charter to make it clear that the Mayor is a part-time employee so that the Mayor will not misrepresent his role to the media and/or the public.
Similarly, we obtained a copy of the City's stimulus package request list sent to Albany. We made it available to readers who were able to help us show that about 20% of the projects on the $97.775 mm wish list were actually ineligible for funding. In response to our story, the City told us they would file a revised list with the State of New York. Think this doesn't matter? By replacing those ineligible projects with eligible projects we helped increase the likelihood that some of the stimulus money will flow to our City.
Almost every bit of these two stories came about through readers inside the government or with connections to the government getting information to our site. As Dave correctly points out, today's technology permits the disintermediation of sources and the public. Today, Deep Throat would not need Woodward to get his story out; any whistleblower inside government can now drop information onto Wikileaks, sent to a blogger or publish their own blog.
I would also note that all for the claims about "investigative journalism", I can tell you that in New Rochelle our local newspaper is the Gannett Journal News which covers all of Westchester County. I can count on one <strike>hand</strike> finger the amount of investigative reporting they have done in New Rochelle in the past decade. The so-called reporting that we get here from traditional newspaper is almost exclusively high school sports, police blotter stories and stories spoon-fed to reports by local officials (otherwise known as propaganda). Our little web site has broken more stories in New Rochelle in 3 months then the traditional media has broken in the past 5 years. Why? Because we actually have people in New Rochelle contributing to our site whereas the "local" media has not assigned a single reporter to the New Rochelle beat.
Let me help put this in context. New Rochelle is the 7th largest city in New York State and we do not have -- and have not had for many years -- a single reporter who covers just our City. We did not "leave" journalism behind -- they left us.
dave
· 9 months ago
Bravo!!
Kevin Sablan
· 9 months ago
Regardless of the actions of the news PUBLISHING industry, the "next version of journalism" is already booting up -- with or without traditional news organizations. If journalism is dead, we are witnessing the (shameless plug to related post) dawn of the dead journalist ... http://almightylink.ksablan.com/2009/03/dawn-of...
All Comments
happening RIGHT NOW.
I hope it's true and maybe the next piece can be THE REBIRTH OF JOURNALISM.
former journalist too?? :-)
If they get their news from reporters, then they are not adding to the pool of news. When the news producers they rely on go away, what are they going to do?
My local daily recently bought out their lead investigative reporter, someone with 30 years at the paper who typically spent weeks and months preparing and researching stories of gross behavior by the usual suspects. I think it is naive to expect that production to be replaced by unpaid bloggers. Few of us can afford to spend weeks and months doing something unless we are paid to do it.
If the Post hadn't been around, would Deep Throat have leaked to a D.C. blogger? Maybe, but would that D.C. blogger have had the resources and the financial means to stay with the story?
I hope, and expect, that we will see news production move online with commercial outlets functioning as coordinators and publishers for decentralized news producers. (Whether that can work locally and regionally is a good question.) But, that's not blogging, it's news production.
The problem is that the news industry's business model is being deconstructed. Classified ads, job listings -- they've been unbundled from the news, where they used to support reporting. No longer possible. So there's less and less money to fund reporting.
A more productive discussion would address the issue of how to support reporting in a world where the old business models don't work. What's your take on that question?
them going as-is. You don't see that happening. What you ask has been asked
over and over, it's a way for corporate media to ask for their handout. They
get the reporters to beg on their behalf. Maybe -- but first tell us what's
in it for us. Isn't that fair, shouldn't you first sell us a little, romance
us a bit, rather than just assume the right to OUR money??
I think you are writing off Mr. Temkin's point (which is overstated some) too quickly. He's right -- the margins that newspapers are used to have shrunk dramatically. Whether that is a proximate cause of a fall in investigative journalism is anyone's guess, but let's assume, as Mr. Temkin postulates, it is. At that point, it becomes a valid if not necessary question.
Also, I did not parse Mr. Temkin's comment re: "support[ing] reporting" to be a request for a handout. I think he is asking, fundamentally, how news organizations should structure themselves and seek revenue in a way which allows those organizations to provide the product you correctly desire.
too, okay -- here we talk about the whole picture and that includes the
people who are part of the news equation that the news industry always
leaves out. You can have that discussion elsewhere with someone else, I'm
not interested -- it's about 10 years too late to be asking that question.
Norma Strange
www.normastrange.wordpress.com
There are a number of great journalist that I love and respect - that I read every word of. Then there are the rest that made me cancel the free daily paper that I was given for order the Suday paper (for the coupons). It's just not worth waking my dog up who then wakes the wife and me up at 6am.
Cheers!
But there's nothing inherent to newspapers which make it the final (and only) bastion of journalism. There probably *was* something to it for the 100 years ending in the mid 1990s, and I discuss some of that at http://www.centernetworks.com/how-to-save-newsp... -- and the formerly huge profit margins certainly helped, too. But the Web changed all that and irreversibly so.
Newspaper companies can still adapt. If they don't, they'll die, for reasons you state and many others. But journalism will still remain.
You could also argue the people don't have to wait for the news to be deliver now when they can go grab it, from multiple sources, so there is no reason to wait for the local paper to deliver the national news.
Just saying.
spinning it one way. Another way to spin it is that the news industry
evolved around an assumption that distribution would always be hard and
expensive. When that stopped being true, they clung to the past, or a vague
belief that they could convince the government to pay their salaries.
However, when they did that, they failed to consider how that would change
their practice, which already couldn't look into the corporate media
entities that owned them, now they wouldn't be able to look into the
government too. So eventually new ways of getting news to the people had to
evolve because what remained of the news industry was unable to report on
any of it.
That's another way to spin it. Not saying it's true, but there might be some
truth to it. All I know is what you say is what I keep hearing over and
over, and I don't believe it any more than I believe any other theory.
Investigative journalism is endangered by lawyers for big media companies. I know of an investigative piece that wasn't published because the lawyers for a newspaper said they would have to spend a lot of money to fight a libel suit if the article were published. Even though the reporter had six sources backing up the story, it wasn't published.
A modest proposal for the Seattle Times:
http://rejurno.com/2009/02/27/a-modest-proposal...
A modest proposal for jurnos left standing on the sidewalk:
http://rejurno.com/2009/02/27/a-modest-proposal...
There is no resisting an idea who's time has come.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm skeptical about whether we'll still get coverage of some important things, like the Darfur genocide (I doubt any of the refugees have access to their WP-Admin pages at the moment), without somebody working full time to go in there and do the reporting. Do you know how that kind of thing might continue after traditional journalism dies?
I think you are exactly right. The reason the news industry is failing is because they are no longer providing any news. Certainly in Washington it is all about the access a reporter has to "inside sources" that simply lead to being a mouthpiece of those in power rather than anything remotely resembling journalism any longer.
So let me add my voice to yours... Dear news people -- WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE JOB YOU'RE DOING.
Do some journalism again that requires some critical thinking by an informed citizenry for a change and produce a product worth consuming again. Competition is tough. Produce a better product if you want to survive and you will reach your audience.
...'journalism' is changing not just because technological discontinuities have annihilated traditional msm monopoly and oligopoly and the anachronistic business models that suppor them BUT also because - objectively & subjectively - its marginal value is declining relative to its marginal cost TO THE USER...
your own knee-jerk opinionating on topics you clearly know little about (as opposed to web stuff you know ACRES about) is a good case-in-point: as a mediatech pundit, your insights are useful and your biases are clearly on the surface of your expression; as a 'sociomedia' political pundit, you couldn't be more predictable than if i had programmed you myself...
journalism isn't dying - it's committing suicide and simply refuses to be helped...it used to be tragic; now it's farce
If Obama is misrepresenting Reagan, which you admitted to, he is creating a fictional character, a straw man, to argue against. Just because he lies and says it is Reagan doesn't mean that he is not indulging in the technique, it is just one more level of indirection. What really worries me about Obama is that he may not be smart enough to know that is what he is doing. He may have drunk from the Kool Aide he is serving.
This is odd because the research I've seen has generally cast conservatives as pretty much the opposite of what you describe, maybe not specifically with respect to debating, but overall. See http://www.newsweek.com/id/118167 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6356637 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/119655... and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howie-klein/the-l...
"...A much stronger link exists between political orientation and openness, which psychologists define as including traits such as an ability to accept new ideas, a tolerance for ambiguity and an interest in different cultures. When these traits are combined, people with high openness scores turn out to be almost twice as likely to be liberals."
Now if we take Bush as an example of a conservative then I can point out dozens of cases where he seems to have intentionally swept facts under the rug (or invented new ones) to get his way. Aren't a high percentage of scientists (whose livelihoods are made from facts) liberal? Aren't a lot of conservative tenets begotten from faith and religion - some using the same fact-less arguments that lost them, in a court of law, the ability to teach creationism in the classroom?
If you want to have a debate with facts go ahead - bring 'em on. I hope you're under no false pretense that the outcome of the debate is possibly in your favor. You'll probably end up like this guy http://archive.redstate.com/blogs/kowalski/2006...
As of this Tuesday morning - IT NEVER HAPPENED. Neither CBS-WBBM, NBC-WMAQ , Tribune NOR Sun-Times had any coverage.
It's like the Midwest Division of North Korea.
And your list needs to include people like O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Chris Wallace, Kristol, and seveal others to be complete.
Historically, TV networks considered their news departments as public services, and did not expect them to be profitable. Not anymore. If you want to place blames the network boards and all of us who think some talking head yammneing on about what he thinks is news.
Sources tend not to call themselves out or point out their bad behavior. Newspapers are less than perfect at doing this, but if you read one newspaper you are still more likely to get a more accurate view of reality than if you read one blog.
Of course, someone in a world of a gazillion blogs is always going to be ready to point out someone else's bad behavior. But, I just can't see most people reading enough blogs -- especially blogs that carry an agenda they don't support -- for that to make much difference.
One of the reasons we have become so culturally and politically polarized is that the number and variety of media sources is so large that we can select only sources that share our points of view. If we don't want to be told the emperor has no clothes, it's easy to find sources that just won't mention it.
I don't see this changing. Maybe it might if we all started our mornings with a newsreader and a few hundred feeds, but I'm not counting on that.
On the other hand, the percent of the population that actually pays attention to the news -- e.g., that actually reads to the end of a long piece about AIG and why it failed -- has always been tiny. The rest of us just hear soundbites.
When the customer is always wrong, the supplier will eventually become extinct—no matter how entrenched the monopoly. I am ready for the brave new world. How could it get any worse?
My point is not that newspaper people are or are not poseurs and monopolists, but that, if they are, why would we expect a change of publishing technology to render the new guys invisible to such demons?
"if you read one newspaper you are still more likely to get a more accurate view of reality than if you read one blog. "
WELL. . .InstaPundit beats The New York Tiimes any day.
People do want aggregation of trusted sources. That is the only advantage a newspaper can claim and as DW points out that is being lost fast as they cling to outmoded and costly forms of production. The best journalists are leaving the sinking ships.
So it goes.
inexorable process of disintermediation. It's amazing we're floating in a
sea of disintermediation and people think it's an experience unique to them
when they get wet and then drown. It's been going on for a loooong time.
Of news, of income, of relationships, of ... ? Well you get it.
Maybe you should watch "All the President's Men" for a reminder of what goes into professional journalism that simply can't be duplicated by the crowd. There's room for both and they'll become comfortable with each other.
:-)
Or how about old reruns of Mary Tyler Moore or Lou Grant!
Now, consider that we today know that Mark Felt, the number two guy at the FBI, was leaking information to Woodward. There were many people who knew that the Nixon campaign was using illegal contributions to fund dirty tricks and were not comfortable with it. In today's world there would be no need to Woodward to meet Deep Throat in a garage. They could send each other DMs on Twitter or SMS or otherwise communicate without actually meeting up. More to the point, Mark Felt could have set up an anonymous blog (deepthroat.blogspot.com) and posted information to the web. Staffers at the Committee to Reelect the President who wished to could have done the same sorts of things. There would be no need to Ben Bradlee to take the heat when a Woodstein story turned out wrong. There are many bloggers that would publish these sorts of stories.
If you think this is not happening then you are too focused on the big blogs and not paying attention to what is happening at the hyper-local level. I do some work on such a site called New Rochelle's Talk of the Sound. we ran a story recently in New Rochelle, NY about the Mayor telling The New York Times that he was a "full-time" Mayor. A reader sent us the files from the local Congresswoman showing that during the time the Mayor said he was "full-time" he was actually getting 40% of his income working as a consultant for our district's Congresswoman. After we ran that story, another reader -- someone in City Hall -- sent a copy of the Mayor's employment form in which the Mayor had checked the "Part-Time" box on the form. We will be running that story on Monday. On Tuesday, there will be a City Council meeting where consideration will be given to either raise the Mayor's salary to make him an actual full-time employee or change the City Charter to make it clear that the Mayor is a part-time employee so that the Mayor will not misrepresent his role to the media and/or the public.
Similarly, we obtained a copy of the City's stimulus package request list sent to Albany. We made it available to readers who were able to help us show that about 20% of the projects on the $97.775 mm wish list were actually ineligible for funding. In response to our story, the City told us they would file a revised list with the State of New York. Think this doesn't matter? By replacing those ineligible projects with eligible projects we helped increase the likelihood that some of the stimulus money will flow to our City.
Almost every bit of these two stories came about through readers inside the government or with connections to the government getting information to our site. As Dave correctly points out, today's technology permits the disintermediation of sources and the public. Today, Deep Throat would not need Woodward to get his story out; any whistleblower inside government can now drop information onto Wikileaks, sent to a blogger or publish their own blog.
I would also note that all for the claims about "investigative journalism", I can tell you that in New Rochelle our local newspaper is the Gannett Journal News which covers all of Westchester County. I can count on one <strike>hand</strike> finger the amount of investigative reporting they have done in New Rochelle in the past decade. The so-called reporting that we get here from traditional newspaper is almost exclusively high school sports, police blotter stories and stories spoon-fed to reports by local officials (otherwise known as propaganda). Our little web site has broken more stories in New Rochelle in 3 months then the traditional media has broken in the past 5 years. Why? Because we actually have people in New Rochelle contributing to our site whereas the "local" media has not assigned a single reporter to the New Rochelle beat.
Let me help put this in context. New Rochelle is the 7th largest city in New York State and we do not have -- and have not had for many years -- a single reporter who covers just our City. We did not "leave" journalism behind -- they left us.
http://almightylink.ksablan.com/2009/03/dawn-of...