The future of journ­al­ism. That old chest­nut. It came up again in a debate I did this week (PRs feel­ing sorry for journos), and now it sur­faces again with news that the San Fran­cisco Chron­icle is in trouble, and editor Phil Bron­stein (once Mr Sharon Stone) appar­ently told his troops that the news busi­ness:

is broken, and no one knows how to fix it … And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.

Good job Phil wasn’t around in 1940 to write Win­ston Churchill’s speeches. In response to this Dave Winer says:

…reform journ­al­ism school. It’s too late to be train­ing new journ­al­ists in the clas­sic mode. Instead, journ­al­ism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every gradu­ate. Why? Because journ­al­ism like everything else that used to be cent­ral­ized is in the pro­cess of being dis­trib­uted. In the future, every edu­cated per­son will be a journ­al­ist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers.

The report­ers have been act­ing as middle­men, con­nect­ing sources with read­ers, who in many cases are sources them­selves. As with all middle­men, some­thing is lost in trans­la­tion, an inef­fi­ciency is added. So what we’re doing now, in journ­al­ism, as with all other inter­me­di­ated pro­fes­sions, is decent­ral­iz­ing. So it pays to make an invest­ment now and teach the edu­cated people of the future the basic prin­ciples of journalism.

Well Dave, there are still travel agents and pro­fes­sional stock brokers. Our old friend the divi­sion of labour means even an eco­nom­ist like Steven Levitt needs a journ­al­ist like Stephen Dub­ner to write a book like Freako­nom­ics.

But if I can restate your point, I don’t think j-schools need reform­ing so much as edu­ca­tion in journ­al­ism needs to be made more widely avail­able. (Dis­claimer: I’m in the journ­al­ism edu­ca­tion business.)

Journ­al­ism should be the Rhet­oric of the mod­ern cur­riculum — a key com­pon­ent of higher edu­ca­tion. This fits with the idea that people who gen­er­ate data and the­or­ies need to take own­er­ship of their work’s dis­sem­in­a­tion, some­thing I blogged on recently. It’s not all mutu­ally exclusive.

Scott Karp moves things on a bit:

It is true that the news­PA­PER busi­ness is broken. But let’s be clear about what is actu­ally broken. News­pa­pers were once the most effi­cient means for con­nect­ing private buy­ers and sellers (mer­chand­ise, jobs, real estate, etc.) in a defined geo­graphic region — for dec­ades, local news­pa­pers’ mono­poly con­trol of this chan­nel paid for local journ­al­ism. Then came the Inter­net and Craigslist, which were much more effi­cient for this pur­pose. You know this story well enough by now.

It is also true that if the the pro­fes­sional prac­tice of local journ­al­ism is to sur­vive — and by this I mean people who do ori­ginal report­ing on a reg­u­lar basis and whose work is trust­worthy because it adheres to a known stand­ard (i.e. NOT a free-for-all of cit­izen journ­al­ists, most of whom will never put on their shoes and socks to go out and actu­ally REPORT, i.e. fact gath­er­ing) — then cit­izens of a loc­al­ity are going to have to pro­act­ively value this service.

He con­cludes:

I can post a clas­si­fied for free on Craigslist. And most people hap­pily do so, com­pletely obli­vi­ous to that fact that their actions are put­ting their local papers out of busi­ness. Most news­pa­per exec­ut­ives prob­ably assume that people will con­tinue to choose free Craigslist over paid list­ings in their paper or on their web­site because that is the “rational” thing for those people to do.

But I won­der what would hap­pen if news­pa­pers intro­duced a new factor into the equa­tion: the civic bene­fit of sup­port­ing local journalism.

The news busi­ness may be broken but some people see oppor­tun­it­ies there. Here’s an inter­view by Andy Kessler with Mark Zuck­er­burg, Face­book CEO:

“In the next iter­a­tions, you’re going to see real stor­ies being pro­duced. ‘These people went to this party and they did this the next day and then here’s the dis­cus­sion that was tak­ing place off of this art­icle in the Wall Street Journal. And these two people went to this party and they broke up the next day.’ Whatever, you can start weav­ing together real events into stor­ies. As these start to approach being stor­ies, we turn into a massive pub­lisher. Twenty to 30 snip­pets of inform­a­tion or stor­ies a day, that’s like 300 mil­lion stor­ies a day. It gets to a point where we are pub­lish­ing more in a day than most other pub­lic­a­tions have in the his­tory of their whole existence.”

Is there a big­ger mean­ing in all this? Mr. Zuck­er­berg would say yes. “As inform­a­tion is avail­able, that really affects how people think about the world, how people think about and absorb things, demo­cracy at a really high level. It’s both an ideal in the abstract that we fight for and work toward as part of our mis­sion, but it’s also a prac­tical value inside the com­pany, we place a really high value on being able to talk about a lot of things, anything.”

Read that last para­graph closely. One day they’re going to have to pay for that inform­a­tion, and my bet is that it won’t be through things we now call news­pa­pers, but it will be through people called journ­al­ists.