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.