Journalism

After writing a column for Editor & Publisher Online for so long (it was my “Stop The Presses!” column that served as the website’s main original content at the very beginning), it feels weird to have the final one published.

But it’s online, “Goodbye, for Now: Looking Foward.” (My editors rejected my apparently too-controversial suggested headline: “Stop a Lot of the Presses! (Farewell, E&P).”

There’s no place for online discussion of the column on the E&P site, so I hope anyone with an opinion on it will use the Comments area below this blog item to react to what I’ve written.

I chose to go out with a two-part list.

• One is 20/20 hindsight fantasy: what the last 15 years should have looked like if only the newspaper industry’s leaders (and employees and outside analysists and pundits) had reacted to (and more effectively lobbied industry leaders on how to respond to) disruptive change properly.

• The other is prediction: based on the reality of what did happen over that time and the decisions made, what can the newspaper industry expect next and what will the news eco-system look like.

I’ll continue writing on the future of news — and yes, expressing my opinions — on this blog. You’ll also start to see me writing on a blog associated with my newest project, set to launch in January 2010: the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More on that very soon.

To any and everyone who spent any time reading “Stop The Presses!” over the years, thank you for spending some of your valuable time pondering my words. To everyone I’ve interviewed, thank you for sharing your ideas and opinions — and educating me on what’s to become of media in the digital era. And to my editors at E&P (present and past), thanks for allowing me this venue, and for your support over the years. Good luck!

Reading the new report by Len Downie Jr. and Professor Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” today, I kept wondering: Who is this report aimed at?

Commissioned by the Journalism School at Columbia University, the 96-page report offers nothing much new to media geeks. If you follow the news industry and its travails closely, the treatise is just a handy recap of how we got into this mess (newspapers crumbling, reporters laid off, et al) and of all the various small news entities springing up to take over some of the tasks that old news media is shedding (like “accountability journalism,” which saving is a central theme of the report). And then some recommendations; again, nothing particularly original.

But I don’t mean to be negative, because I think the report is great for the right audience: philanthropists and foundations.

As the authors make clear, much of the new news ecosystem — the part doing the serious watchdog and investigative journalism that advertisers don’t especially want to pay for — will be non-profit, or low-profit. For this segment of the news sector to grow (and it must), philanthropic money will be critical. Such news organizations can’t rely on sugar daddies forever, but they’ll need it initially while they work toward and invent a model for long-term sustainability.

(I am not dismissing for-profit enterprises springing up out of the ashes of old media, and neither do Downie and Schudson — though they don’t give a whole lot of time in their report to for-profit solutions to the news crisis.)

I do hope that “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” is widely distributed and read by community foundations, national foundations that have not yet made grants within the news and information sectors, and various other philanthropists. Because this report will serve to educate them on a problem that they should know about, and to persuade them to join the party to find solutions.

Of course journalism has long had its support from key foundations, with the Knight Foundation at the top of the heap. But even that big pile of cash in Miami won’t support everything that needs to be done to make up for the degradation of newspapers and resulting alarming decline in accountability journalism. New players must come into the picture, including more community foundations and local philanthropists. The authors make the case that local accountability journalism is most at risk (and much of it already lost in some communities).

Knight already has been courting community foundations, with matching grants for those that take on local initiatives or programs to keep their communities informed. It’s also reached out to other national foundations, urging them to get involved. After all, if the good work by organizations that these foundations support in other need areas can’t get their messages out because of a dysfunctional and chaotic media ecosystem, then it’s in community foundations’ interest to start spending some money on news and information experiments and solutions.

Entrepreneurs looking to make a profit well may be able to create new news entities that don’t rely on philanthropy to get started and succeed long term. But I’m of the opinion that when it comes to serious journalism (accountability, investigative, watchdog, public-interest, whatever you want to call it), we’re headed into a period where that kind of journalism increasingly will be non-profit.

I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know from this report, but there’s a lot in there that caring people with money to give away to support their communities don’t yet understand. Let’s hope “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” gets on their reading lists, post-haste.

This week I was lucky enough to participate in an Aspen Institute conference, “Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism.” The participants were an all-star bunch, including Madeleine Albright (a journalist before becoming a diplomat) for day 1, Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Marissa Mayer of Google, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, and other assorted top dogs from News Corp., MediaNews Group, Associated Press, American Public Media, the Knight Foundation, etc. (Here’s the full list; it opens up a Word doc.)

A significant part of the 3-day event was devoted to business models to sustain journalism (legacy news institutions, upstart digital news entities, community bloggers, and non-profit news initiatives), and especially the idea of getting online users to pay for news, whether through force (pay-wall schemes) or persuasion (donation models).

I’ll write more about the event later, but for now I want to toss out one quick impression: It didn’t turn into the jihad over business strategy that I expected going in.

First, some context. … In recent months, some of the news industry’s leaders have made some statements that seemed to indicate that they were gearing up to put a lock on a lot of their online news content (or even all of it) and make users pay for access, that they’d seriously go after people “stealing” their content, and that even headline-and-excerpt news links might be banned. For example:

Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.: “Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. … We can be platform-neutral but never free.”

Tom Curley, Associated Press: “If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

Dean Singleton, MediaNews Group: “The content is ours and we can do anything with it we choose to do with it. If it’s in our best interest to give it away, we will give it away. If it’s in the best interest to charge, we will charge.”

But after spending a few days in Aspen, I returned to Boulder feeling more optimistic. While overall the news industry remains in a state of confusion, with no clear immediate solutions to the decline in legacy news organizations (especially newspapers), the outcome of the conference discussions were, I dare say, reasonable. I had feared either that the conversation would become hostile between “paid vs. free” camps, or that the group would come to bad decisions, such as a stronger move toward unity on charging for news online. Rather, I’m thinking that recent statements like those above are mostly bluster.

While it’s not clear that all news publishers will follow the quasi-consensus of the elite Aspen Institute crowd, I got a sense that for the most part, really bad moves like putting up high pay-walls on news websites won’t happen.

Here are a few quick takeaways:

• Most news publishers recognize that many revenue streams will be necessary for digital news. They’re not stuck on just advertising, just paid content, or just both; they know they’ll need more, including new models not yet devised. To quote Clay Shirky on saving the news industry: “Nothing will work, but everything may work.”
• Most everyone wants to charge for some premium content, but few think that any news publisher will be able to get money out of more than 10% of their most-loyal users. That sounds too high to me, since newspapers and other old media have cut back so much on staff and they’ll have a hard time creating content and services that online users will pay for. I didn’t sense any kind of death wish, so for the most part we’ll probably see 90%-plus of legacy news sites’ content remain free.
• That desire to find the right “freemium” model leaves room for implementing other options simultaneously, including allowing users to donate and support their favorite sites via networked donation solutions (e.g., Kachingle, whose founder was an Aspen participant), as well as tracking copyright infringement and making revenue-sharing offers to the offenders rather than punishment being the only option.
• The non-profit news sector will grow quickly, as more foundations, philanthropists, and the public become aware of the “news crisis” and support investigative and public-interest journalism as the struggling private sector falls down on that job.

More later…

I’ve been away for a few days, but when I got back I caught up on some episodes I’d missed of the Daily Show and Colbert Report during the Republican convention. Jon Stewart hit it particularly well by comparing past and recent statements by folks like Karl Rove and Fox News TV pundit Bill O’Reilly.

Rove praising Palin’s credentials in being mayor of a town of 9,000, then earlier trashing Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who had been mentioned as a possible VP pick for Barack Obama, as being too inexperienced because he was mayor of the “small” town of Richmond, Virginia (population 200,000), were priceless! Ditto for the side-by-side video clips of O’Reilly trashing the mother of Jamie Lynn Spears for bad parenting when the teen TV star got pregnant and then praising the parenting of GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin when her teen daughter got pregnant

Politicians like Rove and Fox pundits like O’Reilly seem to think that voters are stupid and will buy this bullshit, so bravo to Stewart for pointing this out. But how about mainstream news organizations going after this kind of political chicanery? Isn’t that the job of the news media?

Newspapers, especially, are in a fight for their lives. Since it’s time to shake things up in that industry, how about if more papers start to be bolder about pointing out politicians’ lies and mistruths? Pointing out blatant hypocrisy with documentation — though without the hardcore opinion that Stewart presents — is within the realm of what newspapers could be doing. It might just go a long way in making newspaper brands relevant again.

As Jon Stewart no doubt would put it, it’s time for mainstream media to get some balls. The public shouldn’t need to rely on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, or be savvy enough to frequent FactCheck.org, to learn when politicians are lying. That’s the job of the news media, which too often shirks it now (or so underplays it that it’s ineffectual) for fear of being branded “the liberal press” by the likes of Rove and O’Reilly.

No wonder Jon Stewart is sometimes referred to as the most trusted newsman in America. At least he gets the job done.

(This item was edited from its original form to fix a factual error.)

I just discovered Tweetscan, which is a cool little service that aggregates Twitter posts for user-selected topics. You can go to the site and type in a search term, then see recent tweets (that’s what you call Twitter posts) that include your term.

Jeff Jarvis noted this over the weekend and used the example of a spring snowstorm that was disrupting travel at London’s Gatwick airport. Tweetscan’s search of “Gatwick” turned up lots of tweets by people stranded and bored at the airport, posting to Twitter from their laptops or cell phones.

What a nice journalistic tool! Next time you’re covering something that can be tracked with a common term, search Tweetscan and you may find eyewitnesses’ accounts. You can contact these people via Twitter for follow-ups. Sweet tweets!

Did you see the Brodeur survey of journalists released the other day? “Brodeur Journalists Survey Identifies Blogs’ Influence on Traditional News Coverage.”

Flipping through the PDF version of the report, my jaw dropped when I saw this slide:

One in four journalist blogs. One in five has a page on a social network. Good grief, Charlie Brown!

The audience is marching online, in many cases switching allegiances to online and digital, or at least adding significant digital consumption to their media diets at the expense of traditional formats, and most journalists don’t move with them. News professionals can’t understand the transformation in media consumption if they don’t live it themselves. I think every journalist should blog, maintain pages on social networking sites, use new media-related websites (Twitter, Digg, et al), etc. (Just follow Howard Owens’ advice.)

It’s 2008, folks. My young daughters, apparently, are more attuned to the media reality than three-quarters of journalists. Do you expect to be relevant to them when they become adults if you don’t live in their world?

When I see stuff like this, I sometimes wonder if there’s hope for the news industry.

(Of course, I bet lots of people will look at the numbers above and think that it shows progress. Sure, some. But take a gander at recent headlines over at Romenesko, where hardly a day goes by that one or more of them aren’t about yet more newspaper layoffs. Journalists are not adapting fast enough to help their organizations make the necessary transformation to doing business in the Internet era. It’s not all the responsibility of those in the executive offices.)

Oh, and while my inner critic is letting loose, I’ll point out to Brodeur that the chart is confusing; a pie chart is not the correct graphic device to present the information above. (What can I say… I once was a newspaper graphics editor.) Pie charts can’t be used when multiple answers are possible, such as with the question above.

Here’s yet another Twitter+journalism idea, via PBS MediaShift: Twitter posses.

As J.D. Lasica explains, the concept is to have reporters begin using the immediacy and interactivity of Twitter: “A beat reporter could enlist a dozen or two dozen passionate, driven readers to serve as a kind of Twitter posse. Whenever she was about to tackle a big story or difficult interview, the reporter could begin a mobile dialogue with her posse members, who could pose questions, much like the ‘backchannel’ IRC feed at conferences such as AlwaysOn or Supernova.”

This is a faster version of “beat blogging,” the idea of journalists using social networking tools to assemble a group of experts in a topic to assist and advise them and improve the depth of their reporting.

I can’t help but love how journalists are embracing these new online tools as they appear. For lots of people, their first reaction to Twitter was, “That’s frivolous.” (I’ll admit it; I thought that initially, too.) But fairly quickly folks started thinking outside the box.

Dan Gillmor is gearing up for his new position as inaugural leader of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University, starting next year. Over on the Center for Citizen Media blog, he blogs about the planning process for getting the new center going.

He writes: “The most important thing is simple: This is a time of incredible opportunity in media, and entrepreneurial thinking is absolutely key to the future of journalism. Much of the worry in the traditional organizations is well warranted, given the implosion of their business models, but even there I’m seeing plenty of creativity spawned by the realization that what worked, business-wise, in the past is at best unlikely to work in the future due to the end of the monopoly and oligopoly eras of news. Meanwhile, activists and entrepreneurs are seizing the chance to make a difference when it counts. Everywhere I go, I talk with people of all ages who have great-sounding ideas about media projects. The major question remains, how do we make these things sustainable?”

Gillmor is (as usual) at the right place in the grand scheme of things. This is exactly what the news industry needs. I totally buy into the notion that entrepreneurial thinking is what will “save journalism.” As old business models become unsustainable, traditional news organizations must be much more open to entrepreneurial thinking — and fund new business operations that well may hasten the inevitable demise of their former cash cows.

Of course, much of the new news initiatives will come from entrepreneurs with no formal links to traditional news organizations. I’m hoping we’ll see a wave of those in the next couple years (after which, of course, they’ll likely get acquired by news companies looking to save themselves).