Timothy Burke: Journalism, Civil Society and 21st Century Reportage:
As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media can't provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided.
As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising that complaining about how people on the Internet are really mean or stupid. It narrows the discussion down to a central function of journalism, the independent investigation of government, industry and society and the delivery of information from such investigation.
I know that many of the journalists talking along these lines don't really mean to throw overboard all the other writing (and jobs supported by that writing) that appears within most major newspapers. But I'm going to take it that way: as a concession that much of the rest of the content of 20th Century newspapers is served either equivalently or better by online media. We don't need newspapers to have film criticism or editorial commentary or consumer analysis of automobiles or comic strips or want ads or public records. It might be that existing online provision of those kinds of information could use serious improvement or has issues of its own. It might be that older audiences don't know where to find some of that information, or have trouble consuming it in its online form. But there's nothing that makes published newspapers or radio programming inherently superior at providing any of those functions, and arguably many things that make them quite inferior to the potential usefulness of online media. So throw the columnists and the reviewers and the lifestyle reporters off the newspaper liferaft.
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If print journalists want to claim that their saving grace is independent, investigative journalism, they might want to clean house a bit first, because a substantial amount of print journalism doesn't really live up to that ideal. Getting fed information by a confidential source inside an Administration or inside a business who is using the reporter either to kick a rival in the teeth or as part of a coordinated scheme to float a trial balloon about a hypothetical decision is not independent investigative reporting. It's a collusive agreement to serve as an unpaid assistant to the public-relations staff of a government or business.
Yes?
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Yes! And I'm old enough to remember that I F Stone did a whole lot better with his weekly newsletter than the rest of the Washington press did in the late 60's in ferreting out the crap going on about Vietnam.
quotation: "I am going to tell you a number of things, but if you really want to be a good journalist you only have to remember two words: governments lie."
Woulda mada helluva blogger
As Yachoi Benkler so eloquently demonstrated in his book On the Wealth of Networks, the Internet can be a powerful tool of investigative journalism. Even more so than incumbent medias. Like the people who exposed the problems with the Diebold electronic voting machines.
Listen to this!
But there's nothing that makes published newspapers or radio programming inherently superior at providing any of those functions.
Yes, that's true. But he misses the point. The debate is not about who is "superior". The debate about "can bloggers replace journalists" is about money and economics. Journalists are paid. Bloggers are not. More important, bloggers have usually an other job.
If, in a near future, we can create an economic model that will make bloggers paid, great, because that will create, in essence, "professional bloggers", and then, you will have amongst them the first I.F. Stones of the blogosphere.
Journalists, in other words. :-)
Great questions...the real problem isn't the online competition however. Gannett's readership was down 3.5% in the past 12 months. Ad revenue was down almost 30%. The problem is with the broken business model, not necessarily online competition.
Display ads don't work, either in newspapers or online. (just ask John Battile what's wrong over at Federated)
So what's the answer for any of this? Passion will only take us so far....Foundation Grants? Prizes?
Clay Shirky is right to say we need journalism more than we need newspapers. He is, however, entirely wrong to be so pessimistic about the future of newspapers. In fact, Shirky misses the point completely about what newspapers were about in the first place. I answer his essay on my PR blog here:
http://paulseaman.eu/2009/03/the-death-of-journalism-not-likely/