News Leadership 3.0

February 10, 2009

Ideas that get in the way of saving journalism, Part 1

First, we need to stop flatly equating good journalism with newspapers as more journalistic players enter the field.

We’ve seen a flurry of talk of late about ways to pay for journalism. (See Romenesko just about any day last week for a long menu.)

This is an important and urgent discussion. Important because good journalism is so valuable to our society. And urgent because the newspaper newsrooms that create most of the original reporting are struggling, caught in a vise of a declining business model burning in an accelerant of debt.

Like all debates, this one is generating some good ideas and some highly dubious ones. Ideally, a discussion like this brings the public to the table (since journalism is for them) and fosters experimentation with new models (since the old ones aren’t working). Unfortunately, I am seeing time wasted on false premises that are more reflective of wishful thinking than reality. I want to explore three of them this week.

Here’s the first one:

Only the newspaper industry can create good journalism. (Related: Only large organizations can deliver quality journalism. Related: Information on the Internet is not credible.)

This conflation of journalism with the news industry is central to a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece by two Yale financial experts who contend that the way to save newspapers is to endow them as non-profits.

The piece starts by quoting Thomas Jefferson about the importance of newspapers to democracy in 1787: “If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.” The article never pauses to address new ways in which citizens can receive and contribute vital information more than two hundred years hence, except to note to assert, that “the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, ‘a cesspool’ of false information.”

There is a lot that is wrong in this article, and Dan Gillmor does a good job of probing its many flaws in “Endowing newspapers. What are we saving anyway?”

Right now, the newspaper industry does produce the bulk of original reporting that we find in print and on the Internet. I think people appreciate that and feel a lot of sympathy for the struggles of newsrooms and the journalists who work in them.

But the superior performance of the Internet for a growing number of users and advertisers is transforming the journalism and the business model, and thought leaders in the industry itself recognize there is no going back.

As long as people believe that only the news industry equate newspapers-only with good journalism, the debate is heading down a blind alley. It might be possible to raise an endowment for a beloved newspaper in a few communities. But I don’t see a lot of monied people—much less taxpayers if that is proposed—willing to underwrite a product that is only one player, albeit an important one, in the field.

The future, I think, is a yet uninvented network of news sources that includes diminished newspaper companies that produce good journalism online but is not consistently dominated by them. Nonprofits play a role as do small, for-profit community start-ups and perhaps even micro-funding models.

This network produces a more diverse, chaotic and ultimately satisfying mix that enhances public knowledge and journalistic accountability. It values professional journalists who gather and present information and help make sense of the cacophony of voices that now form the news and information stream.

So “saving newspapers” is not “saving journalism.” But if journalism is saved, you can bet many newsrooms will be along for the ride.

I’ve got a couple more of questionable premises I want to discuss here later in the week. In the meantime, please share your thoughts in the comments. What ideas do you think best serve the transformation of journalism and what ones risk holding it back?

By Michele McLellan, 02/10/09 at 1:58 am
Posted in Business model Comments (18) • Permalink • Tell-a-Friend