Please Stop Whining About The "Death Of Journalism"

It's inescapable.

You can't go anywhere online these days with being affronted by yet another hand-wringing essay, speech, or diatribe about how screwed we will all be when "journalism" disappears (today's is from Leonard Downie of the Washington Post).

Of course, these tales of woe aren't really about "journalism," at all. They're about newspapers.

"Journalism" is alive and well, as evidenced by the still-robust health of companies like Bloomberg and Reuters, the survival of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other great news organizations, the hyper-growth of online news and commentary sites, and the rise of social media. And change is inevitable.

It bears noting that, almost without exception, the hand-wringers are people who run or own newspapers. Thus, in the interest of fairness, they should probably be accompanied by a disclaimer that goes something like this:

And, yes, if we don't save newspapers, my fortune, ego, and life's work will go down the tubes, my shareholders will get killed, and many of my employees will get sacked -- and like hell I'm going to let that happen without a fight.

The Internet is doing to the news business the same thing it has done to dozens of other industries: disrupting it. Specifically, it is taking an old, inefficient system and making it much faster and more efficient. It is also eliminating enormous overcapacity (yes, overcapacity -- society doesn't need hundreds of White House reporters). As always, this disruption is painful, but it's not necessarily bad. In fact, as far as a lot of people are concerned, it's better.

How do we know this?

Because folks who have embraced the changing ways of exchanging news and information are not writing essays about how the whole world is falling apart. In fact, most of them prefer this new world to the old.

For every horror story about how awful and un-accountable this new world is going to be, moreover, there are dozens of examples of uncovered sleaze, unfairness, and hypocrisy that never would have been reported in the old mainstream media world.

• Would we really have gotten a better sense of the Iran protests from a single NYT bureau instead of thousands of Twitter and Facebook images?


• Would CBS's fake National Guard documents have been outed so rapidly?


• Were we really better off when we had to wait for PR people at companies to package layoffs or problems instead of reporting employee and customer chatter as it occurs?


• Is it really better to have a handful of reporters and editors tell us what they think is important instead of letting anyone who wants to weigh in weigh in? (Can anyone seriously believe this? Thousands of expert readers constitute a much better fact-checking department than the best news organization in the world)

Will some things be lost in the transition? Of course. Some things are always lost in transitions.

Should we continue to have non-profits like NPR that conduct journalism with contributions and public funds? Of course. And if these contributions increase, great.

Should we keep encouraging entrepreneurs to experiment with new business models for news? Of course. (And although this isn't welcome news to those who own newspapers, some of them are actually coming along quite nicely.)

But can we please at least wait a few minutes to see how this new world is going to turn out before moaning that everything is going to the dogs?

See Also:
22 Magazines Are Actually Kicking Butt In 2009

 

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Comments

[DevonTexas]

Journalism is not so much dead as it's absence from NYT and WSJ and the major print media might lead one to observe. It's finding a new home in the new media of the internet and places like HuffPo. I am enjoying the interactive nature of the new media and find it more informative.

[kozmo9]

This article uses the perfect term-- "disruptive". The internet (and computers in general) have disrupted many information based industries. Almost all of this disruption has been for the better-- just not for the industry being disrupted. Yes, there are management issues with traditional media, as well as music labels and many other businesses. But that really just doesn't matter when you think about the massive increase in efficiency that information technology brings with it. Technology in general is disruptive:

- cars disrupted the horse business (what happened to all the people making horseshoes?)
- tin cans disrupted barrels (how come nobody ever laments the decline of coopers?)
- incandescent lights disrupted candles
- looms disrupted weavers
- the cotton gin eliminated a huge amount of manual (and mostly slave) labor

To this list of industries and vocations add farming, stock ticker tape production, tube televisions, telephone and elevator operators, and travel agents. As these were disrupted and displaced, society as a whole benefited. I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but we just don't need as many farmers, or newsprint press operators, as we used to.

[poorwriter]

IYou all are talking about high-minded news, national and international stories. But the dealth of small, local newspapers means regular people can't access information about what is happening in their towns and neighborhoods.
Believe me, I want to know if town finances are in a muddle and my taxes might be going up.. And yes, I want to know if there have been a spate of break-ins.
It's not earth-shattering, but it IS news. Our local newspaper does a great job. But the handwriting is on the wall. Each ediition is thinner and thinner, more ads are cramming pages, driving out space for news copy.
Until there is a way to actually make money by posting these vital small-time stories on the internet, local news will go the way of the dodo.
I remember the '90s, when everyone was pooh-poohing the "bricks and mortar" way of doing business and saying profit-making was hopelessly passe. There was a new paradigm for business now! All that other stuff was useless!
Yeah. How'd that all work out?
You've got to pay people to gather info, bring it back and massage it into a form that's interesting. Reader feedback makes news more of a dialogue now, instead of a one-way street. But news sites, whether printed or not, NEED TO MAKE MONEY.

[josephXY]

What the decisions of editors to select what is important and not has led to the following
in the subprime - crisis, a look back:
http://rinf.com/alt-news/media-news/where-was-media-when-sub-prime-disaster-unfolded/2854/

And the other issue concerns ad revenue. Businesses are supposed to spend at least 5% of their
revenue on ad spending, newspaper publishers tell them. Irrespective of whether this ad spending
makes any sense or not, they are simply to abandon all business calculations just because
the media are not interested in cost calcalutions on the side of advertising businesses.
It is an almost unbelievable client - customer relationship. An example:
http://denver.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2004/11/08/story4.html

[satyriasis]

The newspaper business model would still be viable if wasn't racked with dumb executives, myopic managers, cowardly editors, and enormous debt from the go-go 90's and 00 mega merger era.

Sadly it's the journalism and the worker bees that pay the price for the greed and ineptitude of others. This is what happens when you run an organization from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Despite a whole cottage industry dedicated to studying "new media" nobody has come up with a business model. To be honest, maybe there shouldn't be one. Journalism serves society, not the bottom line. Journalism should be viewed as vitasl to the public good as police and national security. That means ordinary people should contribute to keeping it alive in whatever shape it transforms into.

[DIdaho]

I heartily agree with the article. It's hard to stress how limited "journalism" has been over the period with three networks running a half-hour of daily news and one (sometimes two) newspapers, a couple weekly magazines as the universe of journalism. And we forgot how completely one-way that communication was. There was a small chance of getting a letter to the editor printed, far less as a comment in a newsmagazine and no chance at all on the evening news.

Yes, when you have thousands or millions of contributors a lot of it is going to be trash. But I suspect the market for "professional journalism" from investigators who spend months on a story is actually larger today than it has ever been, simply because they have so many more outlets to justify their time.

Yes, tea partiers are victims of a massive disinformation campaign. But so were pro-Vietnam protesters, Swift Boaters, Know-nothings, wobblies, Harry and Louise - but today there is a wide and active network of information to counter them.

[Bobotheclown]

The point of all the "whinning" that you hear is not that newspapers are losing jobs or that there is now too much information on the internet. The point is that the quality of investigative journalism is falling. Bloggers and tweeters do not spend six months undercover risking their lives to break a story, investigative reporters do. This is not a numbers game in which you can point to how many new entrepreneurs are experimenting with business models. Any user of the internet can readily see that almost all the information on these new forums is simply copied and pasted from somewhere else. (Huffington Post is a good case in point.) There is much less original work going on now because the people who used to do it were almost exclusively employed by the newspapers. In the end, the point of journalism is not to create a universe where "anyone who wants to weigh in (can) weigh in". This creates an overflow of information that drowns out any attempt to make sense of it. Instead journalism is focused on gathering, digesting, and summarizing all the "news thats fit to print" and presenting it in such a way that it can actually be understood. This level of professional judgement and filtering is what is going away and the public will be the poorer for it.

[ProfessorDuh]

Exactly. Look at the Tea Partiers. They are blind foois who are the victims of massive disinformation campaigns, and the verified, professional journalism that might help them is being destroyed.

[DIdaho]

"In the end, the point of journalism is not to create a universe where "anyone who wants to weigh in (can) weigh in".

Perhaps not, but it is the point of democracy.

"Instead journalism is focused on gathering, digesting, and summarizing all the "news thats fit to print" and presenting it in such a way that it can actually be understood."

But I seek out those sites, and magazines, and newspapers. As a newspaper journalist, we joked the truth was "all the news that fits, we print." With one paper and a half-hour network slot, there was huge amounts of news and analysis that never fit, so it was never reported. It's almost impossible to have enough time or paper for truly in-depth articles. Just to name two, I can't imagine Rachel Maddow or Matt Taibbi to ever have had a story or clip published that lasted longer than 30 seconds or six inches.