Did Google Kill Journalism?

There was a moment when big government and big journalism were able to keep each other in check.

Eric Schmidt of Google did some pretty heartfelt navel gazing the other day - wondering if Google was in part responsible for the undermining of the economic support system that paid for investigative reporting.

It's great he asked the question - but the fact is Google didn't kill journalism, Don Hewitt did.

Hewitt, you may remember, was the groundbreaking producer who created built CBS's 60 Minutes into a powerhouse. Up until 60 Minutes, journalism wasn't a business - it was a calling. A public service. A mission to inform. There was no P&L for journalism. It was what the TV networks did to 'give back' to their communities. Big newspapers where owned by larger than life moguls and high profile families. Sure, they made money - but that wasn't their reason for being. Journalism, like Politics, was part of the social fabric that knit us together. No one ever became a politician to get rich. Ditto for Journalism.

Hewitt changed all that.

Because 60 Minutes did what no other journalism franchise had done before, it became commercial. It was a Hit. And there was a moment when Hewitt could have insisted that 60 Minutes revenues (profits) went to the news division to fund other worthwhile and less profitable journalism. I wasn't there, so maybe he had no pull. But instead, he allowed 60 Minutes to put money to the bottom line of the corporation. Journalism became a profit center, and everything changed in a heartbeat. Local news became about profits. Newspapers went public, and stockholders expected returns. TV Network news department started getting primetime slots for shows like Dateline and 48 Hours. I remember being in the office office of the Executive Producer of 48 Hours when the head of the entertainment division called - screaming. The ratings for the night before had come in, and they were low. He wanted to know who'd chosen the story topics and why they were chosen. It wasn't supposed to happen that way. News and Entertainment where supposed to be separated by a wall. But that wall had crumbled down.

So while Schmidt is right to worry that Google and Craig's List and other low cost advertising alternatives have eroded the revenues of major media companies, the death of Journalism began when Journalism was expected to begin to earn a profit.

Or maybe we're witnessing the birth of Journalism.

Once you separate the idea of Journalism from the business of journalism - you're able to look at things in a whole new way. If the idea of journalism is that people can question authority, debate issues and ideas, and expose wrongdoing and misdeeds - then the emergence of blogging, micro-blogging, podcasting, vlogging, and lifestreaming all begins to look like a new golden age of journalism.

What is lost is the ability for big Journalism - mass media truth telling - to move masses to act in concert. Certainly that moment was powerful - the ability to shame business or government into justice with a story on 60 Minutes or a front page article in the New York Times - but the explosion of a million niche storytelling channels doesn't make Journalism less relevant or less prevalent. Very much the opposite - it makes Journalism more pervasive and populace.

But overall - do you really believe that "Journalism" is being damaged by the evolution of the web? Last week at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford MC Hammer talked about the state of the music business. He pointed out that if you judge the biz by CD Sales, then music is in trouble. But, if you look at music in terms of things like iTunes, Pandora, AmieStreet or DanceJam - music has never been more vibrant. The point is pretty spot on. From the stand point of big music, music is in trouble. But from a listener or even a music makers perspective things like MySpace are creating huge new ways to make, share, and listen too music. Doesn't this story hold true in Journalism as well. The printing press is replaced by the laptop. The letters to the editor page replaced by forums, comments, blogs, and wide open interactivity.

Eric, how can you suggest that Google isn't fueling a massive redistribution of the power of voice into the hands of new populous citizen storytellers.

Well - let's look at who's really killing Journalism, or in the case of Eric Schmidt's specific concern, important investigative reporting on the war in Iraq.

This is the story we should be focused on:

Zoriah Miller was an embedded blogger. Not any longer He was "disembedded" after he posted a picture of a Marine killed in the bombing in anbar on June 26th. Said Zoriah Miller of the disembedding: "It seemed insane to me that the Marines would embed a war photographer and then be upset when photographs were taken of war." Hmm... do you think so?

So what's "killing" journalism? Is it Google and Craig's list? Or is a government that has effectively created a set of rules around the coverage of Iraq that makes it impossible for Journalists to report what they see without being banned from covering the story.

This is the crisis in journalism. It's not about budgets. It's about our willingness to let the Government specifically define what they think is the appropriate way to cover a story like Iraq. Are these images disturbing? I don't know -since we're not seeing most of them.


Copyright: Zoriah/www.zoriah.com

Comments

[rapriffmaster]

Google didn't kill journalism.It died over ten years before Google was invented.Rupert Murdoch murdered journalismin the early ninties,with the assistance of the US government.he killed it by making the editorial department responsible for raising revenue for the advertising dept.Before Murdoch(BM as it were) all media outlets kept their business and editorial staffs separate,and the ad dept. had no say whatsoever in editorial decisions.Now it it the business Depts.that DECIDE what is newsworthy,not the editorial section.

[ParaplegicNomad]

Worry less about "traditional" journalism's obit and care more about the future of news, IMO. It's fun to have a name to single out and a finger to point at it, but look at the comments to see what this achieved. Now all anyone wants to talk about is who's to blame and who's not at fault.

Why don't we take out all the Hewitt and 60 Minutes stuff and just talk about what's important: the evolution (and decentralization) of Journalism?

-Editor.

[ParaplegicNomad]

Worry less about "traditional" journalism's obit and care more about the future of news, IMO. It's fun to have a name to single out and a finger to point at it, but look at the comments to see what this achieved. Now all anyone wants to talk about is who's to blame and who's not at fault.

Why don't we take out all the Hewitt and 60 Minutes stuff and just talk about what's important: the evolution (and decentralization) of Journalism?

-Editor.

[HeidiHooo]

Yep.

[RobinSeattle]

Actually, 60 minutes did not kill journalism. If anything, it was a commercial for the journalism industry. It is one reason why there is so much criticism in the blogosphere these days about how the press has largely rolled over for Bush and the Republicans. Tim Russert is rather pale compared to Mike Wallace.

Moreover, newspaper and media owners have always been concerned with profit. If that wasn't the case, San Francisco would actually have a decent newspaper rather than the Chronicle, which is a joke, and the L.A. Herald Examiner and the myriad old New York papers such as The World would still be in business.

What has really killed journalism, especially on the local level, has been Eyewtiness News. Instead of gritty reporters acting in the public interest, they were now positioned as your lovable "friends," with inane joking banter between stories that actually trivialized journalism rather than made it more palatable. Weather reports became song and dance routines. It was also used to sell advertising masquerading as news stories, something Disney has only made worse since it bought ABC.

This was also around the time when news divisions were beginning to be folded into the entertainment divisions. Now news is position as just another form of entertainment, not as public service to the nation.

[cityspeak]

The problem with journalism, as so many things in America, is that it is purely profit driven, think healthcare, education(school vouchers?!) bottled water, etc.
Ask an American about the "common good" and they look at you as you've come from another planet.

We find ourselves in so many problems because we refuse to look at our greatest shadow self, greed.

Industries influence our disasterous: energy policies, food choices, healthcare, outsourcing, enviromental policy, banking fiascos, because we are unable or unwilling to see into our own deep rooted greed.

This has to change if we have any hope of preserving our democracy.

[SamThornton]

Steve, you're right about selecting 60 Minutes as the poster child for the decline in investigative reporting.

As I recall, after CBS settled out of court on the $120 million Westmoreland v. CBS case brought on by a 60 Minutes report, "investigative journalism" suddenly became the two dirtiest words in news rooms all over the country.

Although they've made a few stabs since on some mildly controversial stories, for the most part 60 Minutes has become a toothless tiger more noted for Andy Roony and those dreadful "feature stories" than for hard-hitting reporting. The rest of the industry seems to have followed their lead.

[peterg76]

Maybe eliminating the profit element will be the only way to *save* journalism.

[rjmiller]

Are you really making the argument that the 20th century newspaper magnates were solely interested in serving the public good? This is just a straight lie. Hearst tirelessly printed erroneous stories in an effort to outsell competitors and influence public thought in a direction that would be more profitable for him and his friends. There is really little difference between the major news outlets of 1920 and today.

However, the counterargument could easily be made that in post-Woodward and Bernstein journalism there is more investigative journalism than ever. Just look at the amount of "insider" information that gets leaked. The government is more transparent than it has been in 200 years, it is simply the intentional ignorance of the American public that allows the corruption to continue.

[DanniD]

I say Rupert Murdoch is the culprit!

[texfly]

What is killing journal is the massive amount of communicatins bandwidth available. Cable TV bandwidth and 24/7 "news" coverage has made it nonprofitable for inveatigative journalists to do investigations of any depth. Get one "fact" that has been invented, misrepresented, or true and a thousand "jouranlists" will present their spin on it, analyze any nuance as evidence for "whatever-they-want -to-say". These "journalists" are more interested in gettin gtheir mug on TV than doing anything fo rsociety. When you say, "What is lost is the ability for big Journalism - mass media truth telling - to move masses to act in concert.", you are syaing that that is what you think your job is. That IS NOT your job. Your job is to get the facts, verify them every which way and present them. You are NOT in the business to sway the public -- that's called PROPAGANDA! Isn't there a law aginst that? The internet blogs have opened up this BS to everyone! No need for documentation, references, verification. Just say whwt you want make up a couple of "facts" and the main stream will jump on it.

[lisakaz2]

Don Hewitt wasn't and the isn't corporate journalism. There was good work done by 60 Minutes. You could just as easily blame any other news magazine or info-tainment show. When ownership took over editorial, journalism ceased operating under the Cronkite or Murrow concept. It is still done elsewhere. Wonder why that is?