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What the hell happened? I mean, I understand the economic pressures on newspapers. At this point, along with the rest of the wood-pulp Luddites, I've grasped that what was on the Internet wasn't merely advertising for journalism, but the journalism itself. And though I fled the profession a decade ago for the fleshpots of television, I've heard tell of the horrors of department-store consolidation and the decline in advertising, of Craigslist and Google and Yahoo. I understand the vagaries of Wall Street, the fealty to the media-chain stockholders, the primacy of the price-per-share.
What I don't understand is this:
Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.
Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have -- as one, industry-wide -- declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?
And which, exactly, is the proper epitaph for the generation that entered newspapering at the very moment when the big-city dailies -- the fat morning papers, those that survived the shakeout of afternoon tabloids and other weak sisters -- seemed impervious, essential and ascendant? Were we the last craftsmen prepared for a horse-and-buggy world soon to prostrate itself before the god of internal combustion? Or were we assembly-line victims of the inert monopolists of early 1970s Detroit, who thought that Pacers and Gremlins and Chevy Vegas were response enough to Japanese and European automaking superiority?
...
At the moment when the Internet was about to arrive, most big-city newspapers -- having survived the arrival of television and confident in their advertising base -- were neither hungry, nor worried, nor ambitious. They were merely assets to their newspaper chains. Profits were taken, and coverage did not expand in scope and complexity.
In my newsroom, I lived through the trend of zoning (give the people what's happening in their neighborhood), the trend of brevity (never mind the details, people don't read past the jump) and ultimately, the trend of organized, clinical prize-groveling (we don't know what people want, but if we can win something, that's validation enough), not to mention several graphic redesigns of the newspaper.
So in a city where half the adult black males are unemployed, where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat. The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point. The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk.
In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation -- the very currency of the Internet itself.
What I don't understand is this:
Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.
Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have -- as one, industry-wide -- declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?
And which, exactly, is the proper epitaph for the generation that entered newspapering at the very moment when the big-city dailies -- the fat morning papers, those that survived the shakeout of afternoon tabloids and other weak sisters -- seemed impervious, essential and ascendant? Were we the last craftsmen prepared for a horse-and-buggy world soon to prostrate itself before the god of internal combustion? Or were we assembly-line victims of the inert monopolists of early 1970s Detroit, who thought that Pacers and Gremlins and Chevy Vegas were response enough to Japanese and European automaking superiority?
...
At the moment when the Internet was about to arrive, most big-city newspapers -- having survived the arrival of television and confident in their advertising base -- were neither hungry, nor worried, nor ambitious. They were merely assets to their newspaper chains. Profits were taken, and coverage did not expand in scope and complexity.
In my newsroom, I lived through the trend of zoning (give the people what's happening in their neighborhood), the trend of brevity (never mind the details, people don't read past the jump) and ultimately, the trend of organized, clinical prize-groveling (we don't know what people want, but if we can win something, that's validation enough), not to mention several graphic redesigns of the newspaper.
So in a city where half the adult black males are unemployed, where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat. The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point. The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk.
In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation -- the very currency of the Internet itself.
Dan Gillmor in the Center for Citizen Media Blog:
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Anyway, here’s the question:
What famous journalism organization has done the best reporting (remember, that’s the gathering process) about the United States government’s Guantanamo Bay prison? That’s the place where the United States holds the people the government has declared to be terrorists, a prison where prisoners have been in many cases tortured and, until recently, held without access to the legal system.
The people who’ve done the best reporting on this scandal have not, for the most part, been working for major media outfits. They’ve been working for that famous journalism organization called the American Civil Liberties Union.
...
What the ACLU and Human Rights Watch did was what I’m calling almost-journalism. Their reporting was superb, but what they produced fell just a shade this side of journalism. They didn’t fully apply journalistic principles to their media, and that’s a shame.
As the traditional journalism business implodes financially, the almost-journalists are going to play an increasingly important role in the ecosystem. As traditional journalism companies are firing reporters and editors right and left, the almost-journalist organizations have both the deep pockets and staffing to fill in some of the gap — if they’ll find a way to apply those old and new journalistic practices to their media, whether it’s designed to inform or advocate.
What famous journalism organization has done the best reporting (remember, that’s the gathering process) about the United States government’s Guantanamo Bay prison? That’s the place where the United States holds the people the government has declared to be terrorists, a prison where prisoners have been in many cases tortured and, until recently, held without access to the legal system.
The people who’ve done the best reporting on this scandal have not, for the most part, been working for major media outfits. They’ve been working for that famous journalism organization called the American Civil Liberties Union.
...
What the ACLU and Human Rights Watch did was what I’m calling almost-journalism. Their reporting was superb, but what they produced fell just a shade this side of journalism. They didn’t fully apply journalistic principles to their media, and that’s a shame.
As the traditional journalism business implodes financially, the almost-journalists are going to play an increasingly important role in the ecosystem. As traditional journalism companies are firing reporters and editors right and left, the almost-journalist organizations have both the deep pockets and staffing to fill in some of the gap — if they’ll find a way to apply those old and new journalistic practices to their media, whether it’s designed to inform or advocate.
Mark Glaser on PBS' MediaShift:
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As the layoffs and buyouts pile up in U.S. the newspaper industry, and Romenesko becomes a daily wake, there is one other troubling problem: Young journalists are less willing to stay at newspapers because the papers are so slow to change their culture.
Newspapers have a history as top-down organizations where senior management huddles in conference rooms to decide what everyone else will do. Innovative ideas usually die on the vine or in bureaucratic red tape. And that’s frustrating for young folks who want to be change agents at newspapers and make a difference.
Newspapers have a history as top-down organizations where senior management huddles in conference rooms to decide what everyone else will do. Innovative ideas usually die on the vine or in bureaucratic red tape. And that’s frustrating for young folks who want to be change agents at newspapers and make a difference.
The (one) newspaper in my city is pretty much worthless. It is mostly classifieds, real estate, sport news with a smattering of opinion columns, real local reporting and a few page of world news. Trivial celebrity news and "lifestyle" segments make up the rest. This is a trend in all of Murdoch's Australian newspapers, and the rival Fairfax newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne.
Are blogs and advocacy organisations the only future of journalism, and will they have the same capacity for change as newspapers have had in the past? As shitty as The Advertiser is, Adelaide is still a one-newspaper town, and so the newspaper remains the only one-stop shop for state political news. Newspapers also have a more egalitarian distribution model than blogs, most people can pick up a newspaper from just about anywhere, but a blog requires both a computer and internet connection. Newspapers are simply more accessable for the majority of people.
This post has been edited by Seams: 25 July 2008 - 07:54 AM
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