Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

The following is a speech I gave yesterday at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin.

 
I

If you happened to be hanging out in front of the old College Hill Bookstore in Providence Rhode Island in 1987, on the third week of every month you would have seen a skinny 19-year-old in baggy pants, sporting a vaguely Morrissey-like haircut, walking into the bookstore several times a day.

That kid was me. I wish I could tell you that I was making those compulsive return visits out of a passionate love of books. While I do, in fact, have a passionate love of books, and bought plenty of them during my college years, I was making those tactical strikes on the College Hill Bookstore for another reason.

I was looking for the latest issue of MacWorld.

I had learned from experience that new issues of the monthly magazine devoted to all things Macintosh arrived at College Hill reliably in the third week of the month. Yes, you could subscribe, but for some reason, subscription copies tended to arrive a few days later than the copies in the College Hill bookstore. And so when that time of the month rolled around, I’d organize my week around regular check-ins at College Hill to see if a shipment of MacWorlds had landed on their magazine rack.

This was obsessive behavior, I admit, but not entirely irrational. It was the result of a kind of imbalance: not a chemical imbalance, an information imbalance. To understand what I want to say about the future of the news ecosystem, it’s essential that we travel back to my holding pattern outside the College Hill Bookstore -- which continued unabated, by the way, for three years. It’s essential to travel back because we’re in the middle of an epic conversation about the potentially devastating effect that the web is having on our news institutions. And so if we’re  going to have a responsible conversation about the future of news, we need to start by talking about the past.

We need to be reminded of what life was like before the web.

I made my monthly pilgrimages to College Hill because I was interested in the Mac, which was, it should be said, a niche interest in 1987, though not that much of a niche. Apple was one of the world’s largest creators of personal computers, and by far the most innovative. But if you wanted to find out news about the Mac -- new machines from Apple, the latest word on the upcoming System 7 or HyperCard, or any new releases from the thousands of software developers or peripheral manufacturers -- if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence Rhode Island. You read MacWorld.

And even then, even if you staked out the College Hill Bookstore waiting for issues hot off the press, you were still getting the news a month or two late, given the long-lead times of a print magazine back then. Yes, if Apple had a major product announcement, or fired Steve Jobs, it would make it into the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal the next day. And you could occasionally steal a few nuggets of news by hanging around the University computer store. But that was pretty much it.

When I left college and came to New York in the early nineties, the technology channels began to widen ever so slightly. At some point in that period, I joined Compuserve, and discovered that MacWeek magazine was uploading its articles every Friday night at around six, which quickly became a kind of nerd version of appointment television for me. The information lag went from months to days. In 1993, Wired Magazine launched, and suddenly I had access not only to an amazing monthly repository of technology news, but also a new kind of in-depth analysis that had never appeared in the pages of MacWorld.

Within a few years, the web arrived, and soon after I was reading a site called Macintouch, which featured daily updates and commentary on everything from new printer driver releases to the future of the Mac clone business. Tech critics like Scott Rosenberg and Andrew Leonard at Salon wrote tens of thousands of words on the latest developments at Apple. (I wrote a few thousand myself at FEED.) Sometime around then, Apple launched its first official web site; now I could get breaking news about the company directly from them, the second they announced it.

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like John Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.) The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews, or Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology site. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.

And of course, MacWorld is still around as a print magazine, but they also now have a web site. Yesterday alone, they published twenty-six different articles on Apple-related topics.

 

II

The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.

To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.

I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.

When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.

I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.

That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

 

III

Consider another – slightly less nerdy -- case study: politics. The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day the Times would have a handful of stories about the campaign stops or debates or latest polls. Every night I would dutifully tune into Crossfire to hear what the punditocracy had to say about the day’s events. I read Newsweek and Time and the New Republic, and scoured the New Yorker for its occasional political pieces. When the debates aired, I’d watch religiously and stay up late soaking in the commentary from the assembled experts.

That was hardly a desert, to be sure. But compare it to the information channels that were available to me following the 2008 election. Everything I relied on in 1992 was still around of course – except for the late, lamented Crossfire – but it was now part of a vast new forest of news, data, opinion, satire – and perhaps most importantly, direct experience. Sites like Talking Points Memo and Politico did extensive direct reporting. Daily Kos provided in-depth surveys and field reports on state races that the Times would never have had the ink to cover. Individual bloggers like Andrew Sullivan responded to each twist in the news cycle; HuffPo culled the most provocative opinion pieces from the rest of the blogosphere. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com did meta-analysis of polling that blew away anything William Schneider dreamed of doing on CNN in 1992. When the economy imploded in September, I followed economist bloggers like Brad DeLong to get their expert take the candidates’ responses to the crisis. (Yochai Benchler talks about this phenomenon of academics engaging with the news cycle in a smart response here.) I watched the debates with a thousand virtual friends live-Twittering alongside me on the couch. All this was filtered and remixed through the extraordinary political satire of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, which I watched via viral clips on the Web as much as I watched on TV.

What’s more: the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates. Think about the Philadelphia race speech, arguably one of the two or three most important events in the whole campaign. Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone. Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992? Would any of the networks have aired it in its entirety? Certainly not. It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it.  Fox News and MSNBC? They didn’t exist yet. A few serious newspaper might have reprinted it in its entirety, which might have added another million to the audience. Online perhaps someone would have uploaded a transcript to Compuserve or The Well, but that’s about the most we could have hoped for.

There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.

The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.

I think the political web covering the 2008 campaign was so rich for precisely the same reasons that the technology web is so rich: because it’s old-growth media. The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.

What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.

In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.

But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.

 

IV

So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative  or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the rest. My guess is that the venerable tradition of the muckraking journalist will be alive and well ten years from: partially supported by newspapers and magazines, partially by non-profit foundations and innovative programs like Newassignment.net, and partially by enterprising bloggers who make a name for themselves by breaking important stories.

Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever. I’m confident that I get far more useful information from the new ecosystem than I did from traditional media along fifteen years ago, but I pride myself on being a very savvy information navigator. Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion?

Let’s say for the sake of argument that we can’t. Let’s say it’s just too overwhelming for the average consumer to sort through all the new voices available online, to separate fact from fiction, reporting from rumor-mongering. Let’s say they need some kind of authoritative guide, to help them find all the useful information that’s proliferating out there in the wild.

If only there were some institution that had a reputation for journalistic integrity that had a staff of trained editors and a growing audience arriving at its web site every day seeking quality information. If only…

Of course, we have thousands of these institutions.  They’re called newspapers.

The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.

This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:

Will this system be perfect? Of course not. But I think we have every reason to believe that it will be an improvement on the paradigm that we’ve been living with for the past century.

Let me say one final thing. I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell. But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two. That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work. But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.

So that’s why I wanted to take us back to the College Hill bookstore in 1987: to remind us that the emerging news ecosystem is already around us, and already doing wonderful things. Most of us in this room, I suspect, are already living in the old-growth forests now. It’s up to us to remind everyone else how promising those ecosystems really are -- or, even better, to help them live up to that promise.

 
 
 
 
 

Comments

[Steve Allison-Bunnell]

Thanks for a thoughtful piece.

The role of online reporting of local events by non-professional journalists has penetrated even to my small city of Missoula, Montana, where a friend who is a computer entrepreneur and city council member is posting weekly reports of the council committee meetings to an email list. It has gotten so the local newspaper, which we used to rely on for that sort of thing, is quoting not only the original postings but further discussion generated on the list.

[Miriam]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Miriam

http://www.craigslistposter.info

[Casey Quinlan]

"Old-growth" is a particularly perceptive descriptor for traditional media. There are some who are mighty redwoods (NY Times, London Telegraph, Washington Post, Reuters, AP), and others who are overgrown bamboo (anything Media General).

I disagree that old-growth has lost trust completely because the best of them are strong in the new media channel. Trust is based on vigorous, time-consuming, fact-checking reporting - "old growth journalism", if you will. True of either old or new media.

[UNDERFLOOR HEATING]

Times or the Wall Street Journal the next day. And you could occasionally steal a few nuggets of news by hanging around the University computer store. But that was pretty much it.

[make money online]

if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence Rhode Island. You read MacWorld.

[make money online]

I think that there will be an uptick as prices come down, but people are just now coming around to the fact that they will not actually produce a sale unless they take less money, and more and more people are seling for less than they paid, or even for less equity than they have. The bear market is a ripple effect of the real estate market, so they are right now falling off the cliff hand in hand.

[brian gerard hutchins]

"Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion? " This quote, in addition to being a glaring bit of self aggrandizement, contradicts your main thesis. If we are all actors in some fashion, well, then there is no general public. Neva gets at this in the comments from a somewhat different direction. Journalists both imagine and create a general public. The real change at work here is a redefining of what is public and private. It seems what is actually happening to newspapers is less about economics, distribution or role and more about the ever decreasing weight accorded to the public good by the majority of individuals.

[Mr Mark]

Great piece. Rethinking the content model from generation to distribution is the key contribution here, I think, because it is often not remarked upon in most doom-and-gloom projections about the news biz.
It reminds me of an intriguing column I recall about newspaper wikis and what that might look like. An innovation that brings the unpaid boots-on-the-ground together with the professional sleuths under the same institutional imprimatur.
See the post:
www.informationarchitects.jp/washington-post-redesign-as-a-wiki/

[Artie]

"The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem."

McLuhan and Neil Postman coined the phrase "media ecology" in 1962. This is not new.

[Steven Johnson]

Artie, this is a subject for a much longer essay, but I think that what McLuhan and Postman were talking about with media ecology was quite different from what I'm talking about with the ecosystem metaphor. This is Postman's definition:

"Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people."

There's some overlap here, of course, but with Postman and McLuhan it's much more about the environmental impact on human society and perception; what I'm talking about is the internal organization of the media system, in all its complexity. The default view of both Postman and McLuhan is the individual human, engaging with some form of media and being transformed by it, for better or worse; the approach that I'm talking about here is takes a systems view by default; looking at how information flows through all the various components...

[sandy]

You know, it really just saddens me. I'm a techie by heart, but have so much admiration for old school journalism. I just finished reading an interview series on the future of journalism with various well known journalists, and it was just unbelievable how the "death of journalism" is unavoidable. I highly suggest the Christian Science Monitor editor interview..if you guys want to check it out: http://www.ourblook.com/The-Media/The-Future-of-Journalism.html

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Funny how most comments split neatly in two categories:

1) "Great article! It supports my naive prejudices!"
2) "Awful article! It neglects my niche interests!"

There are some good observations in here along with evidence of some really unfortunate blind spots.

I was amused to see the comment from a former Fox News employee contradicting the claim that Fox News wasn't around in 1992. I don't know if that's true or not. Wikipedia's Fox News article says the cable channel was founded in 1996, but that was an expansion of an operation begun with local TV stations in 1985.

I will note that in 1987 there certainly was a healthy Internet-based source of Apple computer news: Usenet. Through comp.sys.apple and comp.sys.mac (among other newsgroups), hundreds of people were publishing news, analysis, and product reviews to a moderately large audience.

According to Google Groups, people at Brown University were participating in these newsgroups in 1987, though of course I can't say whether they were available to Mr. Johnson himself.

But I mention that only for completeness. I don't think it affects Johnson's arguments, since they don't really rely on his personal experience. The trends are still valid even though they started earlier.

The problem, I think, is that Johnson here focuses on the easy answers: politics, technology, and entertainment, subjects where plenty of people are happy to publish facts and opinions for free.

But these subjects aren't at the heart of the contention between new media and old media, and so this piece is largely irrelevant to that debate.

The important questions involve issues that don't attract amateurs and activists, but that are still important to society: in short, issues that will only be covered fairly and in useful depth by paid reporters.

How many of these issues are there? What's really at risk as the Internet competes with newspapers? I don't know. But I know I'd rather have paid professional reporters covering local School Board meetings, because bloggers don't seem to pay as much attention when school boards aren't debating creationism, and honestly that doesn't happen very often.

Johnson also makes the mistake of confusing news with entertainment. This article is about "the future of news," not the future of entertainment, not even when that overlaps with the news business as it does in the case of political satire.

John Stewart and Stephen Colbert aren't even trying to fill in for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Stewart and Colbert have no interest in providing honest, complete, and contextual coverage of anything, and they don't. They're very entertaining, but some people actually do get most of their political news from these guys, and that's really quite awful. (But not new; there used to be people who ignored most of the newspaper but read gossip columnists like Walter Winchell.)

So all in all, some interesting observations here, but I don't think the analysis or conclusions are very useful.

. png

[DR. FRANK STERN]

Dear Mr. Johnson,

I collect autographes Time magazine covers, and I would like to add your autograph to my collection. Please tell me where I can send the Time cover for you to sign. Thank you for your cooperation.

Frank

[Maia]

Le Monde Diplomatique (available in English too) published an article a few years ago about the loss of independent news reporting, praising the UK for having two organisations (BBC and The Guardian) that had their own foreign journalists, the rest buy all their news from Reuters, Press Agency and Agence France Presse (PA and AFP in bylines). To be fair, the Independent buys articles from freelance journalists. So your future without real overseas investigative journalism is here. While e.g. Tamils in Sri Lanka provided information to relatives in UK, the news was only available biased and unresearched.

[Maia]

Sorry, information about the massacre of Tamils by the Sri Lankan government during the recent final push against the LTTE. Information consisting of mobile phone photos etc.
The recent riots in Urumqi, Xianjiang, China, based on internet and mobile/cell information about what was happening in Guangdong. My chinese friends like to get the news unmediated - so they youtube it. That's what happens when you don't have 'trustworthy' newspapers/sources.

[Pants McCracky]

What I think people defending the current journalistic establishment are overlooking is the fact that the death of newspapers is just part of the overall Internet era trend of the demise of the information middlemen/gatekeepers. It's true that if the local city paper goes away, there will be fewer reporters around to cover what's happening in our neighborhoods. But guess what? It's increasingly likely that our neighbors have their own weblog/Twitter/MySpace/Facebook/etc. accounts on which to do their own reporting on their lives. The old function of reporters -- to root out information and bring it to people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it -- is going away because the walls that used to separate information from the the public are dissolving.

[Jessica Partnow]

Great piece - nice to hear something optimistic about the future of journalism. I really do hope you're right about newspapers adopting the credo of "do what you do best and link to the rest", but I currently see them doing the exact opposite: cutting international and investigative coverage to focus on local sports, crime, weather that the web can do much better.

I've freelanced stories from grant-funded international projects from Africa and South Asia to both of the mainstream papers in Seattle, and they both insisted any international coverage must have a local tie. That meant they passed on the best stories I did (many of which went to online only publications) and instead ran watered down pieces that focused on Seattle based non-profits working in Pakistan or Africa.

Well, one of those newspapers folded a few months ago - and the other doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from the first in this department.

[amsatpro]

Nice article!
Todd DiRoberto
http://www.newsguide.us/art-entertainment/movies/Todd-DiRoberto-of-American-Satellite-Hosts-Independence-Day-Charity-Event-for-Operation-Bigs/

[megan colin]

I like you're explanation Darrell Todd Maurina!
http://www.newsguide.us/art-entertainment/movies/Todd-DiRoberto-of-American-Satellite-Hosts-Independence-Day-Charity-Event-for-Operation-Bigs/

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=742944859]

Very good piece, thanks

[remote computer help]

This seems like the most comprehensive blog on this niche

[remote computer help]

This seems like the most comprehensive blog on this niche

[dominique turcq]

Will there be reporters in 10 years? Yes... but.

Reporters are a good case study of what happens in the world of work with the advent of digitalization. Their situation today is not brilliant at all, many of them have lost their job in cost cutting programs, but there is hope. The profession will just never be again what it was. The job mutation of reporters will depend largely on how the press is managing its transition. Until now, the answers have been desperately poor but there are signs that this is going to change and that traditional press will be alive again. The problem for reporters is that they have to go through dark ages before they can see the light again since the adjustment of the industry will be slow.
In the world of work and in the economic theory reporters are special specie.
Good reporters are rare. The economic theory says that rare resources are expensive. But good reporters are paradoxically relatively cheap (except for a few divas). It seems to come from the fact that these professionals love nearly desperately what they do and are ready to work with a relatively large part of their wage being in ego cash. This ego cash stems from the fact that a certain degree of prestige is attached to working in renowned media. Renowned media use this to drive the salaries down. Less renowned media can’t really pay them higher salaries than the renowned media and the result is a compensation constantly driven down. The system is not unique to this profession; the movie industry for instance has a similar dynamics.
Their world of work is therefore particular: they study hard, they fight to be hired at low salaries in the news press, they compete constantly against each other and against the new comers from all trades, and this is currently more true than ever, in this internet, blog and twitter era, where anyone could be an amateur reporter. And some of these amateurs are damn good, are sometimes at the right place at the right time and can bring real news value... Many news media in the Internet are thinking more and more that crowd sourcing will be the next big innovation on the cost side of the business model. But most of these new reporters are only paid in ego cash while professional reporters still have to find a way to pay their rent.
The phenomenon again is not unique, the same happens in the music industry, in the photography industry, in the editing industry, etc. in all those fields where digitalization has allowed the arrival of new players because of new technologies enticing new comers to believe they can be as good as the professionals.
Reporters are also a special breed because the business model sustaining their life is traditionally a strange one where cross subsidization is the rule. Few of us would really pay for buying news for what it costs to sustain a large crowd of professional reporters. But everybody pays for a general source of information and for the classified (both for posting and for reading) and agrees happily with the fact that part of the cost is actually paid by advertising. Advertisers buy space because the media are, well, what they are: a media to reach consumers. The industry is in crisis because this whole business model goes down the drain: paper readership and sales by the unit or by subscription are decreasing in the news world because less people want to buy a paper (even if «bit readership» is increasing and even if paper sales are increasing in the tabloid world), paper cost, printing and distribution costs are increasing, advertising revenues are diminishing because of the crisis and because they are spread in many more media than before, including the internet websites. The traditional media see their slice of the pie shrinking. In addition, the revenue attached to classified is fading because these needs are better served by a multitude of Internet sites both for goods and jobs.
In short, reporters are squeezed between decreasing revenues and increasing costs. Staff reduction is the first rule. Staff externalization, i.e. by using free lances is the second rule. Crowd (free of charge) sourcing is the emerging third rule. Reporters seem doomed and their specie could disappear.
The risks for our societies to see this specie disappear are not negligible, namely because investigation journalism, local bureau reports, professional synthesis and analysis, etc. are part of what the texture of democracy is made of. If reporters disappear, will the amateurs of this world, whichever their quality, be able to replace their professionalism and dedication? Who will write about the next Watergate? Who will play the role of citizen’s lobbyist trying to influence legislations for the interest of the citizens instead of the interest of too specific interest groups? It might be the new crowd but it might also not.
Hope comes from the threat itself. What happens in the Internet is the advent of data mining. The old recipe of Google is to analyze individual’s interest via one’s search activities, mail activities, browsing activities, etc. and to target advertising accordingly. Advertisers have got the message so well that today they are less interested by the context in which an individual can be reached (the TV program to which to attach an ad because they have assumptions about the audience, the magazine or the paper because they have assumptions on the readership, etc.) than by the individual’s profile whichever channel he is currently using. And this is precisely what is changing and what could change for newspapers, provided they understand that the switch to the net is inevitable (and they do, they just don’t know yet how to go there). Il will drive their costs down and could allow them to invest again in the quality of their content and their staff.
What will happen in the next few years is interesting and leads to optimism.
First, the traffic on the Internet will switch more to social networks, and will surpass the one on the search engines. Facebook is already attracting more traffic than Google in the US. This will be the case in all markets because it is a social phenomenon with an exponential growth.
Second, the online reading capabilities will become much easier and much more like paper reading, with the arrival of the iPad and its soon to come competitors. It will mean that downloading papers, articles, free of charge or with a subscription or a unit buying way, will be a real simple experience and a cheap investment like to buy (or to get free) apps or music for the iPhone. This will give the opportunity to newspaper for creativity and appeal.
Third, the flood of information we receive on an hourly basis is just not convenient. We need to win time, to get aggregators, filters, synthesis, opinions to rely on, etc. And this is precisely what reporters and journals are good at. This is what their whole profession is about.
There might be some competitors from the web that will arrive with these capabilities and that will aggregate blogs, produce synthesis and superior analysis. They will even be good enough to produce «journals for one» where one will get on his iPad a journal with only the articles he is interested in, and this will be done in probably quite a professional way. But two things will be very hard for them to build: a) a trusted brand image on deep quality, professionalism and b) a high level «opinion trust» i.e. a subjectivity that the reader expects to read. Indeed, no paper is neutral, every brand of news media on the planet has a twist toward a political side or an opinion of any sort, and this is precisely why we buy this or that newspaper: not because they are neutral but because they are close to us and our opinions in a way as fair as possible (in our subjective definition of fairness). We like to feel in our papers the identity of our intellectual tribe. Newbies cannot achieve easily that trust and that complexity of representing opinions as established newspapers brands can. Because these brands bring something else that is very hard to create for others, even with the most advanced technology: oriented serendipity. To many of us, a newspaper is like a person. We trust the analysis, the editorial lines, not only for general information, political information but also for serendipity information. We don't expect the Financial Times or the Guardian or Libération or Le Monde to deliver to us People gossips or art critics on things we are not interested in (we may buy other papers for that). We expect that the selection done on the art page, the movie page, the literature column, the sport section, even the gardening section, etc. fits with our own personality. Again it is a question of trust in the «Newspaper persona».
Fourth, if newspapers play well, and this is where the big “if” is residing, these new activities and diffusion will give them one of the most valuable database on the market, allowing them to propose to advertisers an incredibly well targeted advertising to one. How could this happen? The path is already shown and is a combination of ways to obtain information on the identities of the readers. A practical way, that is already partially observable, will consist of proposing free access for a number of elements like the titles and a few articles, then proposing a free subscription to the same few elements but sent via for instance the iPad or the iBook rather than searched by the consumer and given against personal data; then proposing a pay per article or pay per issue, similar in principle to the kiosk selling papers in the past except that every buyer leaves his visiting card behind; then proposing regular full content subscription (with the classic marketing incentives) and many additional free services (community discussion forum, events like special exclusive webinars with personalities, free classified, reduction coupons, personalized additional newsletters, etc. There is a lot of room for imagination here). They will also, like in the music industry, use their brand name to organize events, on line or off line (and not only for subscribers) and build them as revenue sources.
This complex combination of value added services and of «give me your data» format will lead to a series of revenue streams and to a very precise and advanced database where the personality of an individual will show more distinct facets than the ones shown on social networks. Many systems will obviously help to combine the various data available on the Internet on an individual in order to create the ultimate targeting for advertisers (by the way, this article does not review the moral or social implications and just focus on the business realities). Newspapers, or better news-e-paper will have an unprecedented knowledge of their readership, which is the current most important currency in this Internet age.
What this says is that newspapers, and therefore reporters, were living in a world where the business model was cross subsidization, are living in a world where the whole business model is dis-intermediated and de-aggregated, could live in a world where a completely new cross subsidization will appear and where they have already a competitive advantage. However, they need to act fast in order to secure and build on their current «market share of trust» based on quality filtering and quality writing... the skills only reporters possess.
Newspapers should be able to pay their reporters again; and they will have to because they are the essence behind the brand.
But what is the lesson of this story for reporters themselves? Should they just wait for the upturn? For them, as for many other professions being drastically changed by digitalization, there is room to act on their fate. In their case, they must clearly become as fast as possible fluent in the language and implications of this new digital world, for their investigations, for the quality of interactions with the readers (the old days of the «letters from our readers» are definitely over), for their participation to the new sources of revenues as moderators of debates, organizers of events, and finally for the very way they deliver information: they have to become, also, bloggers.

[Jordans 3]

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[Hot News and Events]

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