How to reinvent journalism?

I agree with you, Meat, which is why I added the qualifier about the hacking cough. Newsprint retains lots of key advantages. Still, with the death of our monopoly on classified advertising; with the eventual development of more robust and readable electronic delivery systems; with the growth of each new generation of entirely wired kids; and with the unreasoning panic of the old guard, who will make the next 10 or 15 years of turbulence worse for journalism rather than better, it's often hard to see the silver lining.

I'm not sure, for example, who is more likely to survive the next sea change in newsgathering and dissemination: the monoliths like the NYT and the WaPo, with all their resources and brand clout, or the little 5,000 circ. thrice weeklies out there in America, whose mix of home and hearth and local knowledge make them largely indispensable.

Maybe some combination of the two, where we wind up with local news outlets, in both paper and electronic form, fed from network headquarters. A reciprocal news syndicate that combines print and video and whatever else comes along.

 

That's your problem right there. This is not an argument and for someone who claims to have more than 25 years in, you should see that. This is one man's opinion. Instead of trying to be intellectual and witty - you fail in both - and trying to drag others into a free for all that will get a board locked, try to respect another's opinions. Apparently yyou have a major problem with that.
Here's hoping you'll stop attacking and start learning. Contrary to your mind, you don't know everything.

 

I'm using the words "argument" and "argumentation" in the philosophical sense, boots. Like this:

argument

To argue is to produce considerations designed to support a conclusion. An argument is either the process of doing this (in which sense an argument may be heated or protracted) or the product, i.e. the set of propositions adduced (the premises), the pattern of inference and the conclusion reached. An argument may be deductively valid, in which case the conclusion follows from the premises, or it may be persuasive in other ways. Logic is the study of valid and invalid forms of argument. See also induction, fallacies, proof.

You offer nothing to support your opinions. I'm trying to offer my opinions and then support them.

 

Not to wade into the middle of anything here, but:

So if Boots had said "The business is dying" rather than "journalism", he would have been OK? I think on the "newsprint . . . the business . . . journalism" continuum, the truth lies somewhere from the middle, to the right. Everything about the way we do our jobs is changing, from game coverage to the declining appetite for long-form journalism, from the credibility that a professional reporter offers vs. a reacting, second-hand blogger to consumers' reading habits and community involvement (which would favor a general-interest publication or Web site).

With all those changes, our jobs and our voices and our paychecks will continue to change, too, and not for the better. The Internet has devalued information, including its gathering and its dispersing. We won't have a prayer of feeding people what they "need" to know, we'll be so frantic to shovel what they "want" to know at them for whatever nickels and dimes we can extract.

 

The two extremes will have the best chance of surviving in their current state -- the national, prestige papers that provide strong investigative and analytical reporting with enjoyable, compelling writing, and the Hometown Gazette-Shopper with the school lunch menus and the Little League team photos and the Lions Club chicken dinner stories. The ones in the middle, the 25,000 and 200,000-circulation dailies, they'll be in a difficult spot because they won't have a distinct identity to fall back on.

I suspect what you may see at your mid-major dailies is zoned community dailies (or non-dailies, for that matter) that run regional news of importance flowed around the aformentioned Little League/Lions Club stuff. So instead of the Metro Times-Press, you'll have the Southside Times-Press, the Riverbank Times-Press, the Jackson Heights Times-Press, and so on. The website becomes a portal to the community sites and includes breaking news and multimedia projects.

But I think this flavor-of-the-month push towards reader submissions will probably peak at some point, because left unabated, you'll get flooded with all sorts of stuff that wouldn't make the paper (kid plays catch with dad, 43rd birthday party, that sort of thing) that your site will turn into Photobucket, and honestly, the people who want their stuff published don't want to be one out of a million, they want to be special and their submissions treated as news, not published because everyone plays. There's a fine line between citizen journalism and the bulletin board at the Piggly Wiggly. How well the beancounters and the newsroom leaders tread it will tell much about where we stand in 2017.

 

I think the idea that "journalism is dying" wildly overstates things. Newsgathering and storytelling will always persist, no matter the form. Certainly the old "business" model - in which newsprint had a monopoly on information and print advertising has changed and changed and changed again in response to radio and televison and now the internet.

But there's evidence that people still rely on the trustworthiness of the source when they choose their news sources. For all the fret and woe over BLOGS, more people than ever are also dipping into the pages of the New York Times -- in a way that was unimaginable even ten years ago. That they're doing so electronically is as much an opportunity as it is a challenge. We're in that awkward phase where change is going to hurt a lot of traditional businesses, while helping to create others.

Our roles, as writers and editors, are going to change too. Both because of the new platforms, and in response to them. On the one hand, we don't need to wait 24 hours to push breaking news out to our readers. On the other, our access is getting choked off as more and more organizations seek to control their own public message.

My worry in all this is that rather than considering the landscape as it is, there's too much panic in the air. Which is why I called boots out on that comment. To say that "journalism is dying" is to ignore 10,000 years of human storytelling, and offers a perfectly plausible excuse to do nothing while history washes over us. It's on the order of saying that internet readers won't read long stories. Bill Simmons, an early internet star no matter what you think of his work, often writes a weekly column in excess of 5,000 words. People will read what they like, and at length, and always have.

Whether or not we'll figure out a new economic model for every publication in America remains an open question, but to say the sky is falling and merely run for cover helps no one.

 

Panic is the cottage industry for newspapers, at least since I've started. Ever since people connected to Prodigy and CompuServe on their lightning-fast 2400-baud modems, I've heard how the internet means nobody will go to us for national news or sports or anything like that, as though we had lost the patent on the written word on the computer screen. That's not necessarily true, because most of our readers still want one place to get all their information. If we tell them to get it somewhere else, then that's what they'll do, and we become the victims of self-fufilling prophecy.

I will say that it's more difficult to read a long-form story with IM windows flashing and ads pulsating on the fringe and the glare from the computer screen slowly giving you a headache as opposed to sitting in a chair or on the couch with two handfuls of newspaper and digging in.

The economic issues are fair ones and imporant ones to discuss. The editorial end, no matter what the naysayers would have us think, is on more stable ground. Unless we choose to jump off of it.

 

While that's certainly true for our older readers (and me), I think most eleven-year-olds find nothing offputting in the experience. Another ten years, and that'll be even more true. I really like a lot of what the NYT has done to roll more multimedia into their big stories, too. I get the long chunk of text, then, if I choose it, a slideshow or a video on how the story was done; or some charts and graphs in support of the text; or referrals and links to other sources.

And you're right about the panic lemmings. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And the accounting department.

 

Boots, I thought your first couple posts on this thread were surprisingly rational and relatively well-stated. But as soon as jgmac dared question anything you'd written by making one very valid point, you quickly devolved into the usual lunacy. And, the thing is, jg's response really wasn't even criticism so much as a clarification that your point applied more to the newsprint industry than all journalism. Would it have killed you just to acknowledge such an obviously valid point?

If you're gonna keep posting on these threads, why don't you just once try responding to posts that disagree by first considering whether their point might be valid and, if not, responding with rational argument rather than the usual hyper-defensive paranoid bit. You might be surprised by the result.

 

IU, jcmcg wanted me to explain why I feel. I don't feel compelled to do so. Because I didn't and don't wish to explain my feelings, I'm wrong? I don't think so.
This routine of debate, debate, debate is boring. Everyone has an opinion. No one here is right. No one here is wrong. There are no winners or losers.
I trust that you'll see where I'm coming from and respect that as MY opinion.

 

Having given this thread nearly 24 hours to detoxify, I'd like to try to reinvent it without the twaddle and childish byplay.

Having read the ajr piece in the initial post, it seems to me that everyone is going to be paying a great deal of attention to Atlanta's new newsroom model.

Questions: Can it work? Or is it simply plausible corporate cover for more and deeper cuts? Is the departmental rearrangement there the new model for newsgathering? Or is it more beancounter hocus-pocus?

 

I don't think journalism is dying.

I do think that we have to re-think how we project ourselves to the public. Instead of crediting the intellect of the public, we write shorter stories and package those stories with flashy art and graphics.

If we keep the attitude that the public is stupid, they're going to go away from newspapers to get the news.