We don’t realize how much news media has changed in the past fifteen years. We really don’t.
I’m not talking about digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile web or the curation craze. Yes, journalism has evolved and is better for it. I’m talking beyond that.
I’m not even talking about the fact that everyone is a potential publisher now, from white-hat PR by universities and non-profits to the advent of blogging by experts and academics (remember that iPhone antenna thing or the ground-zero mosque kerfuffle?) to citizen journalism and by-us-for-us journalism (even philosophers do it), even though that’s huge.
Beyond even that. I think journalism is being replaced.
New habits
We used to peruse the entertainment section of our favorite magazine for movie reviews and recommendations. Now most of us use IMDB or the recommendation engines behind Amazon and Netflix.
Same thing for music: people still find new music through Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, but services like Spotify and Rdio actually replace music journalism for many. More music and less bullshit. Better recommendations and you can start listening right away.
People who like to read about music, not just find good music, are a niche audience. Reading about music just happened to be one of the few ways to explore new music before the web, together with mixtapes or radio, so reading is what you did.
Digital communities of interest like the Telecaster Discussion Pages for guitar afficionados, The Fresh Loaf for amateur bakers and the Aquaponic Gardening community started out as merely the digital equivalent of meet-ups with like-minded people, but thanks to search engines these internet forums have become a type of mass communication too. You don’t even have to participate, you can just read a forum like you’d read a specialized publication or trade magazine. Which is, coincidentally, what a lot of hobbyists and professionals end up doing, to the detriment of stuffy niche media.
Quora looks like a simple Q&A site, but it’s also a reinvention of the ask-an-expert column you can find in almost any newspaper and magazine.
Reddit’s I Am A board, with threads like “I am an astronaut, ask me anything” and “I am an Australian nightclub bouncer, ask me anything,” looks like any other internet forum, but it is also what interviews and profiles can look like in the 21st century.
Wikipedia has, for pretty much everyone, replaced news organizations as the place where you go to get in-depth information about anything that didn’t happen today or yesterday.
SparkFun, an electronics store, does weekly video blogs detailing new products and neat electronics tricks. People eat it up. Would you call that content marketing or is SparkFun a media company that happens to make money through a store?
Curbed is a superb real-estate website. Is Curbed journalism because they started out with news and added a marketplace later? Conversely is SparkFun not journalism because they started out selling components and their video blogs came later? When does a blog or podcast or newsletter stop being content marketing and start being journalism with an innovative business model?
Make magazine is getting by because it’s insanely great, but many DIY magazines will be superseded by lo-fi YouTube tutorials filmed on webcams (like this one.)
LocalWiki and Pinwheel are places where people can collect knowledge about their neighborhoods. Follow the right people and organizations on Facebook and Twitter, and you’ll find out what’s happening close to you, straight from the source. LocalWiki, Pinwheel, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare clearly do not replace a good local newspaper, but they offer a combo that is increasingly becoming good enough.
And Facebook is disrupting the media industry on another front too: it’s offering better and cheaper forms of advertising to businesses than newspapers and news websites do. Advertisers don’t need us anymore. (This is the part of the disruption we saw coming as far back as 2005, when people were having all these “Craigslist killed journalism” conversations. It is also why editors tend to think of the news industry crisis in terms of “the advertising problem.”)
Newspapers have long been the only way to get your voice heard and get things fixed in your neighborhood. But now Open311 and EveryBlock do that. Why complain to a newspaper when you can talk to an alderman?
There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.
This is not sharing cat pictures, this is stuff that matters. People can read the health section in their newspaper and get drip-fed badly researched advice about how to live a healthy life, or they can visit the NIH or the Mayo Clinic online, or create an account on one of the many bulletin boards about anything from fitness to dealing with cancer.
And then there’s comics, classifieds, job listings and all those other little things that were never the core of our value proposition but nevertheless a part of it, and we’ve had to give those up too, because other companies do them better.
Immense. The range of sites and services nibbling away at journalism is immense.
Steve Yelvington warned us back in 2009 that we were solving the wrong problem: “You’re not competing on the basis of whether you have unique news. You’re competing with the entire world on the basis of the value that consumers get out of your product.”
We haven’t found the right ways to get people to pay for news and media online, but they have. We are crying but they are having a party on the other side of the river with their not-really-reporting and sort-of-journalism and maybe-media.
Death by nibbles
I will repeat this because it’s important: YouTube nor Facebook or any of these other companies aim to be an alternative to journalism and much of what they facilitate or do doesn’t look like journalism at all. A good chunk of it contains written or spoken words, but sometimes not even that. It’s not journalism. But you’d be naive if you thought their services aren’t often consumed instead of news. It’s the same kind of functionality in a different package, after all, and that new package happens to be rather attractive a lot of the time.
My dad never reads music reviews, but he uses Spotify to find new music. My brother doesn’t subscribe to DRUM! Magazine but he’s seen every drum lesson YouTube has to offer.
Sure, if there’s more good media around (and more good sort-of-media) then people are likely to simply read more stories and participate in more communities. Win-win for both startups and old media. But there’s a limit to our appetite, and every minute spent on Facebook is one not spent on a news site.
Why young people don’t care
There’s a whole slew of research trying to figure out why young adults consume so little news, or consume it in such an erratic way. Most of it, like that of the AP (PDF), the NAA and Amy Zerba, tries to find the culprit in how we write or present the news: too much of it, too little context, overwhelming, presented in a way that does not make sense to a generation who grew up with the internet, not optimized for the devices they use.
Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? Ask any of those questions to the baby boomer middle class, as the Knight Foundation did, and they’ll hand you a newspaper.
The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.
It sneaks up on you
A movie review on Amazon is not Roger Ebert, and if you’d ask any avid reader, they’d all tell you that the one isn’t even comparable to the other and that they’d never even consider getting their entertainment criticism on Amazon or through a cold, anonymous recommmendation engine on Netflix. Yet that’s exactly what so many Americans are doing now. Nobody makes any sort of conscious decision to stop reading entertainment journalism and arts criticism. It just turns out that way.
Small upstarts in unappealing markets end up overtaking the big molochs in an established market with what was initially considered to be an inferior product. Gee, sounds familiar.
But what makes the news industry such a curious case is that many of the disruptors who address the same underlying consumer needs nevertheless do something that is not recognizable as journalism at all. (Though some of it is.) Is Quora journalism? Is Foursquare?
We’re living through a much more radical shift from narrative and stories and reporting to entirely different and entirely unrelated ways of sharing knowledge.
People used to ask Adrian Holovaty whether EveryBlock should be considered journalism. First he said yes. Then he switched to who cares? Allow me to rephrase: “No it isn’t, but who cares?”
The news industry hasn’t imploded wholesale because it isn’t quite useless, not yet. Roughly a quarter of all adults in the US would be upset if their local newspaper disappeared, according to 2012 research by Pew. Down from more than 40% in 2009, but still.
People still value journalism. Sort-of-maybe-not-media companies are slowly nibbling at part of the value proposition of traditional news media. There’s parts we still like. The sheer joy of reading. The importance of investigative journalism to democracy. The straightforward way in which it keeps us up to date on many, many topics. (Sometimes, anyway.)
People just don’t value journalism as much as journalists do.
How to survive
Once you start looking at news media through the lens of fungibility and with sort-of-media in mind, it’s actually quite easy to see where opportunities remain.
- Amp up storytelling and personality, because those things are irreplaceable. This American Life, for instance, or The Awl.
- Acknowledge that you provide less value than you used to, downsize and capitalize on scale. What national newspapers are doing, albeit unwittingly.
- Join the revolution. Adrian Holovaty comes from journalism, but EveryBlock isn’t journalism.
- People read because they’re bored. Un-bore them, like Gawker does.
- Write to people’s passion, and they will gobble up just about anything. MacRumors and many other niche sites do this.
- Do stuff that does still matter. People are happy to support ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.
Notice that I didn’t mention digital-first or social data crowdjournalism or anything like that? Wonder why? Because the entire point is that journalism is not being disrupted by better journalism but by things that are hardly recognizable as journalism at all. Stepping up your game is always a good idea, but it won’t save you.
Chasing quality
The most important reason the news industry is in a pickle is because people aren’t getting much value out of our writing, documentaries and newscasts. We only occassionally sit down to really enjoy and savour journalism. More often we use it to procrastinate at work – which the populist in me frankly believes is a much better explanation for the fact that we consume so much crime, celebrity and weird news, viz. because we’re just looking for a distraction, not, as the most commonly proffered explanation would have it, because each and every one of us is retarded.
I’m confident that strong digital players like The Guardian and the New York Times and Digital First Media will survive. I’m less confident that they’ll ever thrive.
I mean, we’re congratulating The Guardian for losing money online, NYT because its paywall isn’t the crash-and-burn we expected it to be, and because the Journal Register Company is in the black. If you don’t go out of business, you’re a hero.
We have all been so focused on the quality issue: the fact that we’re still doing journalism like we used to do it fifty years ago, that there haven’t been any exciting new news formats since PolitiFact, that there’s a ridiculous lack of context for news stories online, which together with the fragmentation of readership is a disaster. It’s a disaster, and I intend to keep writing and ranting about all three of those issues.
But if people tell you, as they did assistant professor Amy Zerba’s research assistants, that they hate not being able to multitask when reading a newspaper, does that mean we should try to find ways to make it easier for readers to multitask, or is it simply a symptom of people not caring all that much about the news? And does that in turn mean they just don’t care about stuff in general anymore and have become jaded and uninterested in politics and world news (for which there is some evidence), or is there more to it and are people perhaps getting their information needs met in other, more convenient or more exciting ways?
Are we trying to get better at something that doesn’t matter anymore? Perhaps we should take the best traditions of journalism and do something entirely new with it. Whatever we are doing now is not working.
The future
It’s a testament to the enormous value newspapers must have provided to readers before the internet if, even after twenty years of seeing the value proposition of news media sucked away by other media and services, for so many people, even young people, visiting a news site is still the first thing they do every morning. Even the printed newspaper is not disappearing overnight. It’s a long way down.
I’m sure traditionalists are right when they say that media ten years from now will look surprisingly similar to what it is today. Maybe we won’t be printing news on paper anymore, at least not daily, but that’s a minor detail if anything is.
Things won’t stay the same forever, though, and an industry can’t survive on symbolic capital alone – grand talk about democracy and the Fourth Estate. If things that are not journalism entertain, inform and facilitate agency better than things that are, don’t bet on journalism to thrive.
I work for a newspaper and I think about how to reinvent newspapers and reassert their relevance all the time. And people are consuming more news than ever, so we must be doing something right. My guess, though? Most innovation in media and most of the revenue and most of the value will come not from the incumbents and not even from news startups, but from people who unwittingly stumble into producing media as the solution to another problem.
News will be news. But the ecosystem will explode, and traditional media companies will only be a tiny part of it. If you think about it, that’s already sort of true right now.
44 comments
Thanks for the insightful and, at the same time, thought provoking piece. I have been thinking about the same issues, more recently because of a career change I am seeking, and your words have put the 'media problem' in proper context for me.
Also, many congratulations on the simple and usable design of your blog. Can you tell me which CMS are you using? (I am a content guy, not a developer). Thanks
I'm biased because I work in traditional media. The main advantage of traditional media is quality; fact-checking and editing. This article, for instance, has interesting ideas but would have been vastly improved by editing. Very few will read it entire in its present woolly, misspelt form.
For important news people need an outlet they can trust.. I don't believe anything I read on the internet until I see it come from a reliable source such as Reuters. Until then, it's a rumour. Most of the stuff you're talking about is magazine fluff. The idea of using Wikipedia for in-depth background is laughable. Newspapers have real writers. Read them.
I am a newspaper writer, so I'm "biased" too, but I've been hearing those kinds of arguments for a while now and I'd like to add my two cents: While I agree with a lot of what you're saying, I think that your definition of journalism as a system that produces "news you can use" is way to narrow. Sure, new sites are nibbling away the formats we used to get music/film recommendations etc. - but could it be that those sites are actually nibbling away the pieces that are actually NOT journalism? In my definition, journalism has much more to do with providing useful ways to reduce complexity than with just producing content. And while all that content may have been vital for the economic survival of traditional media, it didn't - at least not always - fulfill the core tasksof sound journalistic practice. So the main task remains to develop new formats in which journalism can thrive.
@M L: fair point – and I'm sure my blogpost would be better with some good editing – but if veracity and being a trusted source is the most important part of journalism, we need to start doing a better job of it. Also, don't mistake your hopes for reality: many people are using Wikipedia for in-depth background and Facebook to keep up with what is going on in their neighborhood. You may not like it, you may think that's stupid or even dangerous, but that's another matter.
@Michael: yes and no. I'm willing to grant you that, say, movie reviews are not the core of journalism, but you're venturing very far into No true Scotsman territory if in addition you want to claim that solving problems in your neighborhood (EveryBlock) or learning more about important issues and people in society (Reddit, Quora) is not journalism, and in addition that niche magazines also do not contain and have never contained any journalism.
With such stringent standards, I would be hard pressed to find any journalism in an average newspaper. Maybe journalism isn't dying, but has been dead all along?
Just watch the age stereotyping. I just turned 54 and I spend my first 6 working years as a journalist. I think I may have bought 3 newspapers in the past year. I still read good newspapers but online and usually via twitter feeds. What I can't get on my iphone doesn't exist. I haven't owned a record player for 20 years, a cassette player for 10 years and now don't own a cd player either.
Journalism is not dying - its become more competitive - something not seen in Australia for 20 or more years. I can follow the best journalists via their twitter feeds watching their recommendations - and they may work for themselves or in a PR job, not for mainstream media. I don't know where it's heading but my gut tells me that in the future there will be a difference between bullshit and insight - and between well-written stuff and boring stuff. People will choose between all of them as they did in the past. Quality will sell, good presentation will sell, popular will sell and accessible will sell.
And you know what? I can't wait for it, and I don't miss that black crap on my fingers - even though I'm over 40!
An interesting and thought-provoking start to the evolution of journalism, but one that in the end leaves the reader as much in the fog as a ship approaching San Francisco Bay on a cool spring night. You know the bay is out there, but you cannot see it and you are left fearing more for the rocks than for the final destination.
The issue is not where journalism is going. The issue is what will the new information dissemination practice be? That may be an obtuse recognition of a serious problem, but until we stop trying to solve the problem, we are destined to continue repeating the problem.
The problem is in the asking whether journalism will survive in the future? It will not. That is not to say that the dissemination of information will cease, only that the methodology of capture and regurgitation will change.
It is the form of that capture and regurgitation that make up the question. It helps to realize that journalism (from the French “jour” and Greeks, “ism,” or daily doctrine, has to cease before the new process of dissemination can begin to be seen through the fog.
About twenty years ago I left the confines of the print newsroom to become an “online journalist.” It was I believed the future of journalism and the place to be if you wanted to reach people. I stayed there for many years before leaving to go back to print journalism. I didn’t do it because print journalism was the future, I did it because I realized that neither were the future, but at least in print everyone knew they were on a sinking ship. Journalists, after all, have always been a fatalistic group.
Journalism, as practiced today both traditionally and online is the anchor for those with a desire to tell the story of the world. As things change, we remain anchored even as we continue trying to see new ways to tell the story. Therein lays the problem. While the future may be foggy, remaining anchored while searching for an answer is counterintuitive. Yes, you will find new ways to do journalism while you swing in the ever-moving current, but your area of search is limited by the scope of the anchor line. The safety net is understandable because of the dangers of drifting freely on an unknown current, but it is limiting. The answer is to accept that journalism, as we know it, is dead. The only rational way to proceed is to cut the line and allow the industry to drift into uncharted areas.
We have spent twenty years trying to find what the new journalism is, instead of looking for the replacement of journalism. And that is exactly what we are looking for – journalism’s replacement. It will not be print or storify or Everyblock or Patch or Facebook or anything that we can see today. I would go as far as to say it will not be anything that we can even imagine today. It will not be journalism.
It will remain hidden until we finally cast off from the traditional anchor of journalism and allow ourselves to drift past (and some will not) the impediments blocking our way. Eventually, if we stop trying so hard to see it, what was once known as journalism will evolve and morph into a new information system on its own.
Stijn: Intriguing post, but the crux for me was in your response to a comment:
"With such stringent standards, I would be hard pressed to find any journalism in an average newspaper."
We allowed this to become true, through a collective failure to address the future (and now the present.) But I retain hope that the orgs that you cited -- and others such as my own -- who are responding aggressively can indeed thrive.
I hope at some point you'll train your keen eye on the other half of the equation: the still-broken online advertising model. The lack of innovation there is truly breathtaking.
Stijn, I really enjoyed reading your post and how you've painted an accurate picture of the changing media landscape.
While we have so many access points to information, I think we currently suffer from a lack of quality and relevancy whether it's music reviews, local news, or other forms of media. I think this is where our trusted networks will play a larger role in the future. I'd also add that age is becoming less of a factor in media consumption as these shifts are happening so rapidly. Add to that the emergence of auto-discovery tools like Prismatic and it will be a whole new world five to ten years from now.
For someone who's such a proponent of social media, I'm surprised you don't make it easy to share your own content. Some sharing buttons are almost a must on blogs today - where are yours?
There's a technical term for people who use Wikipedia as a source of information: "Often wrong."
Those who, like you, promote wiki sources as an acceptable replacement for facts end up contributing to the demise not just of journalism but of accuracy of any kind.
I work in medicine. We never make any decisions based on Wikipedia. That would be absurd and irresponsible. There ARE many things that are not totally correct on wikipedia, and we like to be damned sure in medicine. Besides, there many pages that get manipulated by drug companies and device manufacturers. We pay a lot of money to use UpToDate and First-Consult to make real decisions. Same goes for lawyers with LexisNexis. Wikipedia is fun to surf around in and get some leads on later research but it is distinctly limited. As for newspapers, what percentage of the population ever read them even 30 years ago? i would wager no more than a quarter or a third. Newspapers have always been a minority product with core users.
@Chris: inelegantly worded, I'll admit. My point, however, goes beyond the stereotype that old farts read newspapers and young folk use the web. What is interesting to me is that more and more people see only a tenuous link between journalism and "getting the information I need" – regardless of whether they would read that journalism on an iPhone or on a stencil. To many journalists, not seeing that link must sound as absurd as not connecting hunger to food. Yet people are not proverbially starving – and this essay is my attempt to understand why.
@Jonathan: certainly part of the problem is a management issue and the corrosive effects of "efficiency", but many industries are full of mediocre companies and do just fine. Indeed, capitalism is hardly so mercenary and industries where only the very best thrive are rare – the music industry is the only one that comes to mind. Conversely, nobody's happy with their wireless provider but those providers have no problem staying in business.
News organizations, on the other hand, now have to be 100% on top of their game or risk crashing. To me, that's a clue that the problem might be bigger than just our failure to address the future.
But yeah, the very best tailors to this day have no problem whatsoever making money, even though most of the work has now moved to textile factories and (unfortunately) sweatshops.
Similarly, you are right to point out that there's been an inexcusable lack of innovation in online advertising and in monetization in general, but the problem runs much deeper than that, as I hope I've shown in my essay above.
Nevertheless, I've written down my thoughts on monetization before. For your perusal: Making money with media, Battling banner blindness, Frictionless and Return of the brands.
"I am an astraut, ask me anything."
Yes, that's exactly what we get when anybody thinks they can be a journalist.
@Cynic and Stephen: as biased as my essay may be, it is still an attempt at a descriptive overview of a change in consumption patterns. Whether Wikipedia is an accurate source of information does not matter as much to media companies' future than the fact that many people prefer it over whatever information news organizations offer.
Truly an epic post.
For every response posted here, the same line from the article reoccurs: Who cares?
QED
@RJB: thanks, I'll correct the error. I had written "astraut" instead of "astronaut", in case anybody reads this post-correction.
It's intriguing to me, though, that you try to point out the enduring value of professional journalism by sardonically pointing to a typo I, non-journalist, made. Of all the skills a professional journalist must have, like being a good researcher, topical expert or storyteller, typing must be the most pedestrian and the one least likely to keep journalism alive in this age of disruption. Something to chew on.
Stijn, good post. As I was reading, it reminded me of many arguments I've made in the past. I think you're the mark with your analysis and understanding of problems and issues facing the news — and especially newspaper — business. I also agree that fragmentation of the business into niches, the impact of automation supplanting interpretation in some cases, and competition in niches will become more prevalent.
You also surprised me a little when you said you think traditionalists are right. I thought you were building toward a vision of a more dramatic shift and a call for a radical change in how we do things. I think that's necessary.
I understand the need to preserve existing business lines while making a transition to whatever news and newspapers will become, and how people will get their news. But it seems to me that too many are hedging their bets, moving too slowly, and clinging to a notion of porting the traditional news experience to digital. Experimentation may not be part of news culture's DNA, but it must become so quickly and fearlessly if news organizations want to survive and thrive.
[Also, happy birthday!]
Sex and storytelling are the oldest and still most popular forms of human recreation. The storytelling format may have changed over the millenia, but even with our video cameras and websites we're still sitting in the marketplace, talking about how the demon is creeping up on the hero from behind and.... and.... and my assistant will pass among you with a hat so that I can buy a little something to lubricate my dusty throat before I continue.
Another day the tale might be of Far Cathay or Warshunton Deecee, where mandarins eat steak while lissome maidens massage their nether regions and power crackles in the air the way lightning does in fabled Okra Homa, where the wind is so brilliant that it shines brightly on the plain.
The inverted pyramid story form should have been abandoned the day after the Linotype machine got replaced by a Compugraphics 9000, but it wasn't.
Storytelling has colorful descriptions, and uses the traditional form of starting at the beginning and moving steadily toward THE END, with perhaps a few detours along the way to talk about how the Mountain Folk of Scots Verginya distill the uisge that makes them so fearless in battle. But the main elements, despite side, front, and rear bars, are a BEGINNING, a MIDDLE, and an END.
Sex and storytelling: Our human heritage since the days when we were little tribes huddled around campfires with the Scary Animals growling in the dark.
And the best stories of all? The ones about sex, of course. Sex is not only great material, but for men who are too nearsighted to be great hunters, telling stories is a great way to get sex.
(I am nearsighted, 59, plump and lazy, unathletic, and a long-time Internet junkie. Despite these handicaps I have a beautiful wife, so I am writing what I know about WIMMINS instead of making things up. Phht..)
Hey Saleem,
You can still make money in shrinking markets, the shift in habits and attitudes that is driving people away from news organizations is happening slowly, and the disruptors are not taking on journalism head-first but instead are nibbling at it. Those three factors together lead me to believe that we will still have newspapers and newscasts ten years from now and maybe even twenty years from now, just like traditionalists predict.
On the one hand, the future is already here, the clock is ticking, and if we don't radically change how we do things our industry will die. On the other hand, many of the sites and services I list are not yet an active threat: some only exist in North America (Netflix) or only cater to an English-speaking audience, some only exist in major cities (EveryBlock) and others still have somewhat of a niche audience even if they have potential beyond that audience (Quora).
As someone in journalism, I'm very worried and feel that we're acting too slowly. As a consumer, things will continue to look like business as usual for a while still.
I'm intrigued by Jeff Jarvis's idea, that it's really okay for corporations to be short-lived and die once they've done their service to society. Maybe that's all we can do.
To the journalists above who pride traditional news for its quality and fact-checking... you must not be an expert in any field. Because if you were, and you'd ever read an article written about your field, you'd cringe at the populist simplifications, he-said-she-said empowering of nonsense and sensationalist exagerrations.
Unfortunately most of us flip the page, and assume that all those other articles must be pretty okay.
Nope.
I AM COMPELLED TO CHIME IN HERE.
Let’s go back to the start. It began with SLASHDOT, which morphed into the modern news process – the social aspect of information dissemination. One should not give such short shrift to the idea of crowd participation, and should NOT DISREGARD the incredible knowledge base of likeminded participants in the crafting of the news. With the Slashdot model the news WAS the kernel of which many minds gravitated towards and imparted their own small niche of wisdom to the larger issue at hand. Many people attempted to bring such commentary as added value to the mainstream news – including myself – through a news aggregation format. Ironically, in the end it was the mainstream press that gave birth to Huffpo, since the one thing Arianna had going for her was ACCESS to the mainstream media as a megaphone to promote her blog. Yes, Access.
And then there’s DRUDGE – let’s not underplay the influence of this simple site – which for many years (if not still to this day) set the table for the mainstream press. A man, a logo, a webpage, a big photo, and some links. It was rather Spartan, yet effective. Somehow, it became the must read site for media types after the Monica expose; and it followed that what Drudge thought was important became important to every news organization in the country. And, you would see, hear, and read it repeated ad nauseum until the “cycle” played itself out. Inevitably one starts to ask themselves – should I just start with Drudge if all the news is following him anyway – why not just jump to the chase.
One could surmise that given all the traffic that comes from such sites, the future holds a great possibility for acquisition of such properties, much the way AOL swallowed up Huffpo. Media companies have been doing this for quite some time – using one property to promote another.
I know, I know – if there’s no more news business who will the likes of Drudge and Huffpo link to – trust me – the idea that the only people who can write are the ones that got the job writing is offensive at best, and at the very least pure bunk.
Let’s just say there will be a generation of boomers soon retiring with expertise in every imaginable field of expertise; with nothing but time on their hands, a computer at their desk, an internet connection, a simple blog – hankering to wreak havoc on the world.
Stijn – nice work – but I would add don’t underestimate your competition, even if they have never seen the inside of a news room.
really enjoyed this post and managed to read right through the typos, apparently. I think the application of what you are saying is that, to continue doing journalism, we need to see what information needs are not being met, and how to best meet them ... and think like a programmer. The most effective way for most information will not be a narrative, but sometimes it will.
I think the internet is prying credible writing loose from perfect grammar, spelling and usage.
People with something to say can gain an audience now without achieving the perfect writing that has often come with the help of editors.
Where will this take us? I suspect that grammar, usage, spelling, and the conventions of style will become more tolerant. Some differences will dwindle, perhaps who and whom, affect and effect, further and farther, and whether you use another comma.
Dani,
I would widen the scope a little bit. (1) see what information needs are not being met, but (2) also try to figure out what information needs journalism does address, but perhaps in a way that used to be the best we could do but not anymore, and (3) think beyond just information, because journalism has a broader role than just spreading knowledge – I did an earlier post about this, 37 percent there.
Glad you liked the post. And you're right: narrative might be the best way to do what needs to be done, and sometimes it won't be. It's what Adrian Holovaty told us so long ago: the reason the news industry is in a pickle because so many journalists have trouble seeing themselves as information providers and reporters rather than writers.
Great post, insightful, thoughtful. Thanks so much. For journalism to survive on any platform it needs the context you identify and it also needs knowledgeable reporters who understand that context. The platforms don't matter. Movie listings are important if you want to go to a movie; the stuff that keeps society functioning takes longer to cook.
A good story doesn’t have to be true to sell, just good. To wit, your own good piece above which I was attracted to by the catchy head: “Journalism is not evolving; it's being replaced” which ran in the Daily Buzz from eMedia Vitals. You make many plausible sounding assertions about matters of fact. But having witnessed in my own lifetime (in the US) the advent of TV, FM radio and then Cable; the death of mass picture magazines (Life and Look) and the wild boom in specialty magazines; the advent of LPs, Stereo, tape, CDs and then iPods; the development of computers from main frames, to minis, micros, pc’s, and now tablets; the heyday of direct mail and its replacement by email etc. etc. I would counsel that your assertions can and should be tested against facts and that the facts are likely to be far less sweeping and definitive than they appear to be when your sample of media behavior consists of yourself, your family, and your friends.
Roger,
The facts are that people spend on average nine minutes a month with local news, newspaper circulation is dropping everywhere and the average reader is getting older, most news consumption happens in quick bursts at work (ask any news organization) and, as the research about young adults I linked to indicates, young people are consuming less and less journalism across all platforms. Meanwhile, Reddit gets over 8 million visitors a day and I don't have to tell you how well Facebook is doing.
Your scepticism becomes you, but you can't really blame a vision of the future for containing guesses and extrapolations. Barring a crystal ball, that's the best anyone of us can do.
Roger Wilson: That's a good first line... lest we forget RatherGate.
Oopsies!
(...yet another reason for Journalism's decline is the old truthiness issue: we don't trust traditional media any further than you can throw a bale of crusty old metaphors.)
Stijn: This is an excellent essay. If pigs could fly and publishers/editors/reporters could comprehend reality, they would know that you give Terriffic Advice to Journalism.
As a (mostly) disinterested observer of Journalism's suicide I have to agree completely with Adrian Holovaty: "Who Cares?" I don't.
Heartlessly and unapologetically, I am an interested observer to the extent that it's kind of funny watching Journalism wake up from this nightmare about losing its gatekeeper status, its ham fisted influence, its puffed up ego and realizing that it wasn't a nightmare at all...
Stijn, I can't say I disagree with you. My mind goes back to last fall, when we were sitting in the sun in Prinzessinnengärten in Berlin, talking about new models for news.
As I said then, you can definitely make money in shrinking markets, but I'm less concerned about the slow bleed of the news-consuming community than I am about those who never developed the habit.
The sites and services you mentioned may not be directly attacking the professional journalism outlets or industry, or significantly eroding their communities, but they are signals. They deliver a kind of experience that is hard to find there. The effect is that if a member of this digital tribe finds their way to a news site, they're confronted with an experience that is slow, tedious or some other variation that fails to engage, and off they go, never to return. We all do that with sites or services that fail to engage us or present obvious utility.
So, news outlets that fail to significantly invest in innovation by first and foremost adopting and encouraging a culture of experimentation, are repeating the mistakes of the past when they continued to enjoy double-digit profits and saw digital as that strange thing where the strange people worked and cost a lot of money.
I'm on the fence about how soon and how fast the deep-ocean rumblings we're talking about will turn into a powerful wave that crashes into the industry. Some days, I think it's under 10 years and others, longer. The slow pace at which we've seen change within the industry suggests that the glacial progress will continue. But every time I look up, I can't shake the sense that it's all accelerating, or that an asteroid will hit and we'll see a mass extinction event that gives rise to a new species. Maybe that's a blessing in disguise.
As I said (yet again) last fall, the business we should be in is disrupting our own business. There are infinite reasons to say "No," but the opportunity to survive and thrive seems like a pretty good reason to say "Yes."
A good story will be read and enjoyed, whatever the format. It may be read more often if it is available on the Internet, because, frankly, this is the more reliable medium. I am in the over 40 group but have not subscribed to a print newspaper for more than 20 years. Today I follow AP on twitter, scan the headlines on Yahoo, and, yes, look at Facebook and even Wikipedia. This is the quickest way to get to what's happening in the world. I don't want to spend a lot of time reading an article just to glean one small factoid. I would rather see the factoid first in the headline and then if I want to know more I will read (or more honestly, scan) the rest of the article. So journalists, take heed: most people do not consider your work interesting enough to read an entire 150 word article. If you want to get your point across, make it in the headline, or at least in the first sentence.
An NPR blog cited the recent Pew State of the News Media study indicating that 23% of people aged 18-24 reported reading a newspaper yesterday. http://www.npr.org/blogs/gofigure/2012/05/02/151547286/millennials-and-print-newspapers-a-surprising-story
I was suprised to learn a few years ago that AM radio still has half the audience it had when FM arrived. I don't know anyone who listens to AM but apparantly they are out there.
My point is not that changes are not afoot and not that they are unimportant but that the changes are slower than we think.
Fair point, Roger. I guess I just don't know. Like Saleem, I vacillate between doomsday thinking – writing's on the wall! – and thinking that it will be a very painful but very long process. Not for consumers but for us. It's a crapshoot.
@ M L McEwan:
"The idea of using Wikipedia for in-depth background is laughable."
Well, let's see. Say for example I wanted to learn JavaScript (I teach it, but bear with me, let's assume I'm learning it.) I might google "JavaScript" and hit the second link, which is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript
That gives me a history of the language, goes over features, syntax and semantics, examples of its use in webpages, security issues, development tools, variations, libraries, and external links.
There are 75 citations that link out to further explanations, 15 recommended publications with links to find them, and 12 complete tutorial links.
If that's not comprehensive, I'm not sure what is.
You can respond and say "that's not journalism" and I would say "who cares?" If I'm spending time there, I'm not reading your news outlet or blog. Yelvington was right when he said that we're competing with the rest of the world for its attention.
A basic principle of web design is "people spend most of their time on other people's websites." People are increasingly spending less of their time on traditional news outlets because they don't answer a question or offer a solution that can't be found elsewhere.
Traditional media can R.I.P. for all I care. For decades, journalists have been full of themselves... "arbiters of truth," "defenders of liberty"... such B.S. Traditional media travel in packs, reporting the same nonsense over and over... getting it wrong much of the time. Almost every time I've ever been close to an event deemed "news" by traditional media, I'm stunned by how biased and factually wrong they are. One word summary... FAIL.
So... I shed no tears for the beating they're taking now. And that's before considering how most media got greedy and stupid over the past few decades... consolidations, indefensible financing schemes, labor abuses, charging exorbitant rates for display and classified ads.
Traditional media has been the defender of the status quo... and they grew fat and lazy on easy money.
Let's just flush... and focus on building the next generation of tools and organizations to protect the masses from the 1%.
How about boil it down to this: Grow a pair of big balls. Take on corporate interests. Expose corruption. Get personal. Muckraking has always been interesting and readable, but it isn't done any more because today's news companies are part of the corporate monster they need to be protecting us against.
The 4th estate has merged with the business and political estates and because of this they have no leg to stand on.
Over 40? Where are you living!? i am nearly 60 but you wouldn't catch me with mainstream media in any shape or form. I don't own a BBC licence either. Any and every type of media has been manipulated to extract the truth and it is nothing but Orwell and propaganda. Online is the way forward with good writers that you trust and who will speak the truth as they see it, journalists are paid to spout their masters voice. Mainstream media is finished, no one with any intelligence trusts it.
Harold, that's an interesting point, except what you miss: jouurnalists who do this for a living need to be PAID.
I don't get why everyone misses this; is journalism supposed to be charity work?
As a general assignment reporter, I've done tons of investigative reporting. No one tells me to do it. I do it because it's interesting and important. But I have to do it around the "what do you think" polls and the fluff pieces - that's because every working journalist today, with a few exceptions like the NY Times, is doing the work of several reporters. We're under pressure to produce 'content' (God, I hate that word.)
Sure it's all filler, but with a 24/7 news cycle, we're under constant pressure to produce NEW crap to keep you coming back. That leaves little to no time for investigative journalism - unless you're like me and you do that on your own time.
Yeah, I do it for free. Cause there is no way to justify the cost of that kind of writing - it's 'content' and has no value to the overseers and the readers to any greater degree than the "what do you think" polls or fluff pieces.
It's extremely democratic. Every piece of 'content' is worth the same as the next piece, no matter how much work it took to write it.
So thanks for the advice. I guarantee you most journalists would much, much rather being doing investigative reporting than asking you about the state of your colon health or if you think rich people should be taxed more.
When you figure out a way to pay a good journalist a living wage so they can focus on writing good, investigative pieces, send me a line. In fact, post it on blogspot. You'll become a billionaire by tomorrow.
Great post. The complaints about Wikipedia (or Google, or Facebook) being a sufficient replacement for professional journalism miss the point. Of course it's not. The point is that the network in its totality is a more than sufficient replacement for professionally generated news and information. The network -- consisting of individuals, groups, organizations and applications -- is smarter, faster, wider, deeper, better than any one institution, new or old, can possibly be.
Lots of good stuff here. Thanks.
Journalists are the "we" in your post. People like me are just watching the caos unfold and smirking as all you former infophiles run around like you're still important. You have been replaced and you need to either adapt or move out of the way.
You were replaced the day WordPress was released. You were replaced the day people decided to start sharing with each other again. You were replaced by machines and apathetic geeks.
Welcome to the Internet.
@KatyL:
You, in turn, miss the multiple examples in the article of how "journalists" are getting paid - by making the "journalism" an ancillary benefit to some other, more vital and paid-for service or utility. The challenge is to determine how to make investigative reporting ancillary to a service readers/users will pay for.
Sure, not all stories are pertinent to individual readers' immediate economic interest; some are simply too large, yet vital to the world at large. But that sort of work can be done by an independent reporter or blogger, who then reaps the rewards when the story breaks in speaking opportunities and book deals.
Insisting that your need to be paid upfront (exclusively by paternalistic handout from a corporation, perhaps one that should be the focus of your investigation) clouds your ability to see opportunity.
Nice, thoughtful piece, Stijn. My only criticism is that, as a European working in the industry in the US, you should never miss the opportunity to remind Americans that newspapers (and newspaper-like media) don't always have to be life-sucking black holes of earnestness. Of course, the smallest small-town American community weekly will often beat a European metropolitan daily on fact-checking and pyramid-inverting, but it hardly matters if the readers have given up, or just dropped dead from boredom.
@Harold: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, as Robert Hanlon used to say. That said, I think you're perfectly right: it's considerably easier to disrupt mediocre journalism than it is to disrupt the really good, ballsy stuff... and there's a lot of mediocrity out there. Lots of journalists that lack ambition.
@Katy: I don't think we've found a good way yet to give investigative reporting the treatment it deserves in a world where so many things are fighting for people's attention, whether online, in print, on the radio or on tv. Most newspapers' response to their waning influence has been to simply cut back on investigative and in-depth features because it gets the same amount of attention as anything else would but takes much longer to produce.
If, as a publisher, you've reluctantly accepted that you can't command your readers their attention anymore to the extent that you could before, cutting back on investigative reporting makes perfect sense, and frankly I don't even get why journalists would still want to do long projects considering people ignore most of them anyway, and writing about wrongs doesn't necessarily put them right anymore. It doesn't have the impact it used to.
But what if, instead of sidestepping the problem, we would actually try to figure out how to get people to care about and pay attention to things that matter? Kind of vague, I know. But Joy Mayer is doing some really interesting experiments in that vein, and Greg Linch has been trying to figure out how we can start to measure journalism in terms of impact rather than pageviews. Those are two projects more people need to get involved in.
@Erik: Europe used to have a strong tradition of partisan press and sleaze (though the latter is mostly a UK phenomenon, I think) but haven't most papers converted to New York Times-style impartiality by now? Anyway, it was fun but also polarizing. If we're looking to drop objectivity for transparency, there's better role models, I think.
Sure, not all stories are pertinent to individual readers' immediate economic interest; some are simply too large, yet vital to the world at large. But that sort of work can be done by an independent reporter or blogger, who then reaps the rewards when the story breaks in speaking opportunities and book deals.
Let's think about this...
I am speaking from the millennial perspective here, but we are the ones that have created this problem in the first place.
Most my peers log onto Facebook or Twitter, take time out of their day to read about the sandwich their friend ate, delete that ugly picture of them from the previous weekend, and so on. Millennials are fixed on this concept of only engaging in news that only affects themselves (and their initial networks). Facebook and Twitter have created a world of their own, and although social networking platforms are gigantic in numbers, the reality points to young individuals focused on the news that relates directly to those they interact with.
Journalism needs to find a way to tap into this gigantic-small world...
In my eyes, there are two problems.
1) The Millennial attention stan WAY to short. We want to read news that relates to our networks now, and be able to have easy access to a response on the spot. Facebook has mastered this.
Journalism needs to find a way to either change the minds of Millennials or better their methods for allowing quick expression of individualism. Humans are creatures of habit, so after spending hours on Facebook, the thought of reading a long article printed after earth has completely orbited the sun isn't attractive to the majority of us (I am not proud of this).
This leads to my next point...
While those in previous generations would take the time out of their day to pick up a paper and read the news, most those in our generation spend starring at a computer screen, tablet, or smartphone. Imagine if a newspaper offered a bunch of clickable tabs that would take you deeper into your world of your interest? The distractions would take away from reading articles relevant to the community and event further from those relating to our nation. This is what is happening.