15 September 2009

ETYTYK About the News Industry Is Wrong

Posted by Connor under: Internet; Technology .

This is the latest in an ongoing series entitled, “Everything You Think You Know (ETYTYK) about ‘X’ is Wrong,” designed to illustrate just how much technology and the internet have changed key industries (the X). It is also about how we as consumers and most especially how the industries themselves are mostly failing in an ongoing way to absorb these lessons despite the ongoing toll they are taking on their colleagues and on their own companies.

In today’s episode, the Newspaper Industry. To recap: newspapers are going broke. The large multi-paper conglomerates overspent in the 80’s and 90’s and loaded themselves down with debt. So, even though their flagship newspapers are still doing okay, they cannot meet their debt obligations. See: The Tribune Company. Other papers are seeing one of their main revenue sources, classified advertising, eaten away by Craigslist, et. al.

For smaller papers, lower revenues mean a smaller “news hole” and fewer reporting resources. This leads to a downward spiral where there is less original, local reporting, the relevance of the newspaper decreases, readership – already hemorrhaging to the web – decline further through disatisfaction and so on.

The news business is changing radically. There will be a new business model for printed news. The problem is no one knows what it is and there are darn few volunteers to find out among the big players. One thing is certain, in the future, ink on paper will only be a small part of a “newspaper’s” distribution model.

So, today’s post is from noted new-media observer and critic, Dan Gillmor, and Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organizaton.
Example:

2. We would invite our audience to participate in the journalism process, in a variety of ways that included crowdsourcing, audience blogging, wikis and many other techniques. We’d make it clear that we’re not looking for free labor — and will work to create a system that rewards contributors beyond a pat on the back — but want above all to promote a multi-directional flow of news and information in which the audience plays a vital role.

But my personal favorite:

6. We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence. If we learned that a significant number of people in our community believed a lie about an important person or issue, we would make it part of an ongoing mission to help them understand the truth.

Which seems to me not a New Rule at all, but a fundamental definition of what it means to be a journalist, period. The fact that we have to “reinvent” this is a sign of just how far mainstream news organizations have fallen from their core business in the quest for higher profits in the 1990s and to fight for survival in the 2000’s. And yes, I am looking across 6th Avenue South when I write this.

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