The Reconstruction of American Journalism

If you type “are newspapers” into a Google search box, three of the first six auto-finish results are the words “dying”, “dead” and “doomed”. It’s a good question – are they?

They’re obviously not what they used to be and the concern is not only about money and the profitability of the business (although that does seem to be the main issue) but about the kind of journalism that is emerging as a result of the shift to multimedia-orientated, user-interactive web-based publications. Given the trash that passes for news these days and the fact that anyone can start a blog and write pretty much whatever they want, it’s not without reason that people are worried about the future of American journalism; after all, it looks pretty bleak.

Honestly, unless the state of the economy changes drastically (and for the better), I don’t see newspapers and journalism bouncing back from the hit they took when, as I like to say, it all went to hell. I know that Downie Jr. and Schudson think that the answer to the financial issues lie in private and public funding and I can’t exactly disagree, but I don’t see that happening on quite the scale that they hope for. I think that funding will come from people who simply support the cause because they love it or are interested in it, as Voice of San Diego publisher Scott Lewis says: “loyal people like those who give to the opera, museums, or the orchestra because they believe they should be sustained.”

I like the idea of a collaborative effort when it comes to reporting and I especially like Alan Rusbridger’s idea of a “mutualized newspaper”. If journalism is for the public good, giving the public what they should, need and deserve to know, then it seems to make sense that a joint effort to report it is the right move, and that it might improve the overall quality and reliability of the finished product.

I also think that given the role colleges and universities have played in independent reporting thus far, that role will only continue to increase as perhaps other means of publications find themselves unsustainable. Currently, “a number of universities are publishing the reporting of their student journalists on the states, cities and neighborhoods where the schools are located” (sound familiar?) under the supervision of professional journalists. By doing so, they are not only honing their craft, but, given their technological orientation, are encouraged to be innovative and to find new and creative ways of using the internet and multimedia to present the news.

The shift to the internet is not, in my opinion, the worst thing in the world. With all the technological advances this country and the world as a whole have made (with the exception of some places), it really seems inevitable and I wouldn’t try to fight that. The change in journalism that results is really something that comes with the territory of the times we are living in. Historically speaking, journalism has changed, “sometimes dramatically, as the nation changed” and as a direct result of its economics, demographics and politics. This current change seems like a natural progression, though somewhat hurried by the events of the last year and a half.

In the end, I think that journalism will persevere, though not unchanged. Newspapers and television news will continue to exist, and even if “news organizations were to vanish en masse, information, investigation, analysis and community knowledge would not disappear.” That is most important to me – the way in which we access and publish our news may change, but I am confident that the idea of news, current events and sharing of information will always exist. I mean, even in the Golden Age of iTunes, CDs and on rare occasions, even records, are still being bought and sold. Like the music industry and many other industries before it, journalism will adapt and be all the better for it.