How many people with computer access will reach for a conventional dictionary or encyclopedia when the information is quite literally and weightlessly at their fingertips? Is it so much of a surprise, then, that fewer and fewer people are starting newspaper subscriptions, and more are cancelling them in favor of getting their news from the web?
Newspapers are clinging to readers in whatever ways they can. I recently endured no less than 15 minutes of pleading and cajoling and offers of a subscription at 75% off from a New York Times rep when I cancelled my subscription for the entirely valid reason of leaving the country for 6 months. But unfortunately for the Times rep, even though the fight of the newspapers may not be officially over yet, in a large part the battle has already been decided.
So instead of looking at the restructuring of American journalism from the somewhat depressing angle of salvaging the newspaper, why do we not examine it from the perspective of improving online media sources to the point where they can serve as a truly legitimate successor to papers? Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson’s “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” in the November/December 2009 edition of The Columbia Journalism Review is extremely valuable for the amount of information and insight into the issues it provides, but it does not cover a major part of the story—rather than saving newspapers, how do we nurse the online sources of news into valuable entities?
The old guard—the well established and suffering papers—are scrambling to do what the younger generation of reporters, and more broadly internet users, has been doing intuitively and successfully for a quite few years now on the Occam’s Razor principle–bringing news to people in an accessible and interactive manner by reporting on what they know and covering the stories they have access to and passion for.
In my opinion, the most sweeping changes in the arena of journalism will not happen with the meticulous battle plans of government subsidies and the demographic strategizing of coverage. It will come, as we have seen in the past few years, from the blogs, the citizen reporters, and the pack mule journalists who can operate a digital SLR camera just as well as their laptops.
This is not to say that ‘professional journalism’ will ever become obsolete. As a species, we have had storytellers since the beginning of memorable time, and this need will never quite be satisfied by one type of voice. And to be honest, it will take a very long time for blogs to garner the same level of respect from all news readers and analyst as established newspapers command. We will always appreciate the experts, the pros—but in a different and perhaps much more accessible way.
The most important aspect of online news sources is also their trump card—online news is equipped with a built in world wide forum. One story can spread, through e-mail and facebook link and twitter and comment, from one end of the world to the other and back in the time it takes for the page to load. With globalization one of the keywords of our era, the global sharing of information has become more important than ever—and that is something a newspaper will never be able to do.
And so it is not just a structural overhaul we are dealing with. I believe that the basic concepts of news and reporting are being redefined, and that the structural changes will follow from these redefinitions; not vice versa. Socially and intellectually, human beings today are different animals than their mid 20th Century counterparts. Newspapers, in all their tangible, clip-able loveliness, are not cutting it in the age of interactivity. From one online story, a reader can follow twelve different concurrent links to other news stories related to it, and in a few minutes can absorb the amount of information it would take a newspaper reader an hour to find in a sectioned, comparatively cumbersome paper.
In all probability the evolution of the newspaper into an artifact of a time less technological is not going to happen tomorrow, or this year, or within the next half-decade. But I do believe that its demise is, for better or worse, in motion. The problem that newspapers are facing doesn’t stem from a lack of experience or innovation so much as it does the confines of the corporate structure of newspapers—when they lose funding, they usually die.
A blog, which is often started with little to no capital and is operated in the same dearth of wealth, does not roll over or cut coverage when it has to go without funding. Perhaps its author forgoes Starbucks for a day or two, or puts in overtime at their day job, but it certainly does not panic and start covering celebrity scandals in lieu of the news it was created to cover.
The ‘new’ news will be defined by four familiar parameters: its levels of interactivity, accessibility, timeliness, and reliability. It is the basis by which we judge our news today, and so the application of these standards to web based news is natural. Let me emphasize, however, that though I do recognize the importance of blogs and I do believe that one day they will supersede newspapers entirely, as a whole they do not satisfy all of these parameters yet. But I have faith that in a few years, as more and more professional journalists and editors join the ranks of web reporters and the public’s esteem for them rises, the online media journalists will look back on their brave blogging predecessors much like we look back on our founding fathers—the visionary upstarts who set in motion the future of an entire country by striking out alone and often against the grain of mainstream society.
A dramatic metaphor, perhaps, but the evolution of how we access and examine our news should be regarded in no less serious a fashion.