typical: a letter from the last guy to file news using carrier pigeon…
Posted by elliotttobi on January 11, 2010
Filed under Good journalism, Newspapers, Online, Problems facing New Media, Revolution and tagged Future of newspapers
I was going to comment on this letter from a man who describes himself as “the last Reuters correspondent known to have to sent dispatches by carrier pigeon many years ago from Matabeleland.”
However, after reading “Is Free News Really Worth the Price?” by Alan Cowell, published in the New York Times June 27, 2009, I concluded it wasn’t really worth a comment. Cowell simply poses – and doesn’t answer – the question already being echoed by print journalists the world over: “What are us poor print guys to do in the digital age?”
He admits as a print writer he has crossed over to writing mostly for digital media, yet asks readers to go out and buy a newspaper, because “Newspapers — old-fashioned, ink-on-dead-tree newspapers — offer the scrutiny that politicians, bankers and diplomats try to obfuscate.” His plea reaches such a pitch I almost feel compelled to buy one in order to do my bit to save journalism.
But this tired line of argument, brought out whenever another newspaper folds, is just as stupid now as it was when the first head-stuck-in-the-sand commentator argued it. The argument goes thus: because newspapers produce journalism, and printing newspapers costs a lot of money, ergo, we need lots of rich advertisers who will pay for a spot in the newspaper to subsidize good journalism.
Pardon me, but if you take the newspapers out of that equation, you are left with journalism costs money, which it does. We don’t need newspapers to produce good journalism. We need good journalists.
Cowell comes close to this when he states, “those who champion good journalism must insist that their message is not sacrificed on the altar of a changing medium,” and I assume he’s admitting here the medium has already changed. But since when has the medium been equated with the quality of the journalism? When radio broadcasting displaced broadsheet, when television elbowed out both as the primary news deliverer, did journalists become sloppy about their fact-gathering and checking? The medium doesn’t deliver quality journalism, quality journalists do.
The reason I don’t want to comment on Cowell’s Lament is because it offers an argument for a position, but nothing new in terms of a way forward. This is exactly what every communications analyst, wary reporter, freelancer and – especially! – journalism student out there is doing: watching like a hawk to see how things turn out. Will a workable, paying model be found? Who will pay for good reporting? Will an audience used to getting everything on their laptop for free, ever consider subsidizing a journalist’s work? Is online content really unfundable?
For an answer, not THE answer, because there isn’t one yet, I turn to Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”. The NYU professor’s much-circulated blog post of March 2009 posits that we are in the middle of a revolution, and many of the things attempted and accidentally happened upon in this time of transition (he calls it the space when “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place”) will play out in ways we can’t imagine.
We will move through this chaotic period, he seems to reassure us, and find our feet again. In this new model – whatever it is – we will forget entirely that we ever agonized over the death of newspapers. We will still have good journalism, because a democratic society needs it. He ends with the call to shift our focus from “Save newspapers” to “Save society” and “do whatever works” instead of “preserve the current institution.”
That kind of article is worth commenting on, but then, he already said it all. It’s worth a read.
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Lisa Lynch on January 15th, 2010 10:22 am
Great takedown of Cowell, and wonderful to juxtapose Cowell and Shirky. I’m guessing from your comments that you saw Shirky’s piece when it came out a while back, so you know that it served not only to make a needed intervention into some of the whining and wheel-spinning; it also got people on the outside of the journalism debate more interested in what is going to happen, which is a good thing. There’s been some commentary written since by others on what this chaotic period might look like, but yes, I also think Shirky nails it.