All the News that's Fit to...Digitally Distribute
Amid much sound and fury, the newspaper industry as it has existed for a few hundred years is changing into something different. Different both in the manner it delivers it's content, and perhaps more significantly, in the nature of that content itself. In a sense, none of this would be particularly noteworthy were it not for the question of the economic viability of the newspaper companies themselves. The key questions that need to be asked are:1. Is this a terrible catastrophe or the natural evolution of another industry in the digital age?
2. While the near-term economic disruptions in the news-gathering and publishing industries have quite demonstrably had a profoundly negative impact on quality of reporting in traditional media, will the consumer suffer overall for the radical changes taking place in the newspaper publishing sector?
3. Are there genuine dangers to society and even democracy in the decline of newspaper publishing?
In order to answer those questions, we need to think more critically about what a newspaper is, what it's role in the economy and the culture is, and just how unique or irreplaceable that role might be. When you think about it, a newspaper isn't even mostly about news. A newspaper is a collection of information - local, national and global news, weather, sports, stocks, advertisements, features, opinion, movie times, obituaries - virtually anything that might be of interest to some portion of the readership. This clearly came to be what we think of as a newspaper because for well over a hundred years that was the only way to make this information available to a wide readership at a reasonable cost.
As that is no longer the case, we are free to re-imagine the news delivery model. There's plenty of sports, weather, movie times, TV listings and opinion available on the Internet. No one can make a credible case that the newspapers did a better job of classified advertising than eBay and Craigslist . And in a broadly connected world, is anyone particularly happy reading brief news articles, lacking in both depth and context, about events that happened yesterday?
But caution is in order at this point. When we ask the question "is there anything a newspaper can do better than an Internet connection?", we arrive at the obvious answer that succinctly explains the precipitous decline of the newspaper business. But perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Because it has always been bundled together, we are very quick to conflate news DELIVERY with news GATHERING. As we de -couple the various types of information and deliver it through increasingly specialized websites and blogs funded at best by display advertising, it is reasonable to ask, amid the decline of the for-profit news sector, where the source information will come from. If there's not a bureau in Beijing, will we only get our information on China from Xinhua ? From Congo to Kenya to Capetown, what will be the motivation to provide honest and in-depth Africa coverage? Will it fall to the corporations there to exploit the resource wealth of the African continent to provide this information through their marketing communications shops? It's true that we've seen compelling news from citizen-journalist sources like Kevin Sites and David Axe, and truly worthwhile and effective news-gathering from new media sources like Firedoglake, The Washington Independent, The Huffington Post, even The Daily Beast.
The important question, and one that remains unanswered at this point, is whether there will be enough people, enough opportunity and enough resources to support a broader, more diversified and less corporate news-gathering sector. If there is, newspapers will not be missed at all - the new news will be faster, smarter, more timely, in much greater depth and infinitely richer. The question is all the more important because there can be no doubt that traditional newspaper publishing will not survive the current technologically - driven upheavals. They will be gone in our lifetimes, a kind of historical oddity similar to the 8-track tape and the three martini lunch.
For those who question the "journalistic independence" of these new, smaller, more independent and less accountable news-gathering organizations, while the question is reasonable, it is meaningless. If journalistic "integrity" and balance is what has led the currently dominant media to a place where both sides of any discussion are ALWAYS equal, where we find global warming denial and proponents of government sanctioned torture given equal time to offer patently false, incorrect and misleading coverage, then the very concept died long ago. We can hope for it's revival in the future, but it is not the decline of the newspapers or the rise of Internet news organizations that brought about the current shoddy state of journalism.
It's very important to observe that, at some point, traditional businesses will have to learn to recognize a fundamental evolution within their industry, and instead of fighting to preserve the status quo until it's too late for them to make the profound changes necessary to survive, they will embrace the new paradigms and at least TRY to maintain a leadership role in the new order. The music industry should serve as the classic example of a dinosaur after the asteroid, and as such should provide a cautionary tale to any newly-disrupted industry. With the advent of effective compression (MP3 files) and a delivery/storage/playback mechanism (computers connected to the Internet), there was no longer any NEED for music to be tied to a playback media. And desperately fearful of losing a major source of revenue, the music industry refused to accept this obvious fact and argued for years that even if there was no need for the CD, it was somehow to be perceived as desirable to have it. The market ignored their obviously flawed argument, even when they sought to criminalize the natural technological evolution of their industry's delivery model.
It seems inarguable that when technology provides some fundamental change in either the things people choose to buy or the way in which they buy them, the people who sell those things are faced with an existential challenge. If we have learned anything, we have learned that people will not be bullied or coerced into maintaining the status quo, but rather will support those people and organizations that provide what they want to buy and deliver it the way the consumers want it delivered. To do anything other than embrace the new market reality is to consign one's organization or even an entire industry to the tar pits. There will always be winners and losers, but to refuse to participate in the discussion only guarantees a quicker demise.
posted by mikey @ 12:23 PM
1 Comments:
Terrible catastrophe. Minor-league stuff about city hall policy is going to vanish. Other stories are sexier, but the nuts and bolts of local government really affect people's lives in a way that Britney's prescriptions do not.
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