Intro: I’m Jessica and I spend a lot of time thinking about journalism, both its past and its future. Donica invited me a few weeks ago to crossblog between Fix Journalism and my personal blog, and I’ve finally gotten around to doing it. Newspapers were my first journalism love, so I’m particularly fascinated with what [...]
Journalists, such as those in the RevenueTwoPointZero conference, cling to news as it’s been done. Their entire premise is about preserving what has already fallen. Journalism’s fight can be likened to Terri Schiavo’s case.
The questions we ask:
These questions are relevant but I think we need to back up before we try to answer them.
Our problem comes from the fact that we are trying to solve journalism’s problem for journalists. The above questions are really the following questions in disguise:
Shirky makes it clear that we should be asking different questions. We are the revolutionaries. I posit we should be asking these questions:
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Pew’s annual report about journalism’s prospects for 2009 is due out on Monday. According to an Associated Press story: “The state of journalism is bleak, but an annual study of the industry suggests all hope should not be lost.”
In other news, Pew has an interesting story about the changing face of the Washington press corps, the group of journalists responsible for communicating the going ons of our national leaders. What Pew found was a dramatically depleted press corps for mainstream media outlets (regional bureaus for newspapers have been especially hit hard) but at the same time more and more newsletters for specialized interests (climate change, ag policy, etc…) are emerging. There’s also been a dramatic increase in the number of foreign corespondents covering Washington.
In the past week a lot has been written about Jon Stewart’s skewering of CNBC and the faux-populist Rick Santelli. In the midst of all the praise for what was truly a deserving comedic spanking of arguably the most-watched group of financial journalists on television, others are concluding that Stewart’s eight-minute jab-fest was an example of good journalism. Something tells me Stewart – a comedian – would disagree.
While the Daily Show’s bit on CNBC was hilarious (video below), it should have prompted every working journalist to engage in some serious self reflection. The piece, instead, held up a mirror to a system that is obviously in need of a fix: journalists with all-access passes to the rich and powerful lobbing softballs at the crooks who got us into this economic mess in the first place. Sure CNBC does not represent every working reporter out there, and there are plenty of good examples of financial journalism that warned of the looming meltdown years before it happened (even though it was tragically and largely ignored by the public – but that’s another debate). The problem is we are losing credibility and fast no thanks to the massive cut in resources newspapers are enduring.
Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”
This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
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They wanted to create a news experience around a physical public space, likened to town halls of Benjamin Franklin’s day. So they chose to partner with places like Starbucks, Wal-Mart and other congregation areas within communities.
In doing this, you create a cohesive community that centers around news, interest-based conversations and tasty merchandise.
As a business model, you’re giving incentive to companies to participate and encourage participation with the news and other media companies. This allows journalists to go where the people go instead of forcing them to come to the news, enforcing a beat system and community-driven content.
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I was talking to Technology Editor Damon Darlin of The New York Times today and I briefly brought up the ideas I’ve been talking about this week in the rest of the blog. My main question was “what happens when browsers become obsolete?” He paused, raised an eyebrow and so I continued talking about uNews [...]
Absolutely right. The argument that people will go elsewhere doesn’t jive in one-newspaper towns such as Reno or even San Francisco. If the Reno Gazette-Journal or San Francisco Chronicle started charging for content readers would have absolutely nowhere else to go for local information involving courts, schools, people and business. The New York Times certainly does not cover Reno or San Francisco like readers need it to be covered. And neither do any of the alt publications in town. [...]
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but what you can do for SND