fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

So let’s get this straight: Only teens don’t like frustrating, hard to use websites, only teens don’t like irrelevant, useless information, only teens don’t like liars and only teens want to use information they find for more than personal knowledge?

I don’t understand how the website suggestions are any different than how anyone at any age would like to read. The NAA and Northwestern did not identify how teenagers read, they identified a type of reader that happens to be slightly more common among young people.

In my research and personal usability testing, I’ve discovered two overarching type of readers: Surfers and Drillers. Underneath that, I’ve identified others. However, Innovation in Newspapers 2009 publication (PDF costs money) labeled them more clearly, so I will use theirs in the below descriptions.
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Journalists write stories. Most stories are intended to convey information. The strategic thinking that should be the next step — who needs this information, how might they act on it, how will they find it, how will they share it, how is it useful to them? — gets little attention in most newsrooms. [...]

Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, wrote a column for the Miami Herald yesterday titled, “What readers want vs. what they need.” It represents in one concise package the cultural divide that is preventing so many newsrooms from progressing.
This column neatly identifies some of the tenets of journalism as [...]

The “future of journalism” discussion usually gets framed in the context of editorial content.
We ask questions like: “how can we better connect with readers?” “how can we use technology to build communities?” “how do we ingrain ourselves into the conversation of existing communities?” or “how do we become a vital part of readers’ lives?”
Some of these [...]

This is a mirror post of an editorial I wrote for The Exception Magazine (here for post). I enjoyed writing this because it was written for readers instead of for other journalists.
Journalists suddenly noticed their industry looks like all the other ones they write about on Wall Street. Newspapers, such as the Rocky Mountain News, [...]

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 forms [...]

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:

• How do we save newspapers?
• How do we pay for newspapers?
• Why don’t people read newspapers anymore?
• Why aren’t people engaged with the news?
• How do we mae people read newspapers?
• How do we make people become engaged?

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:

• How will I stay employed?
• How will my media company make money
• How will what I do remain recognizable through this change?
• How can I do the least amount of change while doing the same thing I’ve always done?
• How do I measure successful journalism in this new world?

Shirky makes it clear that we should be asking different questions. We are the revolutionaries. I posit we should be asking these questions:

• What is journalism in 2009 and beyond?
• What is journalism for?
• How do people’s lives intersect journalism?
• How do we build a journalism that intersects peoples lives the way people want it to?
• How does journalism restart; what does it look like, what does it sound like, how does it act, how should it work?

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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.