fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Donica Mensing | 05.19.2009

Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, spoke at Journalism Day ceremonies at Columbia University today. His talk was summarized by Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review:

We also need to embrace, rather than question, the notion of audience engagement. “In this period of not only rebuilding the practice of journalism, but what sustains it, our compass really has to be what can find an audience,” Marshall said. Just as journalists have had a tendency, he noted, “to measure our seriousness as journalists by our indifference to the publishing and business side of the operations that sustain what we do,” we’ve also adopted a kind of principled indifference to the audience itself. Yet people “who are so focused on their journalism—so focused on their stories,” Marshall said, deprive themselves and their audiences of the engagement that is, and must be recognized as being, the core of the journalistic mission.

“Building audience, and engaging readers, is the fundamental test of what you do” as journalists, Marshall said. News stories—and journalism more generally—must reflect that dynamic relationship. “This isn’t writing the definitive Hittite dictionary that can sit on its own in the library,” he said, to the audience’s laughter. Discrete news stories, rather, are organic entities—and the publishing and business models that will emerge to sustain them need to reflect that.