fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

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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If you blow up everything you think is real and start over from scratch based on the needs of the community and tools of the newsroom, I think a newsroom could look like this (below). The idea came from a class Donica and I are brainstorming about. We want to do something that’s similar to [...]