fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Michael Higdon | 03.04.2009

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 uWeb (new name, it’s in the works but I want to call it something other than “that thing that has stuff that we pay for” because I’m sick of relating it to iTunes).

Anyway, so I talked about uWeb being a place that joins information together under a money-making umbrella. Using uWeb to allow anyone to charge for information (in all forms) rather than just trying to get news on board, I think, represents a new platform for the Internet. And beyond that, I think it centralizes the Web instead of further decentralizing it. But this I’ve said before.

Damon Darlin then said that what I’m talking about is actually a distribution system, which I hadn’t realized before. He said that historically the people to make money are not journalists – they manufacture content – but are the producers of journalism, such as publishers.

Interestingly, considering communication devices throughout history, journalism has never invented any of its modes of distribution, it’s only ever utilized it. Printing presses were invented and then used by journalists. Radio, TV and the Web are platforms/distribution modes and journalists have always been years behind in their use of those platforms. Journalists have always chased the bandwagon, never been on it and never been in front of it.

So that makes me think the paradigm shift, aside from newsroom culture and how and what we produce, needs to be a new method of distributing information. And that method needs to be invented by journalists for the world and not by journalists just for journalists. Or maybe it shouldn’t be invented by journalists but with journalists in mind. And it needs to be something that utilizes the Web in a far better way and something that makes browsers secondary, not primary.

If journalism can get ahead of that curve/bandwagon, they will be in much better shape.