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The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism
The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some more. Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that) explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column translates and deconstructs Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's Michael Gerson became the latest journo to bemoan the death of journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?) bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print journalists.
seeing an "emergency" someone will step in with government money, more regulation, etc, and it just goes downhill from here.
Democrat Henry Waxman says that our imperial federal government will be involved in shaping the future of journalism in this country. He claims that it is "essential to U.S. democracy." John Leibowitz, the Chairman of the FTC says, "News is a public good ... We should be willing to take action if necessary to preserve the news that is vital to democracy."
See one story at http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9CAJBQ80&show_article=1
I am far less worried about big media companies and the like. I am more than inclined to fear the Federal Government getting involved. Worse, they will twist the meaning to lay claim that any press other than "printed" is not covered "exactly" by the Constitution thereby allowing them to "help" out by providing some regulation. Very similar to how they exploit the fact that Radio isn't specifically listed in the Constitution/BOR and therefor they have a right to affect them. Sad is how many cheer it on who don't like AM talk radio without understanding that giving the government a foot in the door opens all to the affect.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...has been more deadly to the art of journalism than all of the technical innovations in the last 200 years put together.
Well, I guess whoring your own clumsily written anti-aggregator OpEd to an aggregator site is one way to get traffic and survive in the Google age.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think in retrospect, the mainstream media should have heeded the warning of one Alvin Toffler, who wrote in The Third Wave in 1980 that as communication technologies improves, the days of the the mass media controlling media distribution will come to an end.
With cable TV, small-dish satellite TV and the public Internet, Toffler's warning has become 2009 reality. The only survivors will be those who can quickly embrace taking full advantage of today's communication technologies, and Time, Inc.'s recent "fantasy demo" of an electronic edition of Sports Illustrated designed to take full advantage to future tablet computers (such as the much-rumored Apple tablet) is proof there are some in the mainstream media who understand they must change with the times (pun not intended :-) ).
It's just the death of journalism as we know it.
Print, TV, and radio news outlets are going to have to decide if they are in the print/tv/radio news or if they are in the business of news.
If it's the former, they will die. If its the latter, they can survive if they pay attention.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The internet does not replace the journalists aka reporters.
it is merely changing the distribution.
The town crier was replaced by the paper boy but journalism, gathering the facts, reporting on events, has lived on.
it is not the printing press that makes a journalist.
My big wish is that factual reporting would regain its place ABOVE the opinionated offerings seen on places such as FOXnews.
comment directly in my journal
The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism
In Schmidt's piece, he used the word 'journalism' once:
I believe it also requires a change of tone in the debate, a recognition that we all have to work together to fulfill the promise of journalism in the digital age.
Don't ever kid yourself that journalism will die. It's certainly changing but the thing that might die is the old model of power structures and funding around journalism. Journalists will still do reporting and writing for a monetary sum. The channels where that money comes from are rapidly changing ('rapidly' is relative to how historically slow change has been in this world). This friction is creating the death throes of (most) companies involved as money makers in the traditional channels.
It's change, it's probably for the better (as Schmidt notes) but one thing's for sure: it's unavoidable. Adapt or die.
One more thing:
Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that)
Never forget that Murdoch still sells eyeballs--at all costs. If it meant betraying a political party or betraying his core values or even displaying another side of the debate, he's here for one thing: money. What we see in the op-ed piece is actually one of the few positive effects of Murdoch's greed. I offer him my rare applause if he had anything to do with this being printed in the WSJ although I'm certain the WSJ printed it to generate revenue and he merely approved of it.
My work here is dung.
If all journalism comes from blogging instead of professional newspapers by professional journalists, the news people read will be much less controlled, and probably have much more varied opinions. Which of both is best? You decide.
Who exactly are they referring to?
- Political journalists, who help their sources insult people and ruin careers anonymously? Or do what Stephen Colbert pointed out was "the White House tells you what to write, you write it down, and print it."
- Sports journalists, who basically are professional sports fans, desperately clinging to rumor, conjecture, and hearsay?
- Business journalists, who often act as cheerleaders for a company's stock more than anything else?
- Slashdot editors? (enough said)
These are not the days of Bernstein, Woodward, Hersch, etc.
I am officially gone from
The wonders of the internet and the change they have brought about.(sigh)
When Ford mass produced the "A" and "T" a lot of buggy whip mfg., saddle mfg. and liveries went out of business. Hay production declined in favor of food crops.Horse breeders and trainers suffered. You might say a big industry went teats up. We simply didn't need their services or needed limited quantities. Before that Coach services were displaced by Rail services.
When News, Music and Movie industries cannot adapt to serve the needs/desires of their benefactors , they die like dinosaurs in a glacier. Of course there will be a lot of whining about lost jobs and hyperbole about the affected economy, but all in all, it's for the best and I welcome it. These were industries that were not friendly or really helpful to the benefactors (us) so their passing for something better is to be welcomed with open arms, minds and hearts. As for the displaced...They too will have to adapt. In the words of the Judge Smales character in the Movie Caddyshack " Well, Danny, the world needs ditchdiggers too."
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
See, this is the problem with America these days. Everyone is a gosh darned Pirate, you expect everything to be free on the Internet. The only solution these liberals can come up with is to tax, tax, and spend!
While the Internet may cause 'prolonged death' of traditional journalism, in various countries of the world journalists are being actually killed. In Russia alone, during the years of Putin/Medvedev about 300 journalists died under various violent circumstances.
You can't handle the truth.
for years the model was to sell the newspaper for the cost of print and let advertising cover everything else including the profits. in the late 1990's the newspapers should have bought up Ebay and Craigslist or at the very least started a competitor. instead the trust fund babies who run most of the newspapers allowed their content to be commoditized by Google, they lost the advertising market probably because they thought it was beneath them to go online. and now they are crying. the WSJ was an exception to this for a few years, but there are some good financial bloggers out there now that will give them a lot of competition.
I remember 10 years ago if you wanted to sell your apartment in NYC you had to advertise in the NY Times and pay their ridiculous rates. and the supposedly liberal pro-blue collar newspaper that the NY Times is supposed to be has the snobbiest RE section i've ever seen. on sundays you would see people walking around with a copy of the Real Estate section checking out buildings to buy in. these days the realtors still advertise in the NY Times but it's a generic add with the same properties that probably aren't on the market anymore and the goal is to get people to call the office. not to sell a specific property. all the properties for sale are listed on redfin, craiglist, MLS which is open to everyone now
and there have been so many new immigrants in the NYC area lately that it makes sense to advertise in their ethnic non-english newspapers as well.
The idea that if I read about something in a paper I should not be allowed to blog it is absurd. It always has been, only now journalists are having to compete with this new thing called the internet and the value of their service is being driven down.
We see this happening over and over again. You have to adapt, that's all there is to say about it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I am sure the "horse manure picker-uppers union workers (HMPUW)" biatched a lot when Henry Ford came up with an efficient and effective way of transportation.
Progress is a bitch; embracing it is the only way to survive....
Nice to see an internet executive like this recognize that there is "no free lunch." As much as you hear people bemoan a pay for content system, the fact is journalists require salaries, expenses, etc. The pay per story idea of .01 per story that gets auto deducted or has greater advertising capabilities is great. Yeah, free stuff is great, but what news can you get for free if the journalists aren't around any longer...
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
Newspapers like the NYT and WSJ deserve to go out of business as far as I'm concerned.
Not the death of journalism, just the end of old-style journalism. Nearly every industry in the world has been forced to change with time, but journalism was pretty much TV, radio, and print for 50 years. Now the web is out there. Deal with it.
We used to yell at the TV, complain at the breakfast table to our spouse, hit the steering wheel. If we were really engaged, we'd write a letter to the editor or call the radio station. There was no option for TV, except being in the right place at the right time (the tornado hit my trailer). Now, we can respond within seconds of an article being published, vent anger or correct mistakes. Add insight and expand the story. I find the comments more interesting than the story a surprising amount of the time.
Google news is an aggregation of news from various media outlet's websites. Its not going to kill newspapers, but Google news and Internet news in general is conditioning people to expect to get news for free.
In the past, newspapers were subsidized by advertising and subscribers. Unfortunately, Internet advertising is not nearly has effective as print. Sure, ads can be targeted to specific audiences, but they can be blocked, and many savvy Internet users are conditioned to ignore advertisements. Newspaper advertisements are unavoidable, and the randomly placed.
So if people expect to get news for free and the advertising is ineffective, tell me how the Internet and e-readers lead to a promising future for newspapers?
Let me begin by saying that most comments on /. dealing with traditional journalism quickly turn into a bonfire, cheering the death of traditional journalism and heralding blogs as a bright new dawn with untold promises. I think this is wrongheaded, for reasons I'll get to quickly.
I work for a pretty niche tech magazine as a writer and editor. Much of what I cover is business tech., a lot of venture news and business tech products. It might amuse people how traditionally we do things from a journalistic point of view, since we're frequently writing about the technologies and sites that are changing journalism - editors comb leads and find stories, hand them off to writers who do interviews and then pass the copy back to the editors, who fact-check and rewrite. etc. We have an online component, but we're still very definitely a print publication first.
I think blogging and new journalism has a lot to offer. The distribution method and quick turnaround is great. They can get and exchange news much quicker than I can, although in my particular niche there's not much urgent news, so being a monthly pub. isn't really a problem. But I also think new journalism has a downside, and I think Gerson is right about many of the things he says (never thought I'd say that).
First off, objectivity is not dead. No, you can never be perfectly objective. And objectivity doesn't necessarily mean never expressing an opinion. But it does mean disclosing conflicts of interests (not that traditional journalism has always done a good job of this - it hasn't) and trying to be as honest as possible with your readers. My biggest problem with blogging in general, at least as far as replacing traditional journalism, is that so much of it is done by interested parties. Sure, you can get great info about goings on directly from CEOs and the people involved, but oftentimes it's like hearing about a break-up from only one half of the couple. Business being the way it is, once you're working in an industry, you've got some kind of relationship - however tenuous - with everyone else in it.
I'm not going to name names, but especially in venture and business journalism, many apparently disinterested blogging parties have a history in business themselves, and many are currently engaged in business ventures of their own. There's plenty of people who aren't going to let this cloud their judgment or color their writing, but how can you tell? People talk about new journalism like there's no gatekeepers, but companies and organizations and PR agencies are always going to have gatekeepers. And if it's someone in an industry writing about goings-on in that same industry (which many people see as a big plus for blogging - since, they say, a participant knows more about the situation than an uninvolved third-party journalist), they're going to have a vested interest in not causing too many waves. Sure, some people get big enough or well-read enough that it doesn't matter, and admittedly plenty of lowly traditional journalists have been forbidden from doing a hit piece because they don't have the clout (or their pub. doesn't), but that added conflict of interest certainly can't help matters.
People like to heap scorn on traditional journalism, but there's a very good reason for fact-checking, and there's a very good reason for objectivity. I'm all for new journalism and I read plenty of blogs. I do think that form of journalism is, more or less, the future. But let's not be quite so hasty to discard everything that made traditional journalism what it was (even if it's tarnished, in this day and age), and let's not be quite so quick to put all our faith in blogging. I'm confident that a more concrete code of ethics will develop in blogging, and bloggers who lie and distort will get weeded out just like traditional journalists who've committed the same transgressions tend to be (eventually), but I'm not quite ready to hang up my sad little hat with the press pass or my dreaded red editor's pen just yet.
Regular journalism has been dead for a long time in my country (France). So called "journalists" just take Reuters & others news and republish them, adding in the process useless rants and made up facts. If that dies, we'll all be better off.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
It's like the newspapers were the last to notice that they were dying. Which _so_ highlights the underlying problem.
Fanboy Purge of 2010 can't come quickly enough for me.
Are we going to put them all on some sort of ark vessel and shoot them into space, or are we going to have public hangings?
Wow, so it's not just the US? That makes me feel a little better; in sort of a misery-loves-company kind of way.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Or is this debate a ruse to drive traffic to blogs?
I won't regurgitate most of what Radley Balko said, as his post is probably one of the most insightful I've ever read on this subject, but there are two functions that the papers do or are supposed to do, not one:
-Aggregate news
-Investigative journalism
Very few do investigative journalism anymore. Most of it is just aggregating and writing up some additional filter around press releases and such. The average crime story is no more nuanced and investigative than regurgitating what the police, prosecutor and defense attorney have to say. Most newspapers do so little investigative journalism that they are, quite frankly, as useless and vestigial to our society's continued liberties as tits on a bull.
What most newspapers are upset about is the fact that new media is more efficient at cheaply aggregating raw information and sprucing it up with some additional verbage. It's not like they're losing money because others are stealing the hard work of their investigators.
I think it is a bit silly that journalism executives think it is everyone else's responsibility for them to make money.
I have yet to see any major newspaper actively recruit and develop the legions of amateur reporters out there armed with a computer. Major league sports has a farm system for developing and identifying talent, and bringing it into play. Newspapers need to embrace what's happening, not compete and complain. They're the experts. They should be leading the exploitation of the Internet for the delivery of news and information.
Truth be told, tiny C-SPAN is far and away the best in the news business at getting this right. Their use of all the means of modern communication -- radio, TV, Internet -- is outstanding. They run contests to develop young reporters. They have blog aggregation pages. They run dedicated news dashboards during special events such as elections. They have call-in shows. They are scrupulously even-handed in their coverage, which is not only the best way to be objective, it makes for a lively and interesting show. Watch and learn, guys. It's not rocket science.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Respect for Pulitzer's form of yellow journalism was a eulogy in action for journalism 100 years ago. The fact that journalism still exists is only a testament for the public's continued desire for era-appropriate mild fiction and sensationalism. The fact that we huzzah at the awarding of a prize named after the man considered the inventor of what non-news non-journalist pundits like Bill O, and Sean H thrive on is enough evidence to show that real journalism hasn't been a public concern for a very, very long time.
So don't shed a tear for journalism now. It has already been dead for very nearly a century.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Well, I guess whoring your own clumsily written anti-aggregator OpEd to an aggregator site is one way to get traffic and survive in the Google age.
Read much? You can disagree with style and opinions (though I didn't interpret hers same way as you), but a random Slashdotter using "Kara who?" to belittle one of the best known, respected and influential journalists and bloggers covering the Internet and tech for decades is beyond ironic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Swisher
My big wish is that factual reporting would regain its place ABOVE the opinionated offerings seen on places such as FOXnews
FOX News is better than all the other news channels. Certainly leaning right, no doubt about it. But, overall, a much better window to view our blathering leaders and crumbling nation through.
MSNBC is a disaster. CNN is scrambling, trying to retreat, if only modestly, from its left-lean. ABC is trying to claw its way back off the ledge. CBS has simply given up.
Some of my favorite people from other networks are joining FOX. I love it.
most of what bloggers do is "editorial comment". when I write opinion I link to the original source. if a popular blogging site does that, it helps the news organization. One way "the press" is kept in line and alternate viewpoints presented (most news places have a "slant" or agenda to the way political or religious news is presented.
In sweden where i live printed news journalism consists of gossip, Reuters and TT articles. The problem isnt the internet but that the content has become mostly useless entertainment, not news. I cant stand reading a newspaper anymore because its crap. It has absolutely nothing to do with the advent of the internet.
HTTP/1.1 400
Let's see, the big news stories this week: (1) Tiger Woods gets in a fender bender after he gets in a fight with his wife, and (2) the White House party crashers apparently lied about other stuff, too.
Journalism is already dead.
to confuse journalism with exiting news media business models.
Pants-shitting cowards afraid of gay marriage, pot, change and any boogeyman they learn about so long as it can be 'fought' by the military. The boogeyman of climate change is of course not real because tanks and guns cannot stop it in any way.
Liberals won't cut social spending for fear of Americans starving because they have no money for food conservatives won't cut military spending for fear of attacks by groups against which traditional military is fairly useless.
It's all fear. We need to harden the fuck up as a country.
Blar.
I find the comments more interesting than the story a surprising amount of the time.
If you still find that surprising, I'm guessing you're new here ;-)
Factual reporting will still exist. It will remain in paid journals, newspapers, etc. Even today, people who pay attention to such reporting are actually in the minority. To most people it is really nerdy to read the Wall Street Journal or something like that.
Most Americans aren't interested in that: they want to hear someone loudly spew oversimplifications and accusations that they can rally behind. "The [other party] is a bunch of [insult]! Next up: Best and worst dressed celebrities!"
i, thought there, were too, many, commas. in this, p,o,s,t.
In related news, the last surviving member of the Blacksmither's Union, now 104-years-old, is still bemoaning the horseless carriage and wondering what the hell happened to the industry.
While slightly amusing, Kara's translation really doesn't explain anything.
Not helpful at all.
Her insight into Google's secret plans is roughly "Google has secret plans." She adds "They're evil."
Thanks, Kara. That's helpful.
Where's Bob Cringley's analysis of Google's position? I know it must be somewhere...
Journalism will never die... As the vinyl didn't died either. Why some activity far more important will?
This is stuff printed by hysterical people. There will always exist some form of journalism. The more independent ones (thank good!) will undoubtedly have more success than the mass market ones because there will be less competent bloggers of that type. Mainstream news are more like entertainment, and are suffering just like big music editors or film distributors.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
I thought the "translation" by Swisher was pretty funny, but this part:
"Also, have you ever heard of “fair use”? It’s the law now ..."
Was ridiculous, even for satire. Fair use has *always* been the law, and newspapers rely on it themselves all the time. It isn't anything new.
Journalism isn't an industry, or a manufacturer.
We want journalism. We want people to inform the public and monitor the state. We need to make sure they have a business model which works a little, so they can continue to thrive.
That said, Murdock and the rest of the large holding media homogenizing companies ARE an industry and a manufacturer and the more they resemble buggy makers the better, certainly.
We need to find a solution to allow journalism to go on -- and especially journalism with a bank account and a legal staff, because little people journalism is way too easy for the state (and even corporations) to stifle. We should NOT (as you rightly say) be bailing out the corporations which want journalism to work exactly one way.
We just need to make sure we don't lose the journalism baby down the drain with the crap that's (thankfully) pouring out it's last profitable days.
If you pick up 4 different newspapers here(The Netherlands) Then you can put several pages of paper A in paper B without even noticing a difference. They just copy the news from ANP(Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau), a press agency that gathers those stories and sells them. Even the weekend edition are being filled with more and more bullshit and less journalism or good articles. The real news nowdays can be read from news sites that primarily focus on those kind of articles(ANP) without all the bullshit you find around it in the printed papers.
Never waded through so much unedited, infantile crap in my life.
Unfortunately I dont think this will happen.
... all that seems to come out is something like: "Damn that Internet. Now what are we supposed to do with all these buggy whips?"
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Can you give me a bunch of links please? I do hope that you don't mean GeenStijl.nl... That sucks even more.
Here be signatures
because too many people are still confusing columnist with journalist and their own petty ideology prevents them from distinguishing which is which. Yet here you trumpet one case in Florida as proof we need more government intervention, yet fail to realize it was the government which approved the view because in the end the judge did the same twisting of law that legislators always do.
In other words, I am far more inclined to rely on the free market to regulate because there is always the government to bring exceptional cases too. With the government entrenched then you merely will get the party line and who will you object too? After all they are "regulated" and as such already are vouched as being truthful.
I am quite sure both of us can cite "exceptional cases" but it is a meaningless game of tit for tat.
The simply matter is, we have Congressmen who are more than willing to step in to make sure that information is delivered how they want it and they want to determine what facts are appropriate, let alone what constitutes a fact. The amazing part is how willing many are to give it to them provided it shuts out viewpoints they object too.
One case does not make a good example of why we need government regulation, what it does show there is a system in place to highlight these issues. The fact the courts cannot get it right is only more proof the government is not solution. Worse, what have they done since then to correct the issue cited?
The government is already looking to extend the "Fairness Doctrine" into areas other than radio specifically under the guise that "printed press" is all that is truly protected. They are more than willing to give money to the printed press now that they are adoring fans of the current administration and bills being passed through Congress. The printed press is more than willing so sell out those who compete against it to maintain their position.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Murdock has ushered in the era of factless journalism and pure opinion as news.
"Reinstated," not "ushered in." Before Rupert Murdoch, there was Hearst and Pulitzer, whose yellow journalism more or less defined the conditions to which Murdoch is now returning his media empire.
The good news is that these things seem to be cyclical. The bad news is that, if Hearst and Pulitzer are any indication, it takes a somewhat cataclysmic event (such as the Spanish-American War) to shake people into their senses and start demanding across-the-board accountability.
The death of news and journalism are highly locked to the trend established in the Reagen era of constantly cutting back on expenses. How many news sources are willing to maintain large staffs of reporters stationed not only in America but in every corner of the world? Knock off a few reporters from their jobs and nothing seems to change at all. So they fire more and more reporters. Then to take up space and try to maintain followers they carry lonely hearts pages or cooking and sports sections. The real news gets lost in the process. And then just to increase the stench in the slime pit they refuse to report anything that might offend their sponsors.
The results of this are tragic. Entire elements in society have no faith at all in the news or press. But this does not stop with a bunch of people walking about feeling bitter. It erupts into crime, riots, drug usage and decline in general. This gloomy outlook transfers downward to our young people who do not believe the party line at all. Seeing so many parents who did get degrees and training and still either work way too hard or are not employed at all helps to cause kids quitting school and living only for the moment.
If the common man believed the news we would not have had the riots in South Central L.A. and numerous other places.
This is the radiant dawn. Not without clouds, however.
Also, floods, tornadoes and some hail, but you'd know all that if you just pick up a newspaper...
Oh, wait...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I've been listening to Thomas Friedman and his ilk for the past 20 years on how technology and globalization is really my friend. Well, it will be interesting to see how journalists handle it when any one can publish and be published.
As a programmer whose experience this, I would suggest that the journalists and publishers consider upgrading their skills so that they can compete with other forms of news on th einternet. In the end, we'll all be winners. We'll get great news and our news sources will be superior to what we have today.
Gerson's perspective is that of someone who's been imbued with the dogma of objective-journalism-is-the-way-and-the-truth. Fact of the matter is that that idea is relatively new, and was largely a political reaction to his own industry's (print media's) egregiousness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Good morning, Mr. Pulitzer. Mr. Hearst, how are you today? Until this backlash started, they weren't called "journalists," they were called "reporters."
Every person is biased. Every outlet has biases that seep through (Hello, Green Week on NBC). You can strive for objectivity, it's unattainable. To deny that reality is folly.
If the newspaper conglomerates want to continue operating, they've got to fundamentally change their means of reporting. The days of sending out a reporter to be there in person, interviewing authoritative sources, interviewing detractors to those authoritative sources, and spitting out an article are over. "The revolution will not be televised." No, but it will be tweeted, and if you've got a hundred people saying exactly the same thing, you can report that. They're missing the big stories, and the outlets who understand where the information flow is are getting them. TMZ, SmokingGun, National Enquirer, etc. etc. But the print media's default position, after they're scooped, is to stay mum until they've been able to verify using their 1960s protocols. Sorry, folks, just doesn't work that way. And, if they don't adapt, they will die. Google isn't the problem.
News corporations and journalists are not the same thing. Where a news corporation's primary concern is to make money by selling information, a good journalist is most interested in discovering truth and making that truth available to the public. The more people the better.
The Internet has caused a major shakeup, and from the sounds of it a break down of the entities known as news corporations. Will these die at the hands of an open web? Maybe. Most likely if they continue to stubbornly refuse to change.
However the existence of the dedicated, skilled journalist will only be at risk if he or she insists on tying their fate to the new corps. Twittered and blogged amateur 'news' only goes so far. Ultimately the most reliable, accurate and compelling sources of news will bubble to the top of the public's attention. Will news reporting be as lucrative as it once was? Probably not... but maybe it will become something that the talented journalist does as a side job rather than a full time one. Maybe a new profit model will emerge- who can know what will be needed or wanted in the future. We may reach a point where companies, organizations or individuals will pay by contract for a respected journalist to investigate and report on a specific news item for them. Who knows?
The point is, I don't see the 'death of journalism' coming, but rather the death of the current news corporation model.
The modern form of Journalism only arose after Pulitzer. 200 years ago newspapers were explictly partisan and proclaimed it on their masthead. (A small town I know of had the Boonville Republican and Boonville Democrat in 1860). The barriers to entry in journalism were low so anyone could start a paper. Readers picked a paper by where it was thought to stand. (Does sound familiar) In a town I spent some time in as a kid it was the Decatur Daily Democrat (still is btw). So journalism is returning to its roots another case of back to the future.
Murdoch's business model is based on withholding information. Since his sources are accessible to others just as well, this won't work anymore. On the same note, I'd also welcome the death of the local TV news: "There's something in your drinking water. More after this short break."
That said, I agree with the warning about blogging: first person accounts can't replace objective journalism. One of the attractions of bloggers is the seemingly "authentic" view of a person involved with the topic, versus the 3rd person account a journalist offers. And yes, the "true authentic" is often an illusion. Industry is already influencing bloggers, and not everyone discloses their "free samples" they got before writing a review. - Or just the fact, they are writing a review on a sample they got without comparing it to the competitor. Bad bloggers aren't an improvement over bad journalists.
However, there are many cases where the blogger is better than the traditional journalist: An IT-blogger usually provides better information about a new software release, than the tech column writer in the local paper, who got moved to the tech column last month, because he did such a good job with the obituaries.
So, why read the paper if I can get the same or more online? Why watch the news about a land slide in South America, if local bloggers have more information available? Yes, these are rhetorical questions. The answer of course is: Because a journalist offers more. Or to turn it around: Where journalism doesn't offer more, it will die. A journalist can connect the dots, analyze, ask questions: Land-slide - Population growth? Deforestation?
Where journalists are doing that, journalism still adds value. But, you can't ask good questions about things that sound jibber jabber to you and you can't even achieve anything that resemble an objective presentation of different options, if you are too undereducated (or under-experienced) to realize that there might be more than one way to look at it, or that the opposite of main-stream isn't always "crazy". So, good journalism requires journalists that know things about the things they are reporting, not just how to present things that might interest people who are into these things. That again is bad news for Fox News, but also for people who think, that a CJ-BA will be all it takes to become the next investigative wonder, or that the semester of Japanese will let you write articles that are better than the political blog of a Japanese ex-pat with a PoliSci degree.
I hope for the death of bad journalism. Whether this will help good journalism, I don't know. There are journalists I find worth reading. I lived in the US and Germany long enough to know both countries, but Marcia Pally still gives me things to think about. Her articles are also on-line, does that make her a blogger? While missing the boat on some topics, Scholl-Latour usually points out political crisis years before they become daily news. But he too isn't in the daily-news business. He writes books and does documentaries.
What about newspapers? I don't know. A local paper can't feed an expert journalist and her family, but it's its access to local news, that keeps the paper alive. Germany has newspaper cooperatives, where international and national news are done in a central office with the local papers then adding their local content before print. The only major American paper I know of, that does that, is The Onion..
as Microsoft Publisher is to desktop publishing. Just because you can type stuff on your blog doesn't mean you are a journalist.
How ever will the evil cunt survive, we feel soo sorry for him.
Seems to me that she is strongly lobbying for Rupert M. And her strategy against Google seems to be inducing a 1984 style fear (that Google will take over everything) and extreme examples - rather than facts. The fact is that I like to read news over the web, I like the google aggregator - it works for me. Thank you.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
My clients are looking at the shrinking media landscape, not for somewhere left to advertise, but for traffic.
They have their own web-sites where they feature their products, engage in conversations with customers and potential customers, take orders, track shipments, they're on Twitter and handle complaints that way.
They look at advertising on you site as a secondary, ancillary activity that's a lot tougher than it looks...
People who promise you viral video success on YouTube, or any other platform, hope you're a big enough idiot to believe them, at least until the cheque clears, but not so big an idiot that you couldn't possibly have any money.
Banner ads have such a low click-through rate that they're usually aren't worth the CPM dollars.
While you want earned buzz, (as opposed to paid-for ads, which get you at best ignored, at worst called a liar, and usually not believed,) you usually settle for SEO.
A company selling plumbing supplies or semi-trucks, or guitars, will never get featured on Oprah .
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I used to repair televisions, and learned in the sixties that G.E. was on the cutting edge of the engineering push to expand the frontiers of "controlling product life cycles". Terrified does not begin to describe how I felt when I learned that they were in the Nuclear Reactor business.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
So I'm to believe the death of journalism is caused by the internet linking to news, and not by the trend towards "infotainment" instead of hard journalism, or by the news outlets seemingly becoming the public relations arms of the big political parties? It couldn't have anything to do with the conglomeration of independent news providers into megalithic companies like Murdoch's, with a very clear agenda -- which apparently has nothing to do with providing concise, unbiased reporting.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Well then, I hope they keep on pandering. I used to watch CNN all the time. Now I go elsewhere. Maybe I can come back when their news is less....crappy. I guess MSNBC panders to the ultra liberal folks. That network is simply unwatchable.
I believe that the Metro does this, although it's not strictly an American newspaper. A large amount of the content is the same in every city it runs in, while a smaller amount of specific to the city it's actually being printed in.
I have one from yesterday's NRC Handelsblad.
A quick & dirty translation of the main portion:
"Research was done on nearly 60,000 articles from 2006 to 2008 to determine how much they were based on sources from ANP. Almost 17,000 articles, mainly about sports, economy and foreign affairs [foreign countries really, there's a lot of that when viewed from the Netherlands], were (partly) based on a message from the press agency. The percentage ANP-news in the newspapers increased between 2006 and 2008 from on average 31 to 36 percent. This was the lowest in NRC Handelsblad and the free newspaper De Pers (20%) and the highest in the free newspapers Metro (40%) and Spits (46%)."
One problem is that ANP bulletins are often copies of other press agencies material. Another is that this doesn't say much about the original journalistic efforts of the newspapers; especially the free ones are very good at showbiz and celebrity news, car and movie reviews. Society's watchdog they're not.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
I just meta-modded this comment, yet it appears not to have ever actually been modded. Is slashdot now getting us to pre-meta-moderate comments? If a mod comes along and mods this comment the opposite way to my metamod, will their karma suffer?
From "America: the Book":
This type of sensationalist reporting was given the name 'yellow journalism', latter shortened to 'journalism'.
Thats a plant. Its in the front yard in a pot. One saturday The Age, which weighs several kilos on Saturday came flying through the air and broke off a branch.
Our subscription to The Age came from a neighbour who has moved to another country. I prefer to read that news source on line. Not because it is free, but because it is convenient. The online version is pretty crap and I would pay for the paper version on line, if it meant the frangipani didn't have to have wads of paper chucked at it in the early hours of the morning.
So today the paper has gone missing. It sometimes winds up in our next door neighbours front yard. Its not there but I notice that the newspaper chuckers are still out in cars bravely keeping journalistic tradition alive. So maybe my bundle of Yesterdays News is still on the way.
Die already.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If covering the Balloon Boy story counts as journalism, then good riddance.
I understand that news providers need to make a profit, and I also know that in order to do that people have to pay attention to them, however for the past 10 years or so they haven't been doing themselves many favors.
Sure the occasional story comes out that is well thought out, well researched, and legitimate journalism. The problem is that these few kernels of truth are usually buried under so much dross you have to be be a severely critical thinker to glean any tangible facts. I take every story I hear now with a HUGE helping of salt regardless of source now, because to compete they all do the same thing. The fear mongering, the shameless celebrity coverage, the over opinionated and never factual left or right (usually right), infotainment etc... all contributes to erode the credibility of the whole. Some try to sneak a grain of true honest reporting, some even seem apologetic about it, but it is all about ratings, and they will push the envelope in order to achieve that. In the end it is about trust, and I have to say, call me paranoid, but I don't trust any of them. The good ones might make a retraction and a apology after making a gaff, but the fact that they pander to the lowest common denominator at all in the first place is what the problem is. Also "Facts" and "Evidence" just seem to get in the way of a story most the time, and I don't think I go a day without hearing something that is plainly wrong, where the "journalist" is either too stupid, too lazy, or too preoccupied with anything but the truth, and often times it is something that doesn't even require all that much specialized knowlege. Anyway that is my rant. The reason they are loosing customers is a matter of trust, why the hell should I believe you who have lied so often before, I think I will check my own sources on the internet thanks. I will be my own journalist, as apparently your not up to the job.
Internet is come. 21st century is come.
either adapt, or perish. we, 'the people', wont support or tolerate anything against the values of digital, free 21st century world.
Read radical news here
The so-called "Fairness Doctrine" stands out...
As what? State takeover of the presses? Hardly. Even leaving aside that it only ever applied to broadcast over spectrum (never applied to print, probably never would have applied to cable or internet), nothing in it chartered state-owned outlets. It was a set of rules allowing limited access to broadcasting via a scarce resource.
Tweet, tweet.
Wait, hold the show.
"You can disagree with style and opinions"? Ok. I disagree with both the style (sloppy) and opinions (that's all they are, not facts) of that entire article. I chuckled at it the entire way through and was not sure how serious the writer of it was. I have no idea who Kara Swisher is, and given what I've just read I don't care to anymore. She seems to want ad revenue and readers through appeals to emotion and wild opinions, not through integrity and facts.
If Kara Swisher is so highly respected in the hallowed halls of journalism then I can start to see why journalism is dying.
Beyond that, who cares if she's questioned by someone? Isn't the whole point of discourse (which you seem to want to crush) to point out what people say and do, rather what their reputation is? It allows the little and the big from every walk of life to comment, smart or not, about a subject.
I hope that "Don't question what she says, she's well respected!" isn't what is supposed to pass for discourse.
Here's one: Rush Limbaugh has been covering politics for decades! He's respected by millions for his opinion! Don't question him!
Can we move beyond (Thunderdome?) such immature notions and start exchanging facts instead? I'll bet we would all be a little better for the facts and for the opportunity to engage in a meaningful discussion. Of course, I'm not sure there are a lot of facts on this Google thing, mostly speculation about the future, so perhaps I've just shot down my own point there.
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Absolutely, and I'll take every woe we have (which would have happened eventually). We're having to grow up as a society.
I'll even give you a mind-experiment alternate future. Suppose MS never quite got the lock they have on public tech. I'd bank on Apple being the 900 Kilo gorilla. (We'd be using metric! hehe.) The Tech/Calendar year would be better because Apple had already given back some low level basic tech like they do now. Certain specific woes like Corporate IE6 wouldn't have happened. Slashdot would be using different memes instead of the GatesBorg. The iPhone would be out in 2003 instead of 2007.
But in the long haul, we'd still have the exact same Old Media squabbling. The same Big Brother Is Now struggles. The same fileshare woes.
Solving all of that in the public sphere *is* making us smarter. I've learned more on slashdot about political maneuverings and basic logic in 3 years than I did for 10 before that.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The internet is killing the news *business*.
Political bias and dishonesty killed journalism a long time ago.
The Constitution can guarantee a free press, unfortunately it can't guarantee an honest press; the people must do that.
As an example, the broadcast news networks still aren't covering the global warming scandal:
http://mrc.org/press/releases/2009/20091204124643.aspx [Media Research Center]
If the internet kills international and national papers, leaving only local publications filled mainly with local stories, that could mean that stories become much more likely to be reported on, edited, and published by people who live locally to those same stories.
If they get something wrong, or present a biased political view, they're more likely to see circulation affected and people turning up at their offices in person. I wonder what it would do for journalistic integrity to actually be under scrutiny by the very people they write about - especially when they're trying to then sell the paper to those very same people, their friends and relatives etc.
People like to heap scorn on traditional journalism, but there's a very good reason for fact-checking, and there's a very good reason for objectivity
No people heap scorn on the NEW traditional journalism. Real traditional journalism is dead and has been for a lot of years. The problem is there is very little fact finding or objectivity in what you call journalism today. What I see read and hear from News outlets wether it be TV papers or radio is slanted bias bull shit. Even in most tech magazine the articles are bias and slanted which way it is slanted is determined by the payola. If professional journalist want me to pay to read their writings quit writing fiction. When I read you writings I want the unbiased truth not your opinion. Let me form my own opinion.
For a lot of years I bought the local news paper and yes read it too. Now days I won't pick one up for free from a park bench to read a article. Why? If it is in the paper I know it is slanted and biased so why waste my time reading a lie. The problem the Internet has caused for fictional journalist writers is in a quick search on the topic and a few clicks you get caught in your lie. People do their own fact-checking these days. People catch the news media lying and then quit buying and/or reading their product and the News Corps cry "Oh the Internet is making us go broke." No your lying slanted bull shit is what is making you go broke. If you told the truth I would still BUY your media.
Why are blogs so popular? Most blogs contain citations and links to other sources to back up their writings and show the truth of their words. Professional journalist can be bought like a two dollar whore these days.
I wasn't asking for a citation (see my signature ;) ), I was asking for links to Dutch news sites that bring real news. Or do you mean the newspapers that happen to have websites too?
Here be signatures