The best thoughts on the changes sweeping through journalism.
“Let me see if I have this straight: Instead of coming up with a smart strategy and innovating, they’re going to Google to help fix their own mess. If an industry can’t think for itself, well, what do you call it? How about dumb, fat and lazy?”
“I think the institutional belief is that if we work for a major publication or broadcaster that not only do we have a de facto audience but that we deserve an audience. It’s the height of institutional arrogance and self-importance, and it’s obvious to anyone who even has one foot outside of the bubble of institutional journalism that this is the case. But therein lies the rub. For many journalists, we never get outside of this bubble. I think it’s one of the reasons that journalists are bewildered by the fact that viewership and readership numbers are declining. Journalism matters, we say, and it does. But we are too often the authors of our own increasing irrelevance. We trivialise the important and amplify the trivial. In this noisy age, we don’t help our audiences find the signal but instead make a vain attempt to drown out the noise, often with self-serving arguments about our own importance.”
“You see, the problem here is the myth of regular readership. When I started newspaper sites, I had publishers on my rear because they expected people to read them every day, just as (they thought) people read newspapers. But just because the thing plops on the front porch every day, that doesn’t mean everybody reads everything - or sees every ad. That was the myth that fueled overpriced ad rates and overinflated editorial egos. Online, we get to see what people really read - and what it’s really worth to them - and that’s a lot less than we ever thought.”
“I have long argued that we will eventually move from print to screen. What worries me, however, is that the transformation is being threatened by the immediate economic crisis. I fear that the death of print products will lead to the demise of the related online platforms too. Anyway, are regional publishers really prepared to make the switch from one to the other? Are they devoting enough of their receding revenues to building vibrant online news outlets that will do the job of holding local power to account? Are journalists, for their part, thinking about a post-print world?”
“I am a college journalism professor. When I got into this field a half dozen or so years ago, after 17 years as a journalist, I was excited to enlighten young minds and inspire them. And I have, and hope I still do. The problem is this: I feel like I’m teaching them something that will be as useful as Sanskrit when they graduate. I am trying to get them involved in learning the latest technology as well as teaching them important writing and life skills, so they will be employable. But every morning I read stories about how huge, venerable newspapers will likely be shuttered by the end of the year, and it absolutely freaks me out.”
“Incisive Media, the publisher of Computing and Accountancy Age, has just asked its 2000 staff to take a week’s unpaid leave. That came within days of a similar initiative by Euromoney, owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. Euro-money, publisher of about 100 titles mostly in the finance sector, announced that staff earning more than £25,000 would be required to take seven days’ unpaid leave over the 2009 Christmas period, during which the company intends to close its offices.”
“But consider this - the cost to a rival, a group of bloggers or some other outfit to set a site up and get it running would be as close to zero as you could imagine. There may be no threat on the horizon right now, but how distant is that horizon? Imagine a rival publisher moving in with a guy on the ground, some citizen journalists being paid per click and some pretty smart open source software. How long do you think this would take? And how long would it be before your ”not particularly internet savvy” readers would migrate? How long would it take these guys to kill your print edition?”
“The problem with too many journalists — and especially those journalists inside the Beltway — is this: they do not write what they’re thinking. The reporters do not tell us what they know. The columnists and analysts do not tell us what they believe. Their resulting work is boring, uninformative, and manipulative.”
“These are interesting times for folks in my line of work. By “my line of work” I mean people who write and draw things and publish them…and by “interesting times” I mean that I’ve added weight training to my workout regimen, so that next year I can get a job loading trucks at the UPS depot and maybe start earning a decent living wage for once.”
“Here’s the point: it doesn’t matter whether the video is real or staged. People are increasingly savvy and sceptical: they believe what they want to believe and they know that the first casualty of war is the truth. If you don’t respond to their comments asking about verification, or address the suggested ballistics explanations, then you have no claim to ‘the truth’: to them you’re just another desperate news pimp falling for a gory video.”
