The Evolving Newsroom

For those who haven’t caught up with Jeff Jarvis’s uninvited testimony to Senator John Kerry’s hearings on the state of newspapers in the US, here’s a taste:

Newspapers are going to die. That is wrenching, of course, for employees – not just journalists but the rarely mentioned pressmen, drivers, and classified ad takers – who will lose their jobs, and the stock- and bond-holders who are losing their investments in these failing and over-leveraged companies.

But this upheaval is no different from that overtaking automakers, auto dealers, retail chains, banks, airlines, music companies, and soon other media sectors that are suffering and dying in a reshaping of the economy that is more profound than a mere financial crisis and more fundamental even than a recession or depression. We are undergoing a millennial transformation from the industrial, mass economy to what comes next. Disruption and destruction are inevitable.

Should government’s response to this change be to try to forestall it? I don’t think so. I fear that we are bailing out the past when we should be investing in the future. We are throwing huge amounts of money to shore up business models we know are failed and are delaying the innovation, reinvention, and investment we need to climb out of this hole and build a new economy. But that is a subject for another day.

On the matter of newspapers specifically, let us first acknowledge that they are not victims of fate; their owners controlled their fate. Newspapers and their proprietors – and, in many cases, their professionals – have had a generation to reinvent themselves and bring journalism forward into the next age: 20 years since the start of the web, 15 since the introduction of the commercial browser and craigslist, 10 since the invention of blogs and founding of Google. They didn’t reinvent themselves because, understandably, I suppose, they did not want to disrupt their comfortable, powerful, and profitable monopolies. But that responsibility was theirs. Is it not ours, as taxpayers, to make up for their lost time.

The issue I believe you are trying to address is not the fate of newspapers at all. It is the fate of journalism. But on that score, I am an optimist – to a fault, perhaps. Though a majority of journalists polled by The Atlantic magazine recently said that the internet was harming journalism, I believe the opposite to be true. The internet has provided no end of opportunities to journalism, for communities to gather, share, and organize news in new ways; to reach and serve new communities and audiences; to use all available media to inform the public; to find new efficiencies – both in the means of production and distribution and also in the practice of journalism itself. This is what I teach my journalism students.

But what about supporting journalism as a business? Here, too, I am an optimist and this is why we are exploring new business models at my school. We can and will debate the specifics of these plans – what the costs will be; where the revenue will come from. But the real question before us is whether there will be a market demand for journalism – I believe there will be – and whether the market will meet it – I believe it will. But the proof will come only in execution.

The rest is here.