February 7, 2005
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From: Robin <robin@snarkmarket.com>
Was just e-mailing a friend about last week’s Poynter Web+10 conference, and I liked the way it came out, and am also too lazy to write something separate for Snarkmarket (though I should), so! I’m copying and pasting it here for your blog-reading edification.
Only the lightest editing applied. Here’s what it’s like to get a nerdy journalism-related e-mail from me:
Seriously, people at this conference -- and remember, these are the wired, forward-thinking, new-media people! -- were so confused. About everything. Someone would use a simple pronoun like "we" or "them" or "it" and it would be questions, questions, questions: "Who is WE? Who are THEY? What is IT?? What's going ON???"
This breakdown of the boundaries between press and public -- in all respects a good thing, I believe -- has done a number on journalists' sense of their work & its value. It's an odd conflict: They believe that The People are smart & engaged & capable of reasoned discourse. [...] But [the question follows] if the people are so smart & engaged... and can suddenly just talk amongst themselves... then WHY do they need journalists? Some -- actually, a lot -- of the people at the conference ended up arguing that people AREN'T that smart, and they NEED savvy journalists to make sense of the world for them -- an argument that, true or not, you could tell they didn't really want to make.
Of course, there were some more "middle path" views, as well, which I think are ultimately most correct: There will be room, and a need, for bloggers AND journalists -- pajamahideen AND op-ed columnists -- Wikipedia AND Woodward & Bernstein.
But the thing about the "middle path" is that it might not leave a big enough slice of the public discourse pie to financially support good journalism. The newspaper is somewhat predicated on everybody reading it. Ditto for TV news and watching. When attention gets splintered -- or, put positively: when it gets more properly catered to -- then I think everybody's gotta earn their living every day. Blogging is great but [...] it does have a pretty glum treadmill vibe to it. [...] So who spends three months going through bank statements? You can't post THAT every day. (Well... maybe... no, you can't.)
Admittedly, there aren't THAT many people who do the bank-statement stuff now. But having a few is undoubtedly better than having NONE. And so another big topic of conversation at the Poynter thing was how to make sure we don't [have to] lay off the people doing all that good, slow, methodical, often fruitless (but just as often crucial) work of serious Fourth Estate journalism.
Personally, I'm not worried about that. I'm quite sure there will be really excellent news organizations that manage to aggregate big audiences online and sell lots of advertising and subsidize good, important stuff with good, not-so-important stuff. No problem.
I am NOT so sure those will be the news organizations of today, though. The NYT, yeah; Washington Post, certainly. Knight-Ridder? Hmmm I don't know. Smaller newspaper companies? Almost certainly not.
Even orgs like CNN are at risk.
Generally, I don't really care. I have no great attachment (in fact, I have a bit of antipathy) to those old-line organizations and the way they work.
BUT I can certainly understand how the specter of, you know, a slow spiral into dissolution might freak out some of their current employees. And for that reason I hope that some of their execs catch on sooner rather than later.
Like Churchill to FDR, I’m tellin’ ya. Like Churchill to FDR.
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Comments
I'm really curious about your reasons for shrugging off Knight Ridder--they seem both incredibly dynamic about covering politics and national security over the last few years, and deeply , deeply entrenced as a spread out, multi-tiered, well diversified chain. They must be making a ton of cash in the greater East Bay alone because they've got a total lock on the non-Berkeley, non-Oakland paper advertising market.
Hmm, full disclosure, I think they might have helped pay for my J-school degree in some convoluted foundation kinda way.
KR's Washington bureau is, indeed, great. The question is, does KR has the business model to continue to support work like that in the long-term?
I think -- and I underscore that I'm not an
expert on all this -- the answer is no.
My sense is that KR makes all its money from selling ads in printed newspapers, and is not really strong online. That won't cut it long-term. I mean, the company is not going to disappear anytime soon; but money is funneling out of the printed-newspaper business, and as it does, you can be sure KR will cut back, and cut back, and cut back, until it's 2018 and the Mercury News is just one guy in a San Jose Starbucks.
No, I'm kidding, but you get the point. If, say, Freep.com was way hotter than it is, and there were like ten people working on it, I'd be more bullish.
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