I am still struggling with the current decimation and carnage in the field of journalism, and it will never sit well with me. I've mourned the decline of this field since I was first released from J-School with my undergrad degree, right into the world of Reagan media ownership deregulation, the beginning of the end.
Historic 100-year-old papers started closing back then, in the late 1980s, bought up by chains, multiple-paper cities turned into media monopolies overnight. The Clear Channeling of the rural U.S., where I'd come from, was beginning, and it has taken all this time to penetrate to the biggest metropolitan news-gathering organizations in the country.
For a time, some things ran counter to the trend, idiosyncratic things. USAToday was founded, as if to thumb its nose at the decline, yet its modular design spread virally, literally vaporizing page real estate set aside for the work I did best: full page and double-truck photo essays and stories. I fled to grad school, fully aware I was being put out of business.
And Ted Turner, whom I got to meet in 1986, dared to open international bureaus, to populate the landscape with MORE news-gatherers while chain consolidation was reducing them. Fate favored Turner in the form of the Gulf War of 1991, vindicating his international coverage. Before then, people laughed at his staff-heavy spending as an indulgent whim of a boy-man who liked to race sailboats.
But Ted didn't work hard enough to fend off Time Warner, the chains bought up everything, profits rolled in at 20-30% for shareholders in those newly-public corporations, and the shareholders came to regard those kind of margins as a guarantee.
Much is made of the current debate about the newspaper numbers trending to zero. Much more of the debate between Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and traditional journalists (on Christmas Eve, Jarvis proclaims: "No Hope").
[Pissing Match Links: Ron Rosenbaum Slate Salvo, Jeff Jarvis Snark Return]
I'm not surprised at the debate, just at its intensity. Clay Shirky reminds us that he predicted this vaporizing industry in the late 1990s. I was on the World Wide Web Artists Coalition listserv with Clay back at that time, and remember well when he was first making those arguments.
I did not dispute him then because of what I saw happening to photojournalism at that time: the value of my work, of most photographers' work, was trending to absolute zero, which also happens to be the value of poetry, another field in which I have a degree. Royalty-free CDs had already forced me to realize my copyright-based stock photos had just become worthless, because it cost me more to make the images than the market would pay, ever.
To paraphrase a familiar quotation: They came for the Image People, and the Word People said nothing. They were happy to let us fade away. More space in print for words (the more important bits, was their unspoken righteous assumption).
The Word People didn't want to see their own end coming. They didn't want to think that same trend would ever apply to them. But I was certain at the time that it would.
And then, in the early 2000s, the blog and citizen journalism movement arose, and I enthusiastically championed it, participated in it, and would again in a heartbeat. It was overdue. It was necessary. The gatekeepers HAD become drunk on their own power, not sloppy drunk, just too used to holding the keys to the kingdom. Ironically, I was by then working at CNN, covering another war in the Persian Gulf (from Atlanta), and building blogs for unembedded journalists on the ground in Kurdistan.
Now, the unthinkable is happening right before my eyes, the thing I have been preparing for for the last 25 years, and my heart just aches. I DO NOT WANT THIS FUTURE.
It was some of my J-School students at University of Montana who turned me on to The Spokesman-Review as a paper with an online site I really admired, ESPECIALLY because of the way it integrated photojournalism the way I remembered it, before images morphed off into newsprint postage stamps, like it used to be. I often linked to original reporting from there, once I started following the paper. It reminded me of the old Detroit Free-Press, had that same feeling in the online edition.
So I knew the name Steve Smith before encountering this story, just as I knew Clay Shirky online when he was making his prophecies. But it is Steve Smith who reminds me below why I am so heartsick, and why I will continue to fight against this watchdog-less future.
Smith's sad post below reminds me of why this will always be my life's work, no matter what I end up doing for a living. Go read the unexcerpted original, especially if this is or was your field too.
Link: Still A Newspaperman | A holiday wish…and reminder.
A holiday wish…and reminder
Good morning,
For all of the years I worked as a senior editor, I tried to end
each calendar year with a memo to my staff thanking them for their hard
work, reminding them of the good journalism we had accomplished and
wishing them well for the coming year.
I have been struggling in recent days trying to craft a note from my
voluntary exile, something appropriate for my former staff and, maybe,
appropriate for others who follow this blog.
And I’m finding the words are not coming easily. Maybe it’s the
bleak, snowy landscape in Spokane that has left me feeling so
inadequate to the task. Or the knowledge that this holiday season has
found so many of my former colleagues unemployed and struggling,
sitting on the sidelines while our industry stuggles for survival.
[...]
But I am not, by nature, melancholy and certainly not so when I
think about the profession to which i have devoted my life. I remain an
optimist, if not about the future of newspapers, certainly about the
future of journalism.
In struggling to find words for this post, I went back to a speech I
gave some years ago to a convention of college journalists. I excerpted
a portion of that speech for my farewell note to the staff of The
Statesman Journal in 2002. As I re-read that excerpt this morning, I
found it still conveys my core beliefs. It expresses my optimism as
well as anything I could write today. And so I am going to plagiarize
myself for this year’s holiday note.
This is what I wrote in 2002. I re-dedicate it to the staff of The
Spokesman-Review, which is doing such good work during the current
weather crisis, to my professional friends and colleagues and to the
countless students with whom I have worked in the last year.
[...]
Several years ago, Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University penned a book titled “What are journalists for?”
What a terrific question that is.
Here’s my take:
Journalists exist to serve – not ourselves, not our bosses, not our friends, boosters, advertisers or benefactors.
We exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.
Let me say that again…we exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.
And in serving citizens we adhere to certain core values:
Values of community
The marketplace of ideas
The First Amendment
Honesty and truth-telling journalism
Voice to the voiceless
Defense of the defenseless
And in all of this, we are fearless.
That is our calling.
And it is a calling – I believe that with all my heart - a call to service.
If you pursue this calling, this is what you can expect:
Long hours
Low pay
Disappointed parents and frustrated lovers
Generally primitive working conditions in buildings you hate in cities where you’d never want to live.
Your friends will be people just like you, except there won’t be too many of them.
Public officials will distrust and despise you. But, not to
worry, many of your loyal readers or viewers will distrust and despise
you, too.
A good day will be one in which no one calls to scream in your
ear – except that’s a bad day, too, because you obviously haven’t
written anything important enough to arouse anyone.
Your spouse will wonder why you don’t know the meaning of a 40-hour, five-day workweek.
And your kids, should you be in a meaningful relationship long
enough to have any, will describe you as a “writer” during their show
and tell in the hopes classmates will think you do something
respectable, like writing pornographic romance novels.
Statistics say you will experience divorce, alcoholism and heart
disease at rates higher than the norm. You’ll probably smoke – or wish
you could.
You won’t retire to a beach house in Florida. Hell, you probably won’t live to retirement.
But even knowing this in advance, some of you in this room, most
of you I hope, are going to pursue the call to service. Already, you
can’t imagine doing anything else.
And I am so grateful for that.
I am grateful for the people just like you who work in my
newsroom. They are our best and brightest and I am proud every day to
be their editor.
They have brains. They have heart. The have the fire in the
belly and the courage of their convictions. They bring guts to the
party. They work harder than sane people should work and then, on the
day when something happens in our world that could change everything,
when history hangs in the balance, they are there to write the story.
[...]
And by following in their footsteps, no matter the challenges, you
are sustained, whether you work for The New York Times or the Statesman
Journal or The Oregon Daily Emerald. You are part of a great tradition
that stretches back 250 years. And while we are humbled daily in the
practice of that tradition, we must also be proud and honored and
steadfast as its stewards.
This just crossed on my Sixapart Twitter feed (note to self, I should put that Twitter widget on this blog one of these days):
Another sign of the short-sightedness of this approach:
Yahoo and AOL are diverse and INTERACTIVE portals, not finely honed and researched creators of quality content.
In other words, Yahoo and AOL may feature internally-generated content, but it sprawls across a virtual destination that is not fixed or funneled into a narrow set of editorial standards. To compare the NYTimes and its communication model to Yahoo and AOL (which easily pipe out the same AP and Reuters wire content as NYTimes does, but deliver nothing like the same content) is to reveal the lack of understanding of both the content model AND the communications model by people with an inherent MASS media, PUSH ADS, passive consumption bias.
It's like the very idea of Long Tail interactivity patterns never even entered into this analysis, which is based entirely on economies of scale in mass form only.