Link: Social Media: If newspapers disappear, will it matter?.
Another salvo in the economic restructuring of news, print and otherwise. It is possible to be a strong advocate for online forms of journalism and still recognize that what is going on right now in the newspaper business, and in journalism in general, is a travesty.
Lasica points out precisely why that is, and what we could lose if this continues, a loss that should be fought by everyone who cares about the role of a free press in society. I've followed his writings for years, and am thankful he is jumping in on this debate too. I just had to pull out his strongest points, to make sure they hit home.
If newspapers disappear, will it matter?
By J.D. Lasica
Author and marketer extraordinaire Seth Godin has a provocative new post: When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?
As regular readers know, I worked in print newsrooms for the better part of 20 years before transitioning to the online medium, and I've been harsh in my criticism of news organizations for not embracing the digital medium faster and smarter. But I can't agree with Seth's bottom line, and here's why:
Comics are even better online, and I don't think we'll run out of those.
We won't run out of comics, but we will run out of the most talented comics, who will choose to do something else rather than draw for an audience of thousands rather than millions, especially when they'll have to do it for free rather than as a career.
[...]
But the truth is that the flash and trash of dumbed-down coverage is what we're already getting in spades on the Web, and it's not fair to lump the hundreds and thousands of quality, solidly reported local stories and dozens of in-depth pieces, national stories and investigative reports with the fluffy stories that make all of this go down easier.
Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we'll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it's a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.
The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)Here's where I think Seth's argument is seriously off-base. The reality is that this kind of public-interest journalism has never been supported by the public. The investigative reporting and in-depth reports produced in the modern era (from Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame reports right up to modern coverage) have been loss leaders for news networks and newspapers, which is why they have been the first thing cut in recent years as media consolidation works in favor of shareholders' returns rather than the public interest.
We won't pay for it, because we never have.
[HEAR HEAR! All I hear these days are "non-profit models" for "real" journalism, and foundations this and foundations that. Respected people are all of a sudden advocating this non-profit model like it is the salvation of journalism, just because NPR has successfully harnessed its periodic beg-fests into a serious revenue stream. BUT NPR IS ACTUALLY GOOD AND UNIQUE AND A TREASURE. And the percentage that a non-profit sector can contribute to the overall boots-on-the-ground journalistic enterprise is really probably less than 10% of even today's vastly scaled-back and lay-off driven "reporters in the field" force.
Many advocates for restructuring in the field are suggesting things such as the entire L.A. market can be adequately covered by 35 people tops, and that that somehow is a kind of "new reality" of journalism, and we should just take this medicine and we should like it, and not be utterly outraged at what it would mean for coverage.
I am not implying that those who embrace the restructuring speak with identical voices, advocate the same things, or even advocate this specific thing. They are just the leading voices for this structural revisioning of journalism that to me seems like a lot of rationalization of things I can't stomach, especially in terms of its ramifications for what the public will get to know about the functioning of its biggest institutions. The disappearance of the already disappearing watchdog. That is my lament. I don't disagree that certain interactive structures and content distribution channels are changing drastically, and largely to get lagging old media in line with the new media forms.
I just don't see why this means an 80% reduction in the total set of reporter eyeballs in the field.
That, to me, is not economic restructuring. That is a political pogrom under the guise of economic restructuring, to specifically REMOVE reporter eyeballs from the field. Somebody, a whole lot of somebodies, specifically wants a greater cloak of darkness over activities that affect our civil society and the public good.
The people who glibly embrace this restructuring of the field strike me as making the same kinds of arguments that were made in the Reagan years, when the U.S. manufacturing base vaporized from our so-called "Rust Belt."
At the time, it was treated like an economic imperative, like a structural economic change, like economic determinism. But now, years later, with all the regrets of our current, fluff-driven "service economy" and "financial economy" and "consumer economy," I want to look back to that movement, and the assumptions of University of Chicago "free trade" and globalism advocates and say, "Almost all of their basic assumptions, under which the U.S. manufacturing base was deliberately sacrificed, have been completely and fully disproven, and we are all right now paying the price in this economic collapse for the idiotic short-sightedness of it."
And I would make an almost identical argument about the sacrifice of family farms and the rural landscape to government policies that literally made industrial agriculture, one of the biggest travesties ever visited on the U.S. landscape, appear to be some kind of "inevitability." Michael Pollan and others have exposed this policy-driven social engineering of farming to be just as short-sighted, and not a structural shift at all. It was policy-based outcome, not a market-driven outcome.
And now people want to make the same sort of arguments about the enterprise of journalism, when the vitality of this enterprise, from the yellow press and earlier, has always generated revenue, has always fed a thirsty demand when the stories were REAL and affected PEOPLE'S LIVES, and the revenues really only started declining sharply when monopolies and public corporations started dominating the entire communications enterprise, interestingly enough, with the claim that audiences are no longer interested enough in stories that are REAL and affect THEIR LIVES.
Like with Pravda, that's what some entities appear to want you to think. I think there IS a declining audience for the self-censored stories that fit into the current narrow definition of journalistic content that is subsidized by publicly-traded corporations and fits their definition of "acceptable." Like they say, money talks, and bullshit walks. I think there's been a gradual adjustment of our news thermostat, the exchange of ideas, and audiences, perhaps not consciously, react to being fed a steady diet of fluff while being told it is meat.
But back to the great and important points Lasica is also calling BS on (not in so many words).]
Nor is it cheap. Investigative and enterprise reporting are the most expensive forms of journalism in almost any newsroom, column inch for column inch, because the projects require weeks or months of sustained reporting and result in a single splash or a short-lived series.
Ask any journalist who's done in-depth or investigative reporting about budget cuts, and the kinds of stories that are going uncovered, and you'll get an earful, I promise you. And this doesn't even take into account the closing of foreign news bureaus.
[EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read that last paragraph again. Memorize it.]
[...]
But the truth is that the flash and trash of dumbed-down coverage is what we're already getting in spades on the Web, and it's not fair to lump the hundreds and thousands of quality, solidly reported local stories and dozens of in-depth pieces, national stories and investigative reports with the fluffy stories that make all of this go down easier.
Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we'll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it's a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.
The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)Here's where I think Seth's argument is seriously off-base.
[Dude, you are being way too kind. How could anybody involved in the communications business think that part of journalism is relatively cheap? Corporate chain ventures have been trying to find ways to cut costs all over, and this is the FIRST thing cut, because it actually takes experience, and critical thinking, and brains, and a massive legal department, and oh yeah, legal GUTS to back up your people. I could go on and on. Automaton journalism, assembly line wire copy rewrites, this is NOT.]
The reality is that this kind of public-interest journalism has never been supported by the public. The investigative reporting and in-depth reports produced in the modern era (from Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame reports right up to modern coverage) have been loss leaders for news networks and newspapers, which is why they have been the first thing cut in recent years as media consolidation works in favor of shareholders' returns rather than the public interest.
We won't pay for it, because we never have.
Nor is it cheap. Investigative and enterprise reporting are the most expensive forms of journalism in almost any newsroom, column inch for column inch, because the projects require weeks or months of sustained reporting and result in a single splash or a short-lived series.
Ask any journalist who's done in-depth or investigative reporting about budget cuts, and the kinds of stories that are going uncovered, and you'll get an earful, I promise you. And this doesn't even take into account the closing of foreign news bureaus.
I will give a witness. But thankfully, Lasica has said it far better than I could, so I won't blather on any further.
BTW, I will grant Godin another point, this one from his post, here:
Link: Seth's Blog: When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?.
The web has excelled at breaking the world into the tiniest independent parts. We don't use this to support that online. Things support themselves. The food blog isn't a loss leader for the gardening blog. They're separate, usually run by separate people or organizations.
This part of the economic model does need examining. The idea of loss leaders, of subsidizing good and important things with frivolous and unrelated things. I think the basic concept itself will be lost in the Long Tail. People should not have to conned into paying for something they don't want. Like loss leaders in the front of mall bookstores, those overhyped best-sellers that pay the real estate for the mid-list books that fill up the back of the store.
I remember back in the day when I worked retail at an old fashioned camera store as it was undergoing a significant transition. I was a professional photographer. I sold serious equipment to serious shooters and hobbyists (and got an employee discount on my own gear!). I sold darkroom equipment and chemicals. This stuff did not exactly fly off the shelves. Was a time when that was considered OK in retail, like with old fashioned hardware stores too. Was a time when the credibility of one's stock and one's staff made one store better than another store. It was called competition.
But by the time I was in that world, gray market mail order camera equipment forced us to sell our most expensive cameras at cost, no mark-up. And the only thing filling up the till every night was film and print processing-- Photomat stuff. This was even before the day of the 1-hour mall photo place, although I later worked at those too.
So shelf space started shifting. The front of the store filled up with photo albums, frames, mats. Inventory of serious cameras declined. Darkroom equipment disappeared entirely, long before Photoshop was ever a gleam in Adobe's eye. I saw this as a sad day.
Now camera stores are full of inventory again, and the cameras are far more expensive than the film SLRs I used to sell. People I could not convince to spend any kind of money on a film camera are dropping three times that amount on digital cameras and related software and gear.
Assumptions. Sometimes I think everything is a judgment call, and imperatives are only imperatives because some "authority" with a checkbook just arbitrarily decides it is.
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