Go Invent the Future
Here’s the money quote from Nicholas Lemann’s commencement address to the Columbia University School of Journalism:
Our job was to improve on the old model. Your job is to create a new model. You shouldn’t be daunted by this: newspapers in particular, and news in general, have been changing in non-incremental ways for three centuries. Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World (the profits from which endowed this school) had almost nothing in common except that they were printed on cheap paper and distributed in cities, and neither had much in common with a big-city newspaper today. On your watch, newspapers will be primarily digital, but the primary task for you is not to switch delivery media, it’s to invent a new social compact with a community around the gathering and presentation of information.
I suppose that qualifies as a man bites dog story—but it’s still contained within a dog bites man story, which is that you are leaders who hold the future of journalism in your hands. Sorry, it’s unavoidable. Have fun with it.
Yes, have fun with it. And take it seriously. We are living through one of those evolutionary and revolutionary moments in journalism. The Pennsylvania Gazette is different from the New York World because of a similar moment. Ditto the difference between the World and CNN. And ditto today’s MSM from what is coming next.
But the thing is: What’s coming next? Lemann can’t say. Neither can I. He’s exactly right to tell these students: Go invent it. (I would add: Don’t forget to include the public; they are, in some ways, ahead of you in the re-inventing process.)
Tags: journalism
