Where Their Heads Be
Michael Miner covered the Chicago Media Future Conference for Chicago Reader and offers a report that I recognize as the thinking of some of my students:
If the old guard perceives the collapse of the MSM as a disaster out of which just maybe some good might come, the young Turks believe they’re witnessing — and abetting — a redemptive and overdue paradigm shift. To the collapse of MSM they say, good riddance.
Journalism is not going away. It can’t.
I don’t say “it can’t” because of some fuzzy-headed notion of journalism’s importance to democracy (read pages 55-61 of this book). I say “it can’t” because humans naturally are 1) curious, 2) gregarious, and 3) loquacious about what they know.
Business model? Who knows? Wait and see.
Is a business model necessary. Yes, if you want to run a journalism business. But what if all you want to do is do journalism? Is a business model still necessary?
Some of my students are headed into small-town journalism where newspapers are still kings of the local media. In many ways, these kinds of papers — the small dailies and weeklies — have never been a part of the MSM except as an imitation in look and feel. I applaud those making this choice. Citizens in fly-over land deserve good journalism, too.
Some of my students are thinking they will be part of a new New Journalism — one disconnected from the old business model but still in need of information professionals. Here’s how one conference participant put it:
“This may be jumping ahead a little bit in our conversation but I think one of the roles that journalists can play in the future is to be sort of an arbiter of what all of this mass amount of information is worth paying attention to, and sort of curating a news experience. Finding out all of that distributed content and bringing it into one place so people don’t have to go searching, and finding all of those little bits that they would be interested in if they knew where to find them.”
Well, that sounds a lot like what journalism has always been. Add the primary purpose — to give citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing — and you have a rather standard definition of journalism. The key to understanding the difference here: distributed content.
My students want to be journalists. And they will be.
I absolutely agree, journalism isn’t going anywhere by the forms it takes and the technologies it uses are certainly going to change. I wouldn’t, however, be too quick to dismiss journalism’s absolute centrality for our society’s governmental functions. The “business model” may precisely be that of a public service rather than a for-profit business. There are some great interviews with major figures in journalism, including folks like John Yemma and Charlotte Grimes, concerning the future of jouralism at http://www.ourblook.com/component/option,com_sectionex/Itemid,200076/id,8/view,category/#catid69 I have found it to be a valuable source.
Bill… Thanks for the link!