This post originally appeared on my Newspaper Death Watch blog, but I wanted to share:
I got a call today from a journalist who’s doing a story on the future of newspapers and he shared an interesting tidbit. He said he had contacted a prominent thought leader in the journalism field, whom I won’t name. This thought leader had said that the impending collapse of the newspaper industry was “a threat to democracy.”
Excuse me, but what? A threat to democracy? Newspapers are dying, in large part, because of democracy. The rise of citizen publishing has made it possible, for the first time, for large numbers of ordinary citizens to publish to a global audience without the intercession of media institutions. What could be more democratic than that? If Thomas Jefferson was alive today, he’d be an active blogger. Social media is the most democratic process to hit the publishing industry in 500 years.
I’m going to give the thought leader the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was referring to the decline of investigative journalism as practiced by newspapers. On that point, I’ll defer to journalism professor Steve Boriss, who argues that a lot of what passes for investigative journalism today is simply reporters acting as conduits for whistle-blowers. Those malcontents will find other outlets for their gripes, whether it be Consumerist.com or something else. I’m quite confident that the market will take care of filling the need for advocacy reporting.
I think the threat-to-democracy statement is more a function of the arrogance of traditional news journalists, who believe that a system in which a few thousand editors decide what people should know is superior to one in which many millions of citizens make those same judgments. If citizen media is a threat to democracy, I shudder to think of the alternative.
While I agree somewhat with your comments about “citizen jornalism’s” impact. I also don’t think it’s possible to have an intelligent discussion of the death of newspapers without also mentioning illiteracy and media ownership concentration.
Dennis McDonald
Alexandria, Virginia
https://www.ddmcd.com
I’m not sure I see the relevance to literacy. It seems to me that kids today are reading more than ever, only most of it is online.
Media ownership concentration is a failed experiment. That’s why Belo spun off its newspaper properties. None of these conglomerates has made any money on their investments, though I suppose contrarian investors like Zell can profit from selling off assets.
While it probably is something of a ‘the sky is falling’ argument, there is some truth in it.
Essentially, in the old days, because you bought the entire newspaper, and although you were only interested in a bit of it, the whole paper benefited.
(So the classified ads and TV Guide would prop up the Hard Journalism, the serious comment and the scary stuff- The guy in Beirut getting shot at by freedom fighters.
In the modern internet world, it’s only single pageviews that count. And they only count if they:
1) Attract lots of advertisers who are interested in advertising to people who read the topic – and,
2) Attract lots of gullible people who like to click on ads.
So, the most successful “news” of the future is probably a fairly mild and weak recycled press release about some study on depression – lots of gullible people will read it, and lots of pharmaceutical companies will want to peddle their crappy products at them. Already, modern journalists are starting to be given productivity bonuses based on pageviews.
One could see how how this might affect”democracy” to some extent. But it’s not so much about the medium itself, as it is about the great unbundling of content.