A few more thoughts on the ecocatastrophe in the newspaper business:
If our goal is to reinvent the newspaper, it’s not easy to have successful innovation in an atmosphere that is so fluid and uncertain. There is no way to solve this business model conundrum in the short run. We can only make the best of it. That’s why I found the reactions to the intern’s post dispiriting. Ideally, we still want good journalism in a new package. But: if you degrade your real-world savvy through cuts while betting everything on your Internet savvy, what happens? You get a better package. You get more Internet functionality. But the content suffers. This is bound to be chaotic, and sometimes just plain weird – you have editors who started on typewriters “blowing up” their infrastructure of beats and replacing it with an organization and a set of tools they have no idea how to use. And young staffers who do - but don’t know the community, or how institutions work, or how to leverage their new tools to get information and tell a story.
The problem papers face today is not that they won’t innovate – they will because there’s no alternative – but that as they innovate the repeated retrenchments and gaps in expertise make them collectively dumber. This is a particular problem with medium- and small-sized papers, many of which weren’t too smart to begin with and whose cachet as a mass culture product – the go-to source for community, arts, business, and sports info – is already in eclipse.
How to fix this? It’s a money problem, but also a culture problem. There’s a big divide between those with real-world savvy and those with Internet savvy. Relatively few journalists straddle it. Their numbers are certainly growing – every day, every hour – but these are still two camps, culturally at odds. If they don’t come together (or the handful of 35-year-olds comfortable in both worlds throw up their hands), papers risk a continued slide to irrelevancy.
The trick is how to meld experience and insight with new forms – maintaining some continuity in the craft of journalism, even as the look and sound of that journalism changes profoundly. This is the key, believe it or not, to making a sharp, lively, readable, linkable product. (Look at, for example, TPM, which wouldn’t be what it is without a) sharp reporting and b) Josh Marshall’s equally sharp writing/commentary.)
July 7, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Nice post John. I can’t agree more about the need to meld the experience and insight with new forms. It’s about taking the best of each of the two camps and combining them. I think part of the problem is the abrasive nature in which the new media camp and their ideas have been presented to newsrooms — in the wake of layoffs (which do nothing to lift the spirits of the surviving veterans) and with a “this way or the highway” tone that, to many veterans, seem to be completely dismissive of whatever contributions they have to offer unless it’s embracing the new plan being put forth. Newsrooms are often divided by age anyway, and this only adds to the chasm between the old and the young. I think we need a newsroom structure that puts the vets and the newbies in situations where they are forced into regular interactions, forced to depend on each other to get their jobs done (my experience has shown that this co-dependency often resolves interpersonal conflicts in the newsroom), and forced to soak up what the other has to offer and at least gain some understanding about how the other thinks and why.
July 10, 2008 at 5:48 am
It costs $50 for me to light up my home and surrounding yard in a wireless cloud. If my neighbor does the same thing, we can share in a local broadband infrastructure based on wireless mesh network. If every house in the community does the same thing, our community has a local broadband infrastructure (note there’s no Internet access involved). Also, there’s no technical expertise needed, as Open-mesh.com units automagically connect. Ypsilanti, Michigan is building this, and it is operated and maintained by two volunteers without technical expertise.
So, suppose a newspaper invested $50, plugged in their unit, and started the community local broadband infrastructure. They could then sell subscriptions for $50 plus whatever, and the community gets their news on their local broadband infrastructure. No technical expertise needed. We’ll call it a “branded network”.
With a local broadband infrastructure in place, what could the newspaper do? Well, first, they could use Sun’s Wonderland project, which is free, but does require an IT staff to operate and maintain. Extra investment in computers and equipment to serve up the application to the community. This positions them to host town hall meetings, events, live interactive tv shows, concerts, performances, fundraisers, and just about anything going on in the community that now can be found on their “branded network” virtual world.
A local broadband infrastructure is attractive to the local hospital that wants access to the local broadband infrastructure in order to offer telemedicine programs to the community. Negotiate a contract.
A local broadband infrastructure is attractive to Internet providers that want access to the local broadband infrastructure in order to offer Internet services to the community. Negotiate reasonable wholesale pricing for the community.
IPv6 is coming. It allows businesses to sell devices that offer customers tailored services and products, such as grocery stores that use IPv6 to track customers’ food inventory in refridgerators. The businesses would like to gain access to the local broadband infrastructure, and will effectively provide the “branded network” with revenues to replace advertising space.
Well, you get the point. Buy-in to innovate is a mere $50 investment. Now, why aren’t we seeing “branded networks” popping up in every community? Why would our country want a national “make sure every American can watch digital tv” policy, when we could have, for the same price, a national local broadband infrastructure policy?
Maybe it’s the fear of empowering the individual, rather than relying on corporate control?