Journalism 2.0: Don't Throw Out the Baby
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a journalist. My heroes were people like Woodward and Bernstein and the people reporting from war zones. The profession seemed to be both glamorous and worthwhile. Faced with a real decision as a young adult, I went into the IT industry. Then, later in my career, I started blogging, and then writing for ReadWriteWeb, and now I am COO of this news media business. So that got me thinking about the past, present, and future of journalism. Disclosure: I do not come at this from a long career as a journalist. This is a personal, blog-style view of the journalism profession by somebody who cares about the outcome.
Bloggers Becoming Journalists
Blogging is open to anyone. You do not need to be trained as a journalist, nor do you need a job that pays you to blog. But many bloggers have created media businesses that employ people, cover the news on a regular basis, and sell advertising. They have created newspapers without the paper. Which turns out to be a fairly good business, with overheads low enough to make a reasonable profit.
However, the imperatives that come with running a real business tend to shift bloggers from the classic blog mode to something else. This has generated a lot of anguish among blog veterans who worry that blogging is "losing its soul." Journalists, on the other hand, face a starker, more existential threat as newspapers close shop.
So neither bloggers nor journalists are happy today.
But my optimistic nature inclines me to the view that some new model will emerge that makes for a fulfilling and reasonably well-compensated career.
Blogging Compared to Journalism
Blogging seems wonderful compared to traditional journalism: anybody can do it; the style is informal, fun, and personal; no editor has control of your voice; you're not tied to a fixed schedule; and you encounter incredible diversity.
But now that many bloggers have morphed into small-media business owners, they are starting to feel pressure to follow a schedule and cover key news stories. This is a world that a traditionally trained journalist can recognize.
But there is a fundamental difference. Bloggers are passionate experts first and journalists second. Somebody who blogs about technology could not credibly switch to politics, and vice versa. The journalism profession is adept at taking somebody from a story on a bank robbery and allocating them to a political sex scandal. Their professional skills enable journalists to be switch-hitters.
This difference is generally advantageous to bloggers. Training somebody in the basics of journalism is easier than creating passionate expertise in a subject.
However, this is where the blog media business is in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Don't Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater
We don't need print or TV to deliver news. Throw out the bathwater.
But the baby is cute. Let's keep the baby. Let's keep all the good things about journalism, the things that inspired me as a kid and that have inspired countless journalists:
- A really strong desire to find the truth, wherever it may lurk;
- An assumption that everyone knows more than you, and that your job is to find, cultivate, question, and listen to your sources, and then come to a view;
- An inclination not to take anything at face value, because everyone has a point of view, and those points of view are usually driven by self-interest;
- A resolve not to let commercial interests (in other words, advertisers) influence your search for the truth.
I don't know if this is taught in journalism school. It is a personal point of view. I hope that is okay. I did declare up front that this was a personal opinion piece.
Begone, You Self-Interested Tech Cynics
I have always been in the technology business. I like writing about the technology business because I find it fascinating and there are a lot of really smart people to talk to. But techies can spout the most self-interested baloney when it comes to content. The Web 2.0 vision of user-generated content is millions of passionate experts creating content that really clever algorithms deliver to audiences. The people who create those really clever algorithms become rich beyond the dreams of avarice while throwing a few crumbs to the content creators. Don't try paying a mortgage with AdSense or other CPC-affiliate revenue deals.
To a techie, "content" is just something to throw in a software system. Content creators don't talk about "content." They talk about their art or craft. Journalism is a form of art, albeit closer to craft than art. To a techie, art is just content. Which is more important, code or art? If you had to choose between a world without computers or a world without art, which would you choose?
But let's not get carried away with this. Journalism is still just a job.
Would Citizen Journalists Have Exposed Watergate?
Yes, they would have.
We don't need to protect journalism with public money or grants. The greater social good will be delivered by thousands of people on the ground reporting what is happening. That massive flow will be analyzed and edited ("curated") by a small number of experts who are motivated and trained to uncover the truth.
It won't be perfect. But the current system isn't perfect either. It is fair to say, though, that scumbags won't rest any easier. They will still be exposed.
Sacrifices will be made. One cannot imagine foreign bureaus surviving in anything close to their current form. Instead of having a few stringers on a loose contract, media firms will have a standardized deal that applies to anyone who covers fast-breaking news. That way, whoever is on the spot becomes a "just-in-time stringer."
Is that better or worse than what we have now? It's worse for the people working today in foreign bureaus on good salaries. But mostly, it's just different.
Online Revenue Models for Quality Need to Evolve
The newspaper business was fantastically profitable in its heyday. So it has the potential to pay a lot of journalists and editors reasonably well. The online business would likely pay less and employ fewer people because the overall revenue would be lower.
Will there be enough revenue to pay for "quality" journalism. Nobody can really define "quality" journalism. It is a bit like a judge who says, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it."
We can recognize "low-quality" journalism when we see it, and, boy, is there a lot of it online! The free-for-all nature of the Web is bound to produce a lot of junk. The question is, will it let the good stuff float to the top?
Why Pay $2.50 to Buy a Copy of the Financial Times?
Business people pay for quality content. The Financial Times costs $2.50 on newsstands and $99 for an annual subscription. The ROI is massive. Can you imagine a CEO making a bad decision because she neglected to read an article that would have saved her from the mistake?
Even the lowest-paid executive wastes more than $99 a year by not optimizing his cell phone bill.
I repeat: business people pay for news-driven content. If you doubt this, try prying a Bloomberg Terminal, which costs $2,000 per month, from a financial trader!
Consumers don't pay for news-driven content. Consumers pay for entertainment. Reading the news in the form of a newspaper was entertainment, a relaxing thing to do at the end of the day. People will still pay for entertainment. Just don't confuse that with the news business.
Monetizing Quality Online Is Harder
The Financial Times has been the savviest newspaper at balancing free and paid. It has a shot at getting it right because it has a business readership for whom time is money.
But the fundamental reality is that news, and everything that follows from news (opinion, analysis, insight), has to be primarily monetized by advertising; subscription revenue is the icing on the cake. Not much dispute on that score.
The problem is, how do you get an ROI from the additional investment in quality?
In a subscription-based business, that ROI is simple. If The Economist ever compromised its incredibly high standards, I would cancel the subscription I have had for decades. They would have then lost another good-quality advertiser.
But online, the correlation between quality and revenue is weaker. There is some correlation: a site focused on senior managers gets a higher CPM than a site targeting students.
But because the audience for a website is not measured in any way like an audience for, say, a controlled-circulation magazine is measured, there is a large element of faith that the "right" people (i.e. influential people with big budgets) are reading. That need for faith leads to a discount.
Until we as an industry can do a better job at monetizing quality, at correlating quality with revenue, the sensible business decision is simply to go after page views, any page views. This leads to the "aggregator bait" posts (Digg bait, Techmeme bait, Google bait, etc.) that we all deplore. Plenty among us really want to produce quality and have faith that the technology and business models will evolve to the point that quality journalism will be a rewarding profession to pursue.
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Thank you for the thought provoking post.
Journalism, like music artists have become synonymous with the industry that was created to make their material available. As the movement of material becomes free journalists will need to change, but that will be a good thing.
Great post - totally agree!
The industry is in for a shake up!
Thanks for such a detailed post Bernard. You analysis and comparison of blogging and journalism is remarkable. Yes, journalists may have to bend their ways and look at a more fluid avenue to express their opinions or thoughts.
RE: "content." Nicely put. Like you and many others, I have one foot in writing and one foot in tech. Both activities are crucial to my job, and both provide endless fascination. Yay for good writers! and Yay for good techies!
Professional journalists and newspapers have consistently been a full cycle behind the Web. They ignored websites until near the end of the dot-com. They laughed at blogs until near the end of Web 2.0. They finally caught on to Twitter after it had already gone mainstream. Now they are ignoring SEO after mom and pop ecommerce sites have figured it out.
Because I read Google News Alerts through our app at http://www.AlertRank.com, I am able to watch the PageRank and other key SEO values of all the major news sources. Sites like the New York Times has a PageRank of 10, so its stories are capable of being at the top of Google Web searches for anything it writes about, but that rarely happens. The same is true of CNN and many other news sources. If you look inside their pages, you can see that they follow few recommended SEO guidelines. Why are they giving up all this traffic? Because they are behind on the current wave as well.
Instead of fighting Google, journalism needs to recognize that being found in Google is the secret to online success today.
This is such an important topic, and today’s legacy media are grappling with these issues, as are media scholars. Jane B. Singer’s piece on journalists as socially responsible existentialists is an interesting perspective on how blogging is impacting the very function, role, and industry of “news media” as we have known it for so long.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a741570378~db=all
The SPJ code of ethics does affirm many of these assumptions about journalism that you cite http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp - so one criticism of blogging right now (from the media perspective) is that there is no normative code or governing philosophy behind the practice of “new media” as it were. This is where questions of ethics, coverage, quality, reporting, etc. come in to play in the debate over “journalism” v. “blogging.”
To me, though, there's an important factor missing from this analysis, and that's of the concept of the media as the forth estate - and its role in the democratic process.
Quality information for business and entertainment for consumers aren't the only things at stake here. The very governing, political, "informed citizenry" concept may also hang in the balance.
Excellent article. This is one of the few blog posts that have seriously and cogently expressed the real differences between journalists and bloggers devoid of antagonism for either side.
As a trained journalist (one of those swept into j-schools by Woodstein), I endorse all of your points.
A better method of measuring quality online writing must be discovered if blogging is to advance beyond brief personal commentary into a real medium which can provide a reliable and valuable information source. Beyond advertising and enticing the most clicks, this issue must be addressed if readers are to find an alternative to traditional media and traditional media feel comfortable viewing online media as more than an inexpensive marketing tool.
Tiffaney, I will look at those links, they seem interesting. But I tend to the glass half full view. At least the distribution cannot be controlled by a few people. Do you remember when we worried that say Clear Channel or Murdoch controlled what we listened/watched/read? The ability for anybody to be a watchdog is a big important step forward. The movement to more real identities online - so you can look at the source of a comment - is a good thing.
I think a normative code is emerging. We have one at RWW. We know many other bloggers who have one. It is still fluid and has to be as the medium is still fluid. Let the audience judge what is good and not good.
But that is why I come back to the economics - how to pay for quality. The models are emerging, just too slowly for my liking.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. As a j-school grad who worked in the "print" news business (LA Times, AP) before leaving 10+ years ago, my only concern is this: Can citizen journalists carry the torch in dangerous places where speaking truth to power gets you killed.
Hopping a plane on your own dime (or that of an online media concern) to Pakistan, Iraq or Africa and digging into political matters is neither easy nor cheap. The pressures remain real for any business to make money and get close enough to sources and locales to provide original, compelling and societal-changing news (be it breaking, investigative or explanatory).
Covering domestic news is far easier. And myopic.
Major newspapers had bureaus in international capitals because they had healthy profits. They could subsidize a dozen reporters and photographers on assignment in Baghdad because costs were not the primary concern; reporting important news was.
I will watch with great interest to see how many bloggers become journalists, how many journalists become bloggers and how many online news outlets rise from the ashes of the newspaper business.
It takes more than theory, ideas or opinion to run a successful, trusted and appreciated news organization.
Bernard, I agree that mainstream news media have botched the online transition. But you are mistaken on several points.
1. By your own description, bloggers are passionate amateurs. They're not trained in investigative procedure, source development, research, fact verification, the legal system, economics, writing or editing. To say that passion is more valuable than professionalism is ridiculous. Being a fan of jewelry doesn't make me a gem-cutter.
2. Your assertion that citizen journalists would have exposed Watergate, would have developed the confidential sources that brought down a president, is absurd. There's a difference between leaking the Monica Lewinsky story and monitoring the court system to uncover criminal behavior, and then having the connections to investigate the loose ends in a dangerous environment.
3. I understand why both bloggers and journalists need to self-brand. But citizens worldwide should be concerned that half a dozen self-branded, self-monetizing bloggers and journalists per city cannot keep tabs on city, county and state government; health departments; the school board; the police, sheriff's and state highway departments; municipal, local, state and federal courts; chemical plants; regional real-estate development, etc. A credible news source like The Economist requires a disciplined, well-trained community of journalists. As citizens, we need full-time professionals like these to monitor these processes on a local level.
Bob, I share your concerns and these models will live together in parallel. You mention The Economist. They will continue to thrive in my view, the quality is easily worth the subscription.
I would like bloggers to learn more of the professionalism of traditional journalism. As more traditionally trained journalists take to blogging, that will happen. The knowledge transfer both ways (journalists learning from bloggers and bloggers learning from journalists) will be great.
Re Watergate, the story as I recall hinged on the willingness of the Washington Post proprietor, Katherine Graham, to risk the wrath of the government. Many proprietors (most?) would not take that risk. Certainly not in totalitarian regimes. If Woodstein had been shut down by Graham, what could they have done? Today, it is out the door, double expresso at Starbucks, tap, tap, tap on iPhone and story is out to the world. Bye, bye chokehold of the rich and powerful!
As a journalism student, I quite enjoyed reading about the "baby" of journalism.
Of course, you were quite right. These are the things that they teach in journalism school, except that, as I'm sure you're aware, we are told that in reality it is not always so simple. Particularly when it comes to issues of commercial imperative, or news worthiness versus ethics.
Hello Bernard. I loved reading your article. Certainly, you know how to call some attention, hehe.
Well, I must say I dont completely agree with you and I totally agree with commenters Jeff Bean and Bob Page.
When you say that "Bloggers are passionate experts first and journalists second." Im not sure this is quite the truth. In newspapers and magazines there are people who are experts on different fields too and they write only what they know about (i.e. economics, films, television, music, etc). Aside from that, I dont think bloggers can be journalists... while I do think journalists can become bloggers at anytime.
Then you say: "This difference is generally advantageous to bloggers. Training somebody in the basics of journalism is easier than creating passionate expertise in a subject." Hmmm sorry to burst your bubble but having gone to journalism school for 5 years and graduated, I dont think you can train these people that easily in the snap of your fingers. Because it takes years to intellectually shape a person into a variety of subjects that are part of the Journalism curricula, such as History, Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, Art History, Media History, etc. etc. In my opinion, a journalist must know a bit about all these topics and become expert in one or two, but its part of a journalist culture to know these things.
How many bloggers not formed in a journalism school do actually know about history or sociology? And why is it important to know all that? Because if you want to analyze the world you must know where our society comes from.
Like other users said before, its very easy to blog about plants, the last gadget or post yummy cake recipes, but being a journalist with all the letters, with all it takes to become a real one, two things: college and real-life experience.
:)
Hmmm...is the "preview" function working fine here? I guess its not.
Ok, I wanted to apologize for my English, in case there are some mistakes, I warn you this is not my mother-tongue, heehe.
(tried to edit my comment but didn't work)
Thank you for writing this article. I enjoyed reading it.
We are an aspiring online newspaper that brings you daily truths about the vast array of changes occurring in the American economic and political arena today. TDC’s aim is to empower you with daily knowledge about our leaders who will define what America is and what America will be for you and your family for generations to come.
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I agree with you 99 percent of the way... But on this...
"Would Citizen Journalists Have Exposed Watergate? Yes, they would have"
...Bob Page is absolutely correct, and your reply gave no defense of this statement. So, I'll ask again: On what basis do you believe that citizen journalists could have undertaken such an investigation? Can you provide some examples of in-depth investigations conducted exclusively by citizen journalists on anything close to the scale of Watergate?
Aron and others, re can citizen journalism be as effective as professional journalism at exposing scumbags? I think it depends on how you frame the question. If you phrase it as:
"On what basis do you believe that citizen journalists could have undertaken such an investigation? Can you provide some examples of in-depth investigations conducted exclusively by citizen journalists on anything close to the scale of Watergate?"
No. It will be hard to ask people that level of unpaid research. Woodstein got a good salary from WashPo. Then made a lot of money as book authors. What if HuffPo paid? Would the recipients be bloggers or journalists? Judge on the output not on an arbitrary label.
Have we see enough of this? No yet. No nearly. But get real. How much do we actually see from traditional media? Celebrity gossip sells papers.
And I believe we will see more as the online media owners figure out how to more effectively get a financial return o quality reporting.
But the much bigger issue is the choke-hold that power has over the old model with a few big media companies. I have see at first hand - not in America - a government shut down the founders and investors of a media business that exposed a governmment corruption scandal. Today even the Chinese government cannot hold back the digital tide.
On that front, the public is much, much better served the diversity of the Internet.
TDC’s aim is to empower you with daily knowledge about our leaders who will define what America is and what America will be for you and your family for generations to come.
The same is true of CNN and many other news sources. If you look inside their pages, you can see that they follow few recommended SEO guidelines.
Required reading for anyone who wants to be a journalist. It starts with the basics. http://www.spj.org/pdf/ethicscode.pdf
Training somebody in the basics of söve journalism is easier than creating passionate expertise söve in a subject." Hmmm sorry söve to burst your bubble but having gone to journalism school for 5 years and graduated, I dont think you can söve train these people that easily in the snap of your fingers. Because it takes söve years to intellectually shape a person into a variety of subjects that are part of söve the Journalism curricula, such as History, Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, Art söve History, Media History, etc. etc. In my opinion, a journalist söve must know a bit about all söve these topics and become expert in one or two söve , but its part of a journalist culture to know these things.
I guess I don't have the reverence that many commenters have for traditional journalism. It is already a business striving for ratings (circulation) attempting to shock and editorialize. Reporters in print present opinions as news and use all the tools of language to press their views. With a limited number of outlets "news" can be easily stacked, one way or another. I see blogging as the only hope for an informed citizenry. They (we) desperately need a workable business model.
I agree with you .Thanks.
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I dont think you can söve train these people that easily in the snap of your fingers. Because it takes söve years to intellectually shape a person into a variety of subjects that are part of söve the Journalism curricula
, journalists may have to bend their ways and look at a more fluid avenue to express their opinions or thoughts
The same is true of CNN and many other news sources. If you look inside their pages, you can see that they follow few recommended SEO guidelines.
I guess I don't have the reverence that many commenters have for traditional journalism. It is already a business striving for ratings (circulation) attempting to shock and editorialize. Reporters in print present opinions as news and use all the tools of language to press their views. With a limited number of outlets "news" can be easily stacked, one way or another.thx admin
Reporters in print present opinions as news and use all the tools of language to press their views.
The same is true of CNN and many other news sources. If you look inside their pages, you can see that they follow few recommended SEO guidelines.
I need is to have a rant about a stüdyo coworker get passed to management.
your unsupported claim that "this article doesn't represent the contents of the speech very well," then please make your argument.
There seems to be no dispute over the
Do you entered the studio to work ...? I do not understand
TDC’s aim is to empower you with daily knowledge about our leaders who will define what America is and what America will be for you and your family for generations to come.oyun
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