If 2008 was the annus horibilis for newspaper journalism in the U.S., then Q1:09 will go down as quartus catastrophus. Well, it probably won’t, but you get the picture. Newspaper bankruptcies, closings, delivery stoppages: this week’s announcements of 30% newsroom cuts at Hearst papers in Houston and Atlanta -alarming events in themselves-registered nary a ripple in the meta media.
Apropos of the moment, the debate over the future of journalism has been breathtakingly brisk and nearly untrackable. Fortunately, to our aid comes NYU wise man Jay Rosen, with his “Flying Seminar in the Future of News.” With characteristic humility, Rosen lays confesses what we’re all grappling with:
I don’t know what will replace the newspaper journalism we have relied on. It’s a terrible loss for the public when people who bought the public service dream lose their jobs providing that service, and realizing that dream. I do not look forward to explaining to my students the contractions in the job market and why they’re likely to continue for the near term. It feels grim to have to say: “There is no business model in news right now. We’re between systems.
Rosen lays out a dozen articles and posts in the last month alone that form a framework for thinking about this important and messy set of topics. The first five are absolutely must reads if this stuff really interests you; I might quibble with some of the selections below that but so little as not to bother.
I would, however, recommend some additions that didn’t make Jay’s one-month cutoff.
Although the journalism blogosphere has been talking to each other about this stuff for a long time, the mainstreaming of the discussion really began with David Swensen and Michael Schmidt in their 1/29 NYT piece, “News You Can Endow.” Along with Steve Coll, who I know had been thinking about non-profit newspapers for a while, these guys really introduced to the general public the idea that the newspapers have served a critical function in our retail democracy, and that market-based solutions might not suffice in preserving their role. I wrote a postabout Swensen/Schmidt and Coll that linked to both.
Also worth reading are the responses to the Swensen/Schmidt piece that the NYT printed a few days later. I especially liked Nicholas Leman’s line of thinking:
What’s essential right now is that we be precise about the social function we need to strengthen, and creative and non-doctrinaire about how to strengthen it.
Another Coll post on the Swensen/Schmidt piece is here. His response to Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” (#4 on Rosen’s list) is another one I would place on the must-read list. Same is true for Eric Alterman’s New Yorker piece from last spring, which covers many of the historical antecedents for the current state of play. His more recent thinking can be found in The Nation.
Coll’s New American Foundation also hosted a panel on the future of newspapers, the video of which I have not been courageous enough to watch, because I’m in it. But it can be found here.
It’s also very much worth reading the views of people who think that non-profit status and journalism don’t belong together. They generally divide into two schools of thought. The first is what I’ll call the “Original Sin” school, which holds that if the news business could somehow shove the genie of free content back into the bottle, all would be well. This is the ground plowed by Alan Mutter, #12 on Prof. Rosen’s list. NYT media critic David Carr also got a lot of play for his suggestion of an “iTunes for news.” But I found Clay Shirky to be the clearest thinker on the prospects of charging for content in a world of zero cost distribution. (Hint: they aren’t good, as is highlighted in this exchangebetween Mort Zuckerman and Walter Isaacson, whose cover piece about the future of news appeared in Time). And finally, a terrifically exhaustive treatment of pretty much every argument for and against the future of paid content can be found here.
The second school of thinking is what I’ve described, with some ignominy, as the “pony theory.” As in “if it looks like horse poo and smells like horse poo, there must be a ponty in there somewhere.” Pony Theorists believe in markets uber alles and are fond of such phrases as “we’re in the early innings;” “we must have market discipline;” and my favorite: that the disappearance of the serious journalism just simply isn’t that big a deal, because markets would would be giving it to us if we needed it. I, of course think this is faulty reasoning, because I believe that serious journalism is a public good, not unlike clean air and national defense. Public goods, by definition, are not produced in optimal quantities by market forces, and government is the solution to most such market failures. For obvious reasons, government is not such a swift answer to a market failure in the coverage of government. But a number of intelligent folk remain particularly strident in their confidence in they place in “the market”: Allison Fine, Dorian Benkoil, Steve Brill. The market-solution advocate who received the biggest shout out from his fellows was Jonathan Weber, the founder of the admirable for-profit site NewWest.net (which, I can’t resist pointing out, appears to have state government agencies as two of its biggest advertisers). His piece covers all the bases of the argments against non-profit journalism. I disagree with it almost entirely, but perhaps that’s the subject for another day.
Whew. Anyhow, thanks again to Jay for his flying seminar.
