The end of news *as we know it*

TalkingPointsMemo.com founder (and Polk Award winner) Josh Marshall gave the 2008 Knight Lecture at Stanford last night. Among his more prescient observations:

"Journalism, as we know it, is in the process of being destroyed."

And yet Marshall, like me, isn't all in a tizzy about this. It's only journalism "as we know it" that is being destroyed, not journalism itself. He used one of the most apt metaphors I've yet heard to describe the phenomenon we're in the midst of. In the late 1800s, the railroad industry was on the cusp of a similar demise. The reason, Marshall said, that they failed to successfully transition into the new world was a faulty understanding of what their business was about. They saw themselves being in the railroad industry, rather than being in the transportation industry. Instead of asking themselves, "How can we create a long-term plan to continue to provide transportation?", they asked themselves, "How can we perpetuate trains?"

Newspapers are facing the same thing. Instead of asking themselves: "What's our long-range plan for continuing to do journalism?" (which, as I've mentioned before, we need to define as "the collection and dissemination of meaningful information"), they seem hell bent on figuring out how to perpetuate journalism as they know it today. Ie: perpetuating the forms that they're used to: inverted pyramids; a single entity that provides the whole kit and kaboodle, everything from national news to local news to business news to lifestyle news to sports; discrete stories that get wrapped up in a bow once a day, etc....

But this doesn't make sense. These forms are only a product of the technology to which they were beholden. When you have to deliver your journalism once a day via a limited number of physical pages, you develop certain ways of doing things to optimize for efficient use of the technology. But liberate yourself from that delivery vehicle, and you can "collect and disseminate meaningful information" in myriad other ways that are just as useful, authoritative, and effective. Or, as Marshall put it: "When you get out of that technology [physical pages delivered once a day], the canon of the news article seems arbitrary."

Here's another exercise: Take a beat. Any beat. Education. Crime. Green technology. Now ask yourself: If I were starting from scratch today and I wanted to develop a new entity to deliver information about my beat to everyone in the world who was interested in learning about it, how would I do it?
-- What technologies would I use for delivery?
-- How would I tell my stories so that people would be engaged and would keep coming back for more, would be chomping at the bit to hear what I was going to report next?
-- Who would I bundle myself with? A larger organization that also includes news on matters unrelated to mine? Go it alone? Somewhere in between?
-- Would I insist on publishing a completed story once a day, or unspool my story in drips and drabs, sharing things I knew as I learned them? Use Twitter to "live blog" from an event?
-- Would I straightjacket myself into an "objective", "dispassionte" voice? Or would I inject some personality into my reports?

Tip: Think about the websites, news, information sources you use today. Not for work, but just to gather information about whatever it is that interests you: knitting, swing dance, stem cell research, baseball, personal finance.... How do they deliver their information, and what it is it that you like about it that keeps you coming back for more?

Note: For now, don't worry about how you'd earn money to pay for this. For this exercise, simply take it on faith that, if you build a reader base, income will follow. (And if you don't believe me, again, just take a look at TalkingPointsMemo, which, today boasts at least 9 or 10 paid staffers, maybe more.)

Photo courtesy of festivefrog

Howard Kurtz doesn't get it

Howard Kurtz's column today bemoans the recent round of Washington Post buyouts. What he gets right is that it's painful to watch talented reporters like Tom Ricks and Sue Schmidt walk out the door. But what he gets wrong is what the future is about.

Specifically, he says:

"I know, I know. The future is digital. The Web is a cornucopia of fast-moving video and blogs and bulletins and gossip, while newspapers are old, slow and less than hip."

OK, he's right about the future being digital. But he's wrong about contrasting the Web as hip and newspapers as less than hip. It's not about being hip. It's about delivering information to readers in forms they enjoy and find useful. It's not that readers don't want to learn about "Jack Abramoff's dirty dealings" (as Kurtz describes Schmidt's investigative findings) or follow the Middle East that another Washington Post departee, Robin Wright, covered for a quarter century. It's that they don't want to consume the information in the way that newspapers are dishing it out.

Why should this be so surprising? We don't wear the same clothes we did 25 years ago. Our cars have features (cup holders, CD changers) that they didn't have 25 years ago. We don't make phone calls the same way we did 25 years ago. Know anyone who's thinks a landline only is just dandy? So why should we expect that news readers would be satisfied with inverted pyramids and text only?

It's easy to look at online news and dismiss it as nothing but "gossip" and "fast-moving video." Because, sure, among online-only news sites, that's the vast majority of what's out there. Today. And that's key: today. It's like that today, but it won't always be. The reporters of tomorrow are the ones who will look at all those tools and gizmos and realize, "Hey, I could use that to report and tell my story better."

Here's an exercise: Take the Washington Post's two-year investigation of Jack Abramoff. Read the Post's Ombudsman's column about how it was done. Now, imagine how you might report that investigation today using all the digital tools available to you. Start at the beginning: Imagine how you might use blogs and crowd-sourcing to assist your investigation, long before you have anything meaningful to report. (Tip: Take a look at how Josh Marshall and TalkingPointsMemo.com did just that to uncover the US Attorneys scandal. And then consider this: He won a Polk Award for that story. Some might say that means he knows a thing or two about how to use the digital world to do important reporting.)

Then imagine how you might use "fast-moving video" or slide shows or Google mashups or mobile-phone content to create engaging reports. Just because it's "serious" doesn't mean it has to be reported in 4,000-word, text-only formats. Take a look at the Post's timeline, for crying out loud. Please don't tell me you couldn't come up with something more interactive, more engaging, something that would make people actually want to play with it. Of course you could. And their follow-the-money graphics. Very pretty. But come on people... totally static. With databases up the ying-yang these days, you could easily hook this up so that the reader could slice and dice the data in any way they chose.

The point is, when MSM folks dismiss online technologies as nothing more than the purview of gossips and dilettantes, they are missing the point: The brave new digital world is not the scourge of journalism. It is the savior. Online tools offer journalists the opportunity to do better investigative reporting and find those important stories and then to tell those stories in ways that draw readers in, rather than turning them off.

Photo courtesy of Alejandro the Great