I feel like I’m watching Journalism fall apart; watching with interest, horror, and dismay … but just watching, like watching a fire from far away, powerless.
Like you do, I read about the newspapers folding, falling like trees in a rotting forest. Even the New York Times is in trouble. Many of the newspapers I grew up with are either dead or dying.
News flash: this isn’t new. It’s been going on since I can remember. It was already a big deal in the 1960s. (News at 11!)
We blame it on different things: blogs, 24-hour news networks, mainstream network television news, declining education, apathy, the Web, Fox News, Huffington Post, the new president, the old president, whatever.
I got a grad degree (MA) in Journalism, with honors in fact, in the early 1970s. That was so long ago we actually called it Journalism, not communications.
Back then newspapers were already dying because television network news was killing them. People liked their news in 30-second bite-size pieces. Professors wrung their hands about the loss of analysis and in-depth reporting.
And we all worried a lot, back then, about the impact of television violence in general. And sensationalism. Like that would turn the news business into show business. It’s a good thing that didn’t happen, right? (Show of hands, please).
Not that it was ever just academic for me. Before I reached my 30s, grew up and sold out (I became an entrepreneur, got the MBA), I spent eight years as a journalist. I was a foreign correspondent, based in Latin America. I worked for UPI, freelanced for Business Week, Financial Times, etc. Even after business school I wrote columns in several magazines, although mostly computer magazines.
It’s also a bit of the present for me as well, because of my new job blogging and writing. You can see that here on the right column: I’m on the Huffington Post, USNews.com, plus several business blogs.
So where does that leave us? With this:
Accident of history: journalism and business
We tend to forget that journalism grew up to fill pages between ads. It wasn’t about the the sanctimonious needs of society, or the fourth estate, or fundamentals of democracy.
They needed readers to sell ads. And in the old days, before Fox News or Huffington Post, when freedom of the press was limited to those who owned presses, the best way to get and keep readers was to do real news; to pay Journalists to investigate and report.
In the heyday of great journalism, bias was bad business. So the owners paid the reporters and, with many very well known exceptions, tried not to meddle. Good journalism was also good for business.
And we got professional news reporting because that was good business. They paid somebody to attend town hall meetings, and somebody else to travel the globe covering wars and revolutions, because that kept the readers happy and, because of that, the advertisers happy.
Journalism wasn’t about the public good. It was about making money.
Fast forward to the Internet, the Web, and the collapse of the printing press and big owners as the oligarchy of the “media.” Suddenly the media is splintered up into hundreds of millions of websites, in infinite variety of degrees of professionalism or lack of it. And even on the television, far less free, it’s six hundred channels instead of three, so we have the Fox News people talking to their tribe, and the Jon Stewart-Bill Maher people talking to their tribe, and CNN talking to whomever has 24 hours a day to listen, and NBC and CBS and ABC news trying vainly to compete with Joan Rivers and Entertainment Tonight. All bets are off.
And there’s this other trend mixed in: Even before the Web, while few people noticed, newspapers spent the last generation or two cutting costs by cutting news staff and using AP and UPI, and lately, Reuters.
So what happens next? Who’s going to pay whom to sit through those boring town council meetings, or risk their lives in wars and revolutions, or report politics and democracy fairly?
I don’t know. But, in the time-honored tradition of the back side of journalism, I’m going to tell you anyhow. Later. Not now. News at 11.
By 
Comments
[…] Towards the end of traditional media’s primacy, in-depth investigative journalism was sadly more an ideal than a reality. The business nature of newspapers, television stations meant quicker, less labour-intensive stories often took priority over extensively researched, investigative journalism. Despite this, various frames enamoured with ‘the good old days’ have inspired some to forget the realities of traditional media. As one particularly cynic commentator has put it ‘we tend to forget that journalism grew up to fill pages between ads’ (https://timberry.bplans.com/2009/05/is-journalism-dead-dying-or-just-faking-it.html#ixzz1KVsClaip). […]
All the newspaper industry has to do to save itself is to re-train staff. If individual freelance bloggers are pulling in $15K a month in AdSense advertisements, what would that do for a re-configured newspaper industry? Newspapers already have text gurus in place; it’s just a matter of instructing the writers and reporters on correct Web 2.0 Article Submission techniques, Web 2.0 Comments, SEO — in general, on how to treat their paper like a Web 2.0 Blog — to leverage the position they already have within their local communities. Heck, one person could start a Web 2.0 Newspaper in a town like Chicago and put the remaining mainstream online and paper newspapers out of business. SK
[…] Old-time Journalist Tim Berry points out that Journalism was not driven into intensive care by the invention fo the internet but that it started being pronounced dead by some in the early 1970s : […]
[…] Another awesome point it made was that shifting newspapers to online could actually be a positive thing for our environment. Honestly that thought never even crossed my mind before reading this. It really is a good point though because people wouldn’t just throw out a newspaper after reading it or let it blow away outside. Instead they just close the Internet window and boom, it’s gone without affecting the environment. This is interesting. […]
[…] a huge decline, is one of the foundations of our society and without it, we are going to suffer. It might be. And we might suffer. But the truth is that consumers of content – the subscribers of the past […]
Great post. Interestingly today the Newspaper Association of America (www.newspapermedia.com) has a full-page ad in the Providence Journal (and I suspect other places too) attempting to debunk the myth that newspapers are dying. The NAA provides powerful arguments that newspapers are in transformation, and not dying. We’ll see.
Great post Tim!
I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot too. People keep saying that print is dead, and I see it really going that way. Journalism will never go away in my opinion, but print will go away just because of the nice screen we have and environmental concerns.
One thing that is pretty interesting that you can take a look at is http://ctngreen/mag . They are supposedly the first Online HD Video Magazine. I think offline print can possibly take this route and move it’s entire structure onto the internet while preserving the nice reading experience.
I think because it becomes cheaper and easier for everyone to do a lot of things on the internet, a lot of industries will tip over. It’s the same for music because it is much easier to make records and distribute it for free. It’s for VCs because nowadays startups can go very far with less than $100,000. Everything is turning around.
Btw, I really like your blog so I submitted it to Viralogy.com. Hopefully more people can discover it through that! If you want you can claim your blog at http://www.viralogy.com/index.php/blogs/my/583 to make sure all the info is correct and it also helps with your ranking.
Anyway, thanks for the great post again and have an extraordinary week!