The Atlantic Monthly recently ran an article titled End TImes. In it author Michael Hirschorn predicts what the world will be like without the NY Times, and in the process throws in a very reactionary response:
“If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands.”
The article goes on to accept the NY Times and other papers only having a digital presence and accepting that there would be advantages to this. But the statement above struck me as looking at a publication’s customers and saying “Who trained you not to pay attention to us? The Internet.”
The printing press gave publishers an advantage to publish news and the power to edit what’s fit to read. A great publishing brand’s ability to create thought-provoking articles still exists. Their insight into world affairs through actual reporters on the ground in foreign countries and experience remains invaluable. But lacking the insight to understand the world is changing only hinders how you approach journalism today. Or as Clay Shirky described it in the interview I posted some time back (in relation to the “harm” of the internet):
“If you want to point to more proximate harms, it would be very hard to argue, for example, that innovation, inventiveness, new intellectual discoveries had slowed as a result of the Internet, and so people are left with these kind of mealy-mouth cultural critiques, because nostalgia becomes the only bulwark against change. The actual effects of making more information available to more people have been enormously beneficial to society, yet not to the intellectual gatekeepers in the generation in which that change happened.”
I think understanding the true nature of your value and business is going to help publishers that are suffering more than being as reactionary as Hirschorn. A quote from Bill Keller, the NY Times Executive Editor, follows the same thought:
“Good journalism does not come cheap. And, therefore, you’re not going to find a lot of blogs or nonprofit Web sites that are going to build a Baghdad bureau.”
