Do a search for “saving journalism”

If you’re like me and the recent news about the New York Times job cuts made you type into a search engine “save journalism”, then these are some of the top search results you got:

1. Columbia Journalism Review: Saving Journalism, how to nurse the good stuff until it pays (An essay by the same author of The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age with a rather traditional media perspective)
2. Journerdism.com was also prompted to blog an S.O.S. for journalism following the avalanche of job cuts in newsrooms across the nation and the disappointing “negativity and dog-fighting among journalism blogs“
3. WebProNews.com explains How Bloggers Will Save Journalism addressing the many answers new media offers the 21st-century challenges: new technologies (such as Amazon’s Kindle), investigative journalism with shrinking staff, the need for purists and romantics to adapt, market saturation, high overhead, craigslist and more.  The suggestion for “government bailout” is questionable, however.
4. Buzzmachine.com sprouted two results on my search. One challenged the assumption that saving journalism means saving journalism jobs. This suggestion that media progress is synonymous with newspaper job cuts makes me nervous because it plays into greedy shareholders’ hands.
5. And the second buzzmachine.com result was a (looong) blog on the Norg UnConference  held at the Annenberg School of Communications in Philadelphia. Although the title of the post sounds combative, Saving Journalism and Killing the Press, the principles guiding the “unconference”were great: cooperation, mutualism, continuing the conversation, and more. Jeff Jarvis even writes,
   

   I say this is the day that the war ends. This isn’t journalism against bloggers anymore. It never was, really. This is journalists and bloggers together in favor of news.

Media mutualism

If traditional journalists could be found on-line, then perhaps the world would know whether or not they refute the bloggers’ claims that the professional media are worried about news migrating to the Internet.

For example, Alfred Hermida’s blogs from the Knight Science Journalism Symposium painted pictures of new-media champions lecturing to old-world reporters squirming in their seats and asking ridiculous questions.

The fact that there is almost no blogger voice giving a traditional media perspective makes the old-school reporters and editors look guilty as charged. It’s no wonder, then, that the new generation of media who are trying to carry journalism into the future see them as an impediment to advancement and a force to be reckoned with.

That is, unless there are traditional journalists who might agree with the way new-media advocates envision this future… We’ll never know until they blog about it either way, or leave a comment on this post.

As Hermida outlined in his blog on Tom Rosenstiel’s presentation at the symposium, journalists will soon learn to operate as part of a network rather than a final destination by assuming the roles of authenticator, sense-maker, navigator (yes, friends in the traditional media, it is OK for your readers to follow links away from your site…they will be back) and forum leader. These sound like better options than unemployment, so why wouldn’t a journalist support a way to preserve her livelihood?

Such potential responsibilities are also summed up in Daniel Conover’s foundations of 21st century journalism,

MAINSTREAM RETRENCHMENT
“Mainstream media” today are in decline, with “the people formerly known as the audience” fragmented. Future media will separate into market-driven grades of information. The “mainstream” will become a smaller subset of the total media flow, generally associated with less-sophisticated technology and users who: 1. Produce little content; 2. Profit only marginally from higher grades of information; and 3. Choose a passive lifestyle. Mainstream media will not dominate, but will represent the most significant media plurality.

Bloggers don’t seem to deny that professional journalists have a place within their shared information sphere. They actually thrive on taking news that’s run in the mainstream media and then “opensourcing” the information on their blogs. In fact, the investigative reporting job by political blogger Joshua Micah Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, just won him the George Polk Award for legal reporting. Part of his Web site’s process of covering the firing/resignation scandal of eight United States attorneys was to follow the news in the traditional media. But if the TPM staff and its readers hadn’t been paying attention and noticing patterns, their scrutiny of the scandal may never have been picked up by the mainstream media.

To recognize this media mutualism, both the traditional news companies and their employees will have to swallow their pride as well as the reality of smaller profit margins. Unfortunately there are signs that, well, this recognition may be further away than we’d like. In the New York Times story about Marshall’s award, a fellow blogger is quoted suggesting Marshall will win a Pulitzer someday. However, NYtimes.com writer Noam Cohen writes,

“It won’t be this year. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said in an e-mail message that online articles are eligible for the awards, but they must have been published on a weekly or daily newspaper’s Web site.

‘A freestanding Web site does not qualify,’ he said.”

Paradigm shift in the gatekeeper debate

For a community in which the invention of coloring technology is as critical as the printing press, the media—new and old— are strangely viewing the gatekeeper debate in black and white.

Here’s the gray, and fuchsia, and Technicolor film:

Professional and participatory media can thrive together; imagine, mainstream and grassroots, harmonizing. Actually, they must if the art of news is to realize its highest form: accessible, timely, relevant information that adheres to the journalistic standards of balance, truth and integrity.

We’ll get there, eventually, although it could possibly be much sooner if blogger and newspaper advocates would spend less energy trying to block one another’s entrance into press conferences.

One constructive debate to launch would be Daniel Conover’s thoughts on the conundrum of 21st Century journalism. He humbly offers up for discussion possible solutions to the obstacles faced in building bridges across the print v. on-line rift. He addresses the heart of the matter with about 25 points, such as open sources, intelligence briefing models, curating information, accepting profit margin declines, and more. Brilliant.

Washington Post staff writer, Jose Antonio Vargas, in his November 2007 story Storming the News Gatekeepers, illustrates beautifully the distraction caused by the resistance on all fronts.

Why couldn’t the flood gates be flung wide open for anyone to plunge into the collective knowledge of the human race? How would that make the professional journalist’s job obsolete? If anything, it would enrich the quality, purpose and importance of her craft. She would then siphon the information into niche tributaries, much as she always has, but with improved resources.

Michael Karlberg writes about this adversarial culture of contest in his book How Everyone Can Win. The future, Karlberg predicts, is moving towards cooperation. Vargas highlighted a glimmer of this bright future in his story:

“High school and college students are writing for Scoop08, where relatively experienced student journalists are guiding inexperienced student CJs (citizen journalists). “This is the future of journalism, I think: journalists working with citizen journalists,” says Scoop’s co-founder, 18-year-old Alexander Heffner. “

The good and bad of broadsheet

http://reportr.net/2008/02/22/a-misguided-approach-to-electronic-paper/

The above blog post fueled ridicule of a questioner who, during a presentation for E Ink at the Future of Science Journalism Symposium, gave voice to a fundamental divide between print and electronic media that must be reconciled. Could the marketing director’s electronic-paper-display software and device, the journalist in the audience asked, do for her what a traditional broadsheet newspaper does, enable her to scan through its content? Clearly, many have missed her point in asking such a question. Surely this woman does not suggest that commuters lug with them on the subway an over-sized gadget. And unless she intends to then print out the displays so she can “feel” the pages between her fingers (my History of Journalism professor actually once said this in class), she is not some member of a new race of troglodytes, averse to computer screens and electronic text.

Until a more “human-like” graphical user interface (GUI) is developed, new-media apologists should admit that print journals still trump their digital counterparts when it comes to presentation of the news. There are rumblings of slow developments in this arena, such as “zooming” (zoomable user interface or ZUI), which is said to be closer to the human model of scanning and narrowing in on information. This could solve one of the major drawbacks to on-line news: interfacing. The first Web news source that adopts this technology will be a hero and leave its competitors leagues behind, competitors who still won’t have asked themselves, “what about broadsheet worked“. Our questioner wasn’t longing for the past, she was learning from it.

News judgment alone won’t save you

On the information superhighway of the Internet, where news updates and developing stories race by at impossible speeds, how does a stop-press junkie decide which sources to use? What makes one Web site more trustworthy and late-breaking than a rival? How do you know you are getting the news you need and not what would be more relevant in other circles which do consider noteworthy, say, the latest exploits of Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan?

My mission is to find answers to the above. I’ve given myself the assignment and created this blog to track my findings in hopes that such a report might be useful to other news aficionados.

For starters, I hope I arrive at a better and more attractive solution than http://www.newsjunkie.info. If you’re like me, you don’t want “enough news to make you sick”. You want it to satisfy your appetite…with taste.