Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

...more... I urge you to go read the whole thing, though...

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows.  .... [snip]....

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

...[snip]...

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

I read an indictment of the Kindle e-reader today, and it segues beautifully into your thought:

"  .........In our rush to adopt new technologies, we have too readily surrendered ownership in favor of its twisted sister, access.

Web 2.0 and its culture of collaboration supposedly unleashed a sharing society. But we can share only what we own. And as more and more content gets digitized, commercialized, and monopolized, our cultural integrity is threatened. The free and balanced flow of information that gives shape to democratic society is jeopardized.......

"........If our flailing economy is to teach us anything, it might be that an on-demand world of universal access (with words like lease, licensure, and liquidity) gets us into trouble. Amazon and other e-media aggregators know that digital text is the irrational exuberance of the day, and so are seizing the opportunity to codify, commodify, and control access for tomorrow. But access doesn't "look and read" like printed paper at all – just ask any forlorn investor. Access is useless currency.

"Why is this important? Because Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls "the landscape of the temporary": a hyper mobile and rootless society that prefers access to ownership. Such a society is vulnerable to the dangers of selective censorship and control.

"Digital rights management (DRM), which Kindle uses to lock in its library, raises critical questions about the nature of property and identity in digital culture. Culture plays a large role – in some ways, larger than government – in shaping who we are as individuals in a society. The First Amendment protects our right to participate in the production of that culture. The widespread commodification of access is shaping nearly every aspect of modern citizenship. There are benefits, to be sure, but this transformation also poses a big-time threat to free expression and assembly.

"When Facebook, for example, proposed revisions to its terms of service last month – claiming ownership of user profiles and personal data – the successful backlash it spawned caused complex (even existential) ideas about property, identity, and capitulation to bubble up: Is my Facebook profile the essence of who I am? If so, who owns me?"

The hallmark of a constitutionally governed society, after all, is the acknowledgment that we are the authors of our own experience. In an Internet age, this is manifest not only in published works, but also an ever-evolving host of user-generated content (Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). If service providers lay claim to digital content now, how will it all end?"

I recommend the rest of the article at   http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0318/p09s01-coop.html 

Nice. A link to the national newspaper who went online only a while back. :)

Followed by the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspapers.

I found this in a CSM article published Monday: 

"Other analysts suggest that the media should focus on creating more nonprofit foundations, like ProPublica, to produce high-quality news. But the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in its report, argues that "it is unlikely that there is enough funding to become a general ownership model." The report urges media executives to consider other ideas:

     •Adopt the cable model, in which a fee to news producers is built into monthly Internet-access fees consumers already pay.

     •Build online retail malls within news sites to create a local search network for small businesses and link them directly with consumers.

     •Develop subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences, which have already proved to be a profitable growth area in journalism.

     •Collaborate to challenge aggregators, especially Google, to start sharing more revenue."