Via Ezra, Robert Kuttner has a thorough look at the challenges faced by newspapers as they make the transition to the web. The article is packed with interesting information about the economics of print and online journalism, and is worth reading in full.
However, I found the article’s overall thesis kind of puzzling. Here are his contrasting scenarios:
As succeeding generations grow up with the Web and lose the habit of reading print, it seems improbable that newspapers can survive with a cost structure at least 50 percent higher than their nimbler and cheaper Internet competitors. (“No trucks, no trees,” says the former Boston Globe publisher Ben Taylor.) The dire future predicted by the now-classic video, EPIC 2014, in which Google, Amazon, and an army of amateurs eventually drive out even The New York Times, begins to feel like a real risk.
Yet a far more hopeful picture is emerging. In this scenario the mainstream press, though late to the party, figures out how to make serious money from the Internet, uses the Web to enrich traditional journalistic forms, and retains its professionalism—along with a readership that is part print, part Web. Newspapers stay alive as hybrids. The culture and civic mission of daily print journalism endure.
Aside from the semi-pejorative use of “amateur” and “professionalism,” I don’t understand why we’re supposed to consider the first future “dire” and the second one “hopeful.” The premise seems to be that in-depth, civic-minded journalism is something that everybody needs but but no one wants to pay for, and so therefore we need large, bureaucratic organizations like the New York Times to subsidize these activities out of a sense of corporate noblesse oblige.
That doesn’t sound right to me. Certainly, newspapers perform some important civic functions. But very little of what a newspaper does under the banner of “culture and civic mission” is irreplaceable. I would argue that we’re already beginning to see evidence that the blogosphere and other decentralized, web-based forms of journalism can not only perform these functions, but can perform them a lot better than the traditional newspaper ever did.
I should start with a couple of caveats. First, the blogosphere is an extremely young medium, and at this point, most of the important journalism is being done in traditional newspapers. This should not surprise us because most of the readers are still reading traditional newspapers (and watching traditional television stations) so it’s not surprising that the majority of stuff happens there. Second, there are a few specialized types of journalism—war correspondents come to mind—that the blogosphere is unlikely to ever do well. However, I think the set of things that only a monolithic news organization like the Times can perform is much smaller than Kuttner imagines.
For starters, the blogosphere already does punditry better than newspaper editorial pages. There’s a lot more punditry, in greater depth, covering a greater variety of issues. The best bloggers are, frankly, more talented than most newspaper columnists. Likewise, although newspapers do a lot of valuable investigative journalism, there are plenty of examples of bloggers doing high-quality investigative journalism. In many ways, blogs are superior to newspapers, because they have unlimited space and tend to have more loyal readers, giving bloggers the freedom to delve deeply into important issues.
Now, it might still be objected that although bloggers can do some great stuff when they’ve got time, but that very few of them (outside of people who work for policy-oriented non-profits like Reason, the American Prospect or Cato) will have enough time to pick up the slack if there are fewer journalists employed by traditional news organizations. I think this misses several important points. First, there are an enormous number of people who have time to do some high-quality blogging. Jim Henley comes to mind as an example of a guy who produces some great content in his spare time while holding down a normal job. If even a tiny fraction of the population emulates Jim’s lead, it will easily swamp the output of professional journalists.
Secondly, to paraphrase a maxim from the free software community, when you have enough bloggers, most reporting jobs are shallow. That is, if there are enough bloggers scattered around the globe, there’s likely to be at least one on the scene when a newsworthy event occurs. And because blogs are extremely good at is propagating interesting information rapidly, once one blogger reports on a story, it’s likely to percolate up the blogging hierarchy rapidly. So rather than, say, dispatching a bunch of high-priced Washington journalists to fly to Iowa to cover the Iowa caucuses, you can have local activists reporting on events they would be attending anyway. It’s not obvious that you need 20 years of journalism experience to summarize what’s said at a press conference or what goes down in caucus meetings.
The blogosphere also has much finer-grained quality control than do traditional newspapers. One of the weaknesses of newspapers is that I have to buy the entire newspaper, which comes bundled with the work of dozens of different writers. That means both that mediocre writers stay on the payroll much longer than they ought to, and that talented up-and-coming writers take a lot longer to work their way up the ranks. In contrast, in the blogosphere a writer’s success or failure is directly determined by his ability to satisfy readers. That means that although it might be harder for the average journalist to find a job, it’s likely to actually be easier for the most talented journalists to get noticed and support themselves, because they’re not cut off from readers by layers of bureaucracy. And, indeed, the most talented journalists will be able to start websites that are entirely self-supporting–no need for Wall Street to have any influence at all on the kinds of reporting they do.
Finally, I think that some of what journalists do is simply being rendered irrelevant by the ability of newsmakers to communicate directly with their audiences. For example, a lot of the time journalists are simply serving as information conduits for various prominent people. So, for example, a think tank would mostly get its message out through reporters who interviewed its scholars or summarized its studies. Now, think tanks have websites, blogs, podcasts, email lists, and other means to get their message directly to interested readers. And there are thousands of bloggers who report on, summarize, and critique think tank studies. It’s not obvious that professional journalists add any particular value in summarizing others’ utterances. The same principle applies to reporting on the activities of politicians, government officials, CEOs, and entertainment celebrities. It would work just fine for those people to post information directly to their own websites, and then rely on amateur bloggers to highlight, summarize, and analyze the information provided.
I already drew an analogy to Linus Torvald’s “all bugs are shallow” rule above, so let me draw another free software analogy. Kuttner ought to read ESR’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and consider its applicability to newsgathering and punditry. The blogosphere, like open source software, “seems to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.”
Twenty years ago, people believed that you needed a monolithic company like Microsoft or AT&T to finance and supervise the development of a modern operating system. Today, we know that’s not true. Anyone want to bet on whether the now-widespread belief that you need a monolithic company like the New York Times to finance and supervise news gathering will prove equally wrong?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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