Newspapers and Journalism

Last week, Seattle became a one newspaper town.  In early January, the Hearst Corporation, who owns the Seattle PI, warned it would close the newspaper if it didn't find a buyer.  Meanwhile, the surviving newspaper, the Seattle Times, struggles under a mountain of debt and vultures are swirling overhead waiting for it, too, to die.  With the early warning from Hearst about the Seattle PI, the city's journalists and "thinkers" went into a hum of activity.  Seminars, panel discussions, wikis (I sense to demonstrate to the tech-hip that even journalists know how to work really cool cloud computing technologies), blogs, even tweets buzzing with what to do, what will be the next model for news production.  Earnest op-ed pieces were written by the usual suspects, opining that the demise of the newspaper foretold the end of civilization.

Laid off journalists gathered to begin investigations into what is the next BIG thing, what ways can they make a living and still practice what they believe to be "the craft of journalism."  So-called people "who have been in the business" forever were called upon for sage wisdom and advice.

In fact, all over this country this same discussion is occurring.  But similar to the melt down of the financial institutions, there seems to be very little self-reflection on why the newspaper, heck maybe even the news business itself, is going broke.  It is this lack of self-reflection that I think will not help establish any new "models" where news can be commodified and monetized, much less accepted by the public.

Here is my effort to push that self-reflection.  

Up until 1889 there were no schools of journalism.  Rather, people like Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, John Muir, John Burroughs, Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote for newspapers.  In 1889, Walter Williams founded the first journalism school at the University of Missouri.  And the professionalization of writing about news began.  Up until then, if you had something to say and could write, you usually got published.  

As with many "professionalization" experiences, barriers were put up.  If you weren't educated as a journalist, you were generally excluded in the news business.   Of course, many journalists neglected to educate themselves on issues other than producing copy, so over time we have seen pieces that pass for news which are really quite uninformed or simply wrong.  But if it made a headline, that was fine, because it sold news.

The so-called firewall between "news" and the commodification of news, or advertising was and is, well, a joke.  As one former editor of a weekly paper and an on-line venture once told me: "well, I have to think of the investors..."  Another journalist once told me about his story of a strike being yanked because the advertiser (who was being struck) called his editor (note, not the publisher).  We can all find these kinds of stories.

Simply put, between the professionalization of news collection and the lack of real protections between news and money, over time, people lost faith or maybe just got bored with news.  Not only did the models fail, but the so-called journalists failed.

Of course, there are obvious examples of these failures: Judith Miller, the run-up to the Iraq war, the current financial melt down, Bernie Madoff, Enron, the list goes on.  Additionally, I think people have grown weary of "gotcha" journalism.  The kind where the reporter seems delighted to have captured a political figure with a hooker, or failing to show empathy.  Locally, several years ago, there was a story about a crane that collapsed into near-by condos.  The Seattle PI ran story after story about the crane operator who apparently had a decade old conviction for drugs.  The conviction history had nothing to do with the accident, but they delighted for days, it seemed, in ruining this man's life.  That kind of journalism is, what, good for us?  Come on.

I think we may want to not just look at the "models" for the production of news, but the actual journalists themselves.  The Internet has obviously democratized many professions (you can do your own will, attempt to diagnose your own illness).  We see this now in the news collection business.  There are a lot of Mark Twains and John Muirs out there, once excluded, but now able to find audiences and write.  Or, as they now say, produce Internet content.

For news to thrive, now, I think we need to realize it's not an exclusive club who gets to provide the news (a relationship that has created things like press credentials, monopolized access to production) but rather open the doors for more people, invigorate the content and allow the public to find sources that stimulate discussion in the public sphere.  We need to encourage more Mark Twains and Ralph Waldo Emersons and less Judith Millers who see their jobs as hob-nobbing with the very people they are reporting on, who are not using critical thinking or analysis, but rather trying to cozy with power.  

It is because of breaches of faith like the Miller event that I think people are seeking different ways to obtain and digest news.  The fear is, of course, that we only seek news through our own lens, creating an echo chamber effect.  So the trick is, I think, to find people who can tell a story, write a narrative, that is compelling, analytic, and certainly from a viewpoint, but without a bent.  

All of this shakeout will be interesting.  We are truly living in revolutionary times.  Unfortunately, there are unemployed journalists, printers, newspaper delivery folks.  Real people caught up in this.  As the discussions continue on the "elite levels," lets not forget, also, it took a lot of regular folks, not with Columbia journalism degrees, to produce a newspaper.