Jeffrey McManus

Excellent piece on the NY Times debate blog today on the future of journalism. I’m seeing a lot of these discussions both on newspaper sites and on sites that cover the future of journalism like the Nieman Foundation. It’s great that these things are getting discussed, although as I’ve mentioned before it seems like there is a divide between people who produce and pontificate about news and the people who understand the technology that’s disrupting it. Also, I suspect that the discussion is taking place at least ten years too late. Worse for news organizations, it’s happening in the context of a global recession, in which the impulse is to shed resources and hunker down rather than retool and realign to confront the disruption of their businesses.

Couple of thoughts on the Times piece:

1) We have got to get past the notion that “if the newspapers would just stop giving away their content for free, we wouldn’t have this problem”. Guess what? Newspapers have been giving away their content for free since the beginning of time — certainly before the advent of the internet. Every time you pick up a newspaper in a coffee shop or a library, you’re reading free news content.

Lots of newspapers (including the horrible pod-people Examiner here in San Francisco) deposit themselves on your doorstep whether you ask for them or not. How can that possibly be, in a world in which handling molecules is supposedly far more expensive than moving electrons? Somehow, the guy who puts the Examiner on my doorstep (where it goes unread) is making money.

So, the notion of “free content” can’t really be the whole problem. More importantly, with a few rare exceptions, consumers simply won’t pay for news content online. There was an ah-ha moment with the release of the new version of the Amazon Kindle this week — we were reminded that some Kindle users pay $13.95 per month for access to the Times on their Kindle devices. This seems crazy to me, although it probably wouldn’t seem so crazy if I had a 45-minute train commute each morning. It’s crazy because it’s the exact same business model that iTunes just abandoned — proprietary, expensive hardware, a closed model, draconian restrictions on how you can consume the content and on what device, and stark vulnerability to competitive emergent open systems. If you believe (as I do) that systems designed to control information are inherently destined to fail, investing in something like this is not in in interests of newspapers or their readers.

2) Andrew Keen, who argues that any serious discipline cannot possibly survive without a corps of dedicated professionals, is (still) a meathead. Most of what he asserts can be proven wrong by any eight-year-old armed with Google. Keen has developed a personal brand around internet community skepticism, and he defends his thesis so vigorously that it’s difficult to know whether he even believes himself. He is the Ann Coulter of online community.

3) The internet, as we see so often, is being held up here as a whipping-boy. This is unhelpful to the discussion of the future of journalism; it’s a distraction. Imagine a world in which local newspapers were in decline without the hindrance of the Internet. If you worked in a newsroom in 1992 like I did, you don’t have to imagine. But back then, publishers didn’t have the Internet to blame for declining circulation and advertising sales. In that context, you could imagine that free distribution and access to free content would be perceived as a panacea, not a threat. I would argue that the hesitance on the part of professional publishers and newsroom managers to accurately forsee the threat and opportunities posed by the internet and their reticence to adapt to is is mostly to blame for what’s going on now in journalism, not the internet in and of itself, since the problems of journalism predate consumer availability of the internet.

4) Anyway, this discussion is often framed as “the future of journalism,” but it’s really about the future of the business of journalism. Journalism and the business that supports it aren’t inexorably intertwined, although it may seem that way at the moment; one can argue that the business of journalism has been so badly mismanaged that it’s richly deserving of defeat in the marketplace.

Related posts:

1. Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
2. The Newspaper Business: Still Confused About Itself
3. Free Advice: How to Save Journalism