journalism

It really is painful to watch, in a way, how prominent members of the old-school news media complain about the internet. Today it's Robert J. Samuelson, who writes:

If the Internet permanently crashed tomorrow, I'd be thrilled.

I kid you not.

When I joined The Washington Post as a reporter in 1969, hardly anyone I knew in the news business considered it a business. We belonged to a craft, a calling or maybe a profession. We didn't worry about the industry's "business model," a term we'd never heard. Economic realities occasionally intruded, usually involving salaries (always too low). But mostly we blissfully ignored the proposition that newspapers aimed to make money. We condescendingly thought that the moneymaking people—advertising salesmen, managers—toiled so that we could pursue our higher purpose, which was to inform the public.

This comes from an award-winning business journalist. Color me naive, but isn't it obvious that a print publication with a cover price, paid subscriptions and loads of advertising is a business? The nature of the business may be changing, what with financial speculators trying to squeeze more and more juice from the melon, but it has always been a business. Right? Right?

We've been disabused of our naiveté and arrogance. All our business models (for newspapers, magazines, network news) are now in retreat, if not rout. The Internet is stealing our audiences and our ads. Few of us imagined ourselves as heirs to textile or steelworkers, disemployed by new competition and technology. But we are.

This, I believe, is a conflation of issues. The internet is bringing a new reality to newspapers (and all other media), but in this age of predatory Wall Street speculation in the news industry, I don't think the layoffs can be laid at the feet of a new technology.

How does a medium "steal" audiences? Especially when newspapers are right here in that new medium? It's not like there's no money in the internet. Why is it that web ventures are able to monetize their websites but newspapers fail at it so terribly? And why do old media folks then demonstrate the bad manners of blaming the messenger? --I mean, if they notice at all.

In Ad Age today, Simon Dumenco has an answer:

Who or what is really killing print? Craig Newmark? Blogs? YouTube, maybe? The internet in general? Or any of the other usual suspects?

Nah, print is killing print. More specifically, a handful of half-wit overlords at many -- if not most -- big print-media companies are killing print.

We see evidence of this every day.

An internet-company executive I know says of his vague and mysterious job: "I create value." That's an M.B.A.-enabled, blowhardy thing to say, of course, but he means it -- and when he says it, it occurs to me new-economy guys like him are at dead odds with many print-media executives these days, who seem to specialize in destroying value, even as they pay lip service to the "convergence of traditional and electronic media."

It's like watching a monkey thrash around, unwilling to let go of the apple in the jar.

So what's happening here, really? Perhaps it's that our taste for news is changing, and the old guard are unwilling to come along.

[Aside: Personally I think the real tragedy is what's been happening in television "news." In the end, Samantha Bee may have the best take. Who knows -- maybe as video penetration and integration in the web increases, we'll see the internet start to do to television news what it has been doing for print: Make it better.]

This kind tectonic economic and cultural shift and resulting backlash is happening across the board. And even small-scale ventures are affected. Look at what has happened at JPG Magazine. I just have to shake my head at how some people just don't get it. As Molly Holzschlag notes:

As soon as I began reading what happened regarding JPG Magazine, I knew that here was even more evidence of my long-held belief that the room for inauthentic, manipulative voices in our wired culture is becoming very small.

And while the internet has provided avenues for alternative means of finding and evaluating information, it's not the internet's fault that old, comfortable oligarchies and would-be manipulators are feeling the pinch as conversations replace PR broadsides. We all know, or should know, that it's not the internet itself that's the issue, it's what people do with it that matters. And forget the gloom and doom voices crying that the sky is falling. The real excitement, in my book, is that, in the end, it's what people can do using the internet that is our greatest hope to make the world just a little (or a lot) better.

Back to Molly:

Authenticity is not a flaw, nor should it be seen as an “act” of transparency. This is courage. These are actions that just might help save the world.

I have always stated that the Web gives the masses the potential to do just that, and it is clear that we can, via our communities and social networks, improve ourselves and gain more enlightened global perspectives that are based in truth and forgiveness rather than lies and manipulation. Idealistic? You bet. Optimistic, well, yes, but it’s not like I believe that this won’t take a very long time or that it will be a successful endeavor. I just feel it terribly, terribly important that we all realize what’s going on. The testing of boundaries and breaking them are part of this shift toward a world where honesty will truly be the best policy. Breaking those boundaries will cause pain and bruising for us all as we go through it, but go through it we must or the chance to better ourselves as individuals and society at large might pass us by.

Indeed.