On the future of journalism

Does journalism even have a future, and why should anyone care? Paul Farhi says journalists are victims, not perpetrators, of the collapse of the newspaper industry. Jeff Jarvis begs to disagree:

The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists' fault.
It is our fault that we did not see the change coming soon enough and ready our craft for the transition. It is our fault that we did not see and exploit -- hell, we resisted -- all the opportunities new media and new relationships with the public presented. It is our fault that we did not give adequate stewardship to journalism and left the business to the business people. It is our fault that we lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault that we sat back and expected to be supported in the manner to which we had become accustomed by some unknown princely patron. Responsibility and blame are indeed ours.

I think the key idea here is Jarvis' accusation that journalists "left the business to the business people." The overwhelming majority of journalists simply never think of what they're doing as a business.

That a newspaper is a business -- that it exists to generate profit by providing a product to consumers, in the same sense that a shoe store sells shoes -- is an alien concept to most journalists. Notions like value-added, market share and comparative advantage never enter the minds of most journalists, who conceive of themselves as pursuing a profession that has nothing whatsoever to do with commerce.

So much of what newspapers have done, they've done at the behest of consultants, or by following the conventional wisdom doled out in ASNE conferences and journalism trade publications. In the '80s, I remember, everybody was into page re-design, trying to emulate USA Today -- every section front had to have a color chart of something, and it didn't really matter what it was. In the early '90s, the reigning idea was that newspapers needed to get away from straightforward just-the-facts "breaking news," since TV would always beat us to the punch. Instead, newspapers should deliver "context," in-depth, background, etc. Thus was born the ponderous five-part series, the award-bait special feature.

Then along came the Internet and blew all that crap out of the water. Charts? Drudge don't give a damn about your charts. He wants the good old-fashioned scoop. And that five-part series is a waste of manpower, a frivolous luxury in an age where there's scarcely enough staff to do basic metro coverage. Besides which, most of those five-part series were targeted at the awards judges, not ordinary readers.

There is still a public appetite for basic meat-and-potatoes news, if only so many editors and reporters weren't obsessed with serving up eat-your-broccoli journalism.