Journalism Is Not Just Newspapers

There's an interesting comment on one of my previous Recovering Journalist: What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent?posts that I want to highlight and address more broadly than just the back and forth of comments.

A commenter named Dave wrote:

No contradicting your main point that papers fumbled the Web. But journalism's demise is no reason for celebration and netroots b.s. of "a thousand journalistic flowers" is wrong. There will be no flowers, just a brownfield.

This is a common sentiment these days: Somehow conflating "newspapers" with "journalism," as if papers are the only place that journalism is practiced. And that's simply incorrect.

There's lots of other journalism already in local markets: in small community papers, in alt-weeklies, in startup Web sites like MinnPost and Voice of San Diego, and even on blogs and TV news. And there will be more as as kinds of new journalistic endeavors I was celebrating in my post spring up. Newspapers simply don't have the monopoly on local journalism. That's a romantic notion.

I'm not celebrating the sad death of newspapers, and certainly not the death of journalism. Because journalism isn't dying along with the big dinosaur dailies. It's just mutating into countless new forms. As I've written before, the local journalism ecosystem will fill the hole left by the closing of a big daily quite well, and possibly even better than before. Don't fall into a trap of thinking that journalism is going away just because its large, printed version is becoming extinct. If anything, with the democratization of media brought by new technologies, the opposite is happening.

Comments

[Charlotte-Anne Lucas]

Amen, Mark!
None of us welcome the demise of some newspapers.
But as I wrote last week, Newspapers don't own journalism (http://charlotteanne.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/newspapers-dont-own-journalism/).
Some fine journalism has been and is being committed in many other places, and that is worth celebrating!

[Dave]

Agreed - journalism isn't just daily newspapers. No media outlet is unaffected by meltdown. Publications everywhere are laying off staff, reducing news holes, slashing freelance budgets.

But my real point isn't that journalism needs pulped trees and ink to survive. Rather, it needs full time salaries to support full-time reporters (even at the pitiful amount reporters get) working at full-time professional organizations. Reporting is a profession, not a hobby; uncovering facts with an objective hand is grueling work. "Citizen journalists" don't have the time, nor probably the gumption, to replace professional reporters. Laid off reporters turned bloggers can partially fill the hole, but only partially -- full-time bloggers earn even less on average than poorly-paid staff writers and gain no benefits. They need real jobs, too.

So, who will feed and care for "a thousand journalistic flowers"? Without money, who will have the time and resources to do the in-depth digging, file the FOIA requests, go to the county building during working hours to check their registries? Also, without the power of an organization dedicated to unearthing information on their side, how will they extract information from recalcitrant authorities? (Good sources go far; sometimes a lawsuit goes farther.)

Yes, journalism is dying -- or at least getting ready to survive in a much reduced form. The old business model is over but "a thousand flowers" isn't a sustainable model, it's wishful thinking.

[Mark Potts]

Dave:
I have no doubt that, over time, we'll see successful business models to support the sort of journalism that we're both rooting for.