What’s most interesting and useful about “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” report issued by Len Downie and Michael Schudson Monday is not so much what it chronicles or recommends.
Look instead at what it’s provoking.
My Poynter colleague, Rick Edmonds, and others provided expert, deadline analysis of the report’s diagnosis and prescriptions. They did that even before the rest of us were jamming office printers across the land with nearly 100 pages documenting what the authors characterize as American journalism’s “transformational moment.”
It’s a moment in which they assert “the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed.”
So, too, with their own report. Credit somebody at the Columbia Journalism Review — and the school that runs it — with understanding that from the start.
Rather than waiting for reactions, CJR commissioned four as part of Monday’s release.
In the spirit of the Next Step Journalism, each of the four responders advanced the story — the future of news — beyond where Downie and Schudson left it at the bottom of Page 97.
In comments and posts and Tweets across the net, others have done the same. Steve Buttry points out that social media, unaddressed in the report, could help fill some of the gap in accountability news.
Joel Kramer suggests a way to avoid some of the conflict inherent in the sort of government funding the report proposes. Jeff Jarvis asks why the authors jumped so quickly to philanthropic and government remedies before assessing the sort of market-based scenarios advanced by CUNY and others.
Most of the discussion has taken the form of criticism, much of it biting, but all of it reflects the sort of journalism essential to our future: collaborative pursuit of what really matters.
Some of the Next Step collaboration I found especially useful from the four responders:
- Questions raised by Jan Schaffer’s Laurels and Darts assessment of the report, including these: Instead of looking for ways to pay for what we’ve always done, “how do we provide something worth paying for?” And: “What if the something-for-everyone, grocery-store model of newspapers no longer meets consumers’ needs?” A Next Step question from there: What might community life be like without the kind of common document that newspapers have provided for so long?
- The scenario sketched by Paul Starr: “Even with additional financial support, journalism is likely to become more of a specialized interest, with a narrower reach and little presence in many communities, especially those with low incomes. In this new environment, there is an increased potential for deepening rot at the lower levels of the federal system.” Next question: What would it take to recover journalism’s “broad public reach,” as Starr puts it, in ways that emerging enterprises are not?
- Martin Langeveld’s specific suggestions, especially the idea of a “Report for America” along the lines of Teach for America. Next question: Why not try this?
- Alan Rusbridger’s account of his readers succeeding with a form of reporting that his newspaper, The Guardian, could not. He describes the phenomenon as “the mutualization of a newspaper,” explaining: “Our readers have become part of what we do.” Rusbridger’s overall take on the state of journalism today: “There is much to be excited about. But we may all need a little help along the way.” Next question: Where do we take Downie-Schudson from here?
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified the university working on market-based scenarios for supporting journalism.
