Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Angry Journalists Can Be a Good Thing
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Corey, via Flickr (CC license)
Some journalists are very, very angry. Good! |
We're angry.
...How angry, and why? You can find out by reading AngryJournalist.com -- a site where anonymous people (most of them presumably journalists) complain publicly about their profession, employers, and career outlook.
We're not going to take it forever -- not all of us.
Some will abandon journalism. There aren't enough jobs for all of us anyway. But some of us want to work toward solutions.
Doing more with less is not a solution. It's a Band-Aid at best. It's harvesting the goose.
We need to think about systems. We need to think bigger and more broadly. We need to think critically, and we need to collaborate.
Angry Journalist #1854 says, "I'm angry because as much as I complain (and have very good reasons, too), I don't have the guts to start something new. If enough journos put their heads together, there's probably a way to fix many of the problems mentioned here. Bored teenagers can become celebs by making movies with camera phones, but somehow journos won't forge their own media projects in line with better practices. And I'm just as guilty as anyone."
...I suggest we rehabilitate ourselves. Let's work together. Here are some possibilities:
On March 14, Tidbits contributor Paul Bradshaw is holding a U.K. unconference on journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship. He also runs journalismenterprise.com, which "reviews sites that are attempting to make money from journalism in the new media age."
A partnership of about 50 people might be enough to get a news operation off the ground with a relatively small investment of time and money from each.
If 25,000 of us care enough to invest about $450, we could buy American Community Newspapers.
The Knight News Challenge will run for three more years, offering grants for innovations in digital civic media for geographic communities. Knight is also working with Ashoka (a leading community of social entrepreneurs) on a new program that will award three-year stipends "allowing them to focus full-time on their efforts to provide lasting, visible, systemic change in the way journalism works or the way society sees journalism."
Also, News Tools 2008 (Apr. 30 - May 3, Silicon Valley, also known as "Journalism That Matters SV"), will describe and invent tools for sustaining "journalism that matters."
And Leonard Witt of PJnet.org is working on what he calls representative journalism -- an attempt to shift the financial support base for journalism from advertising to the community.
In the September/October 2007 issues of Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Lewis (president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism) wrote about nonprofit journalism.
The social networking site Wired Journalists (mentioned earlier in Tidbits) offers groups for journalists with nonprofit and entrepreneurial interests. Another social network, Newspaper Internet Strategies, focuses on the business end of journalism But these networks are all fairly quiet so far -- new networks take time to develop.
On Mar. 5, the American Press Institute project Newspaper Next published a report, Making the Leap Beyond Newspaper Companies, covering both the editorial and business sides of the house.
Navigating between the past and the future deserves both experimentation and analysis. Newspaper readership has been studied for decades. But we also need to examine what factors make comparable newspapers sometimes perform vastly differently online.
What do you think? How can we improve the situation together? What are you personally willing to do? Please comment below.
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