The national conversation has changed. Millions of people who previously had been excluded have now been allowed to join in. Who ever saw it coming? For those of us who believe in free speech and free press, this is an unexpected gift, a First Amendment miracle, bestowed by the same forces that are laying waste to our newspapers.
Before expanding any further on this and other digital-age miracles, let me get a few worries off my chest — specifically, the following three questions:
Question Number One: Who, in the digital future, will do the reporting?
If journalism has a mainspring, it is the reporter. The reporter performs the elemental task of finding things out. The product of a reporter’s labor is news — news that is originally reported and then verified.
News is as crucial to America’s democracy as oil is to its economy. Without a robust flow of news, bad things happen. Public discourse withers. Crooks and charlatans get a free ride. Citizens know less and less and become less qualified to govern their nation.
What, then, are the prospects for reporters? Well, here at the dawn of the digital age, the media are divided, like ancient Gaul, into three parts. Let’s visit each of the parts and assess their civic value – not in terms of dollars made, but in terms of reporters employed.
First we have the familiar: the old media. Currently, the vast majority of the nation’s reporters are on old media payrolls. You may get your news on your Blackberry, you may get it on the Web, you may get it from a talk show. But if you trace any given story to its origin, you’ll almost always find that it came from an old-media reporter, usually writing for a newspaper.
But the old media are shedding reporters rapidly, which raises a question: where will the reporting of the future come from?
Let us turn now to the second province of modern journalism, the new media.
When the blogs were invented, there was euphoria. “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” the bloggers sang lustily – the witch being the old media, who were about to get what they deserved.
But blogging turns out to be a hard business. The money is generally lousy, and there’s a constant struggle to get and hold an audience.
Bloggers don’t get much time off. When I was teaching, I recruited a successful West Coast blogger to speak to my class. He came, but only after fretting that his audience might wither if he abandoned the keyboard for a flight across the country.
The loneliest place in the blogosphere is the middle of the road.It’s tough in other ways, too. There is a centrifugal force in blogging. If you are a moderate and portray the world in thoughtful shades of gray, your audience will abandon you. The loneliest place in the blogosphere is the middle of the road.
Although blogs have contributed much to the national discussion, they offer only a rare flash of original reporting. For fresh information, the blogs remain deeply dependent on the old media, which they simultaneously deplore and utilize extensively.
Perhaps someday the blogs will make enough money to employ reporters in significant numbers. But that day is not in sight.
Which brings us to the third and last element of media today, the portals: Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.
Overnight, these ingenious businesses have become primary sources of news for millions. And overnight they have made billions of dollars.
Rich as they are, though, the portals employ few reporters. Last I checked, the most successful of them, Google, had no reporters at all. Why originate news when news is free?
The trend here is evident. The trend is that a tide of money is flowing decisively away from those who employ reporters and to those who don’t.
You don’t need a degree in economics to see what this implies for journalism. And you don’t need a degree in political science to see what it implies for democratic self-government.
That’s what we know at this point about Question Number One, a quantitative question about how many reporters we will have in the future. In contrast, Question Number Two is a qualitative one.
Question Number Two: What principles, if any, will guide the journalism of the digital age?
A friend mine was in Mississippi recently campaigning for Senator Obama in the primary there.
The African-American voters in Mississippi were already enthusiastic about Obama, but the whites were not. Her job to was to knock on doors of white families.
The people were polite, she said, but when she probed them on the subject of Obama, they responded: “Oh no, I could never support him. He’s a Muslim.”
Or: “I could never support him. He refuses to use the Bible when he takes the oath of office.”
Or even this one: “I could never support him. He’s a terrorist.”
In general, the marketplace of ideas is enriched by the addition of new voices. But not all new voices are journalistic. Some are decidedly un-journalistic, aimed not at serving the public but at manipulating it.
Imperfect as the old media are, they are imbued with deeply held ethical convictions. At the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, the betrayals of the Staples and Jayson Blair scandals provoked insurrections. In both cases, feelings in the newsroom were so volcanic that calm could only be restored by dismissing the top leadership.
This sense of ethics – this sense of what a journalist does and doesn’t do – is built into the old media. But among much of the new media, it is a foreign language.
So, in answer to the question — what principles will guide journalism in the digital age? — we don’t yet have a clear answer. Will journalism – real journalism – triumph over propaganda? Over marketing? Over disinformation?
We’ll see.
Question Number Three: Will we have journalistic institutions that are strong enough, and independent enough, to serve as a counter-weight to big government and big corporations?
The advent of the lone blogger has touched something in the nation’s collective memory.
Bloggers see themselves as heirs to the pamphleteers who were prominent in the American Revolution. I think they’re right. If Thomas Paine were alive, no doubt he’d be blogging away.
It seems to me that big, institutional journalism – not just a din of individual voices — is still needed.But one important thing has changed since those early days: Institutions have grown. Government has become huge. Business is huge. The tools of spin and of deception are huge and sophisticated. And, likewise, institutions of journalism have grown, too.
It seems to me that big, institutional journalism – not just a din of individual voices — is still needed.
Consider the story in the New York Times that exposed the wiretapping of American citizens by the National Security Agency, which was done without court warrants as required by law.
The sordid history illegal wiretapping by American officials, national and local, tells us why electronic surveillance must be regulated by law – and by law that cannot be wiped off the books secretly.
To me, the Times‘ decision, despite its detractors, was a patriotic act. It was patriotic because it reflected concern for historic American values: the rule of law; the role of Congress as a co-equal branch of government; and the citizen’s right against unreasonable intrusion by government.
But the administration and its claques on the talk shows smeared The Times as unpatriotic, even traitorous, and demanded that it be criminally prosecuted for sedition.
Think, now, about what a blogger would face in attempting what The Times did.
First of all, it is unlikely that a blog would have the reportorial horsepower to break the story. The two Times reporters, both of whom I’m acquainted with, represent decades of investment. Their professional development included years of cultivating of national security sources in Washington and abroad.
Blogs generally don’t have reporters, and they certainly don’t have reporters as well trained and proficient as these two. So it’s doubtful that a blog could have broken this story in the first place.
And if a blog did manage to break the story, it would likely be crushed in the aftermath. The opprobrium from the talk shows and the administration would devastate all but the toughest of individuals, and the legal bills could be a ticket to bankruptcy.
A blog, valuable as it is, is simply not an institution with enough heft to stand up to big government and big business. We need institutions of journalism, muscular institutions, not just individual voices.
Let’s turn, finally, to the students in the audience, particularly those of you who are drawn to journalism.
There are many reasons to be a journalist. Perhaps you have a curious nature, and journalism gives you license to scratch that itch. Maybe you get a craftsman’s satisfaction from working with words. Maybe you enjoy the company of journalists and share their outsider’s perspective on the orthodoxies of business and government Maybe you’d like to expose the next Enron scandal — or thwart some future president’s plan to invade the wrong country.
There will be journalism in the future. And the journalism of the future will have tools unlike any imagined by earlier generations.Well the good news is that all those opportunities are open to you today. And, beyond that, there is better news.
There will be journalism in the future. And the journalism of the future will have tools unlike any imagined by earlier generations.
You will have new tools for finding things out, and tools to send your stories to the entire world at the speed of light.
Journalism has always been a one-way bulletin from journalist to public. Now it is a conversation with millions of participants, which gives us access to new facts and new ideas.
Thanks to hyperlinks, you can write accordion-like stories that can be expanded to match each reader’s degree of interest. One person might give your story ten seconds; another might spend a rewarding half day with it.
The journalism of the future will be flexible, making fluid use of video, audio and text to tell stories as they can best be told.
I won’t attempt to list all the new forms journalism is taking. A noteworthy example is YouTube, which is playing an important role in the current presidential election campaign.
Among many promising experiments is a nonprofit outfit called ProPublica, which is assembling a cluster of high caliber investigative reporters to take up the slack from the old media.
There are many other exciting new ventures in journalism – far too many to enumerate here.
And we still have the old media.
…The staff of the Herald-Leader today is almost exactly the size it was when I left in 1991, which isn’t bad. You can do a lot with such a staff.The other day I had occasion to re-visit the Herald-Leader, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d find in my old newsroom. Lo and behold, it looked pretty much like a newsroom. Exactly like a newsroom, in fact. People were tapping at their keyboards, talking on the phone, gossiping, telling jokes, and no doubt complaining about heavy-handed editors.
They, too, are fretting. They feel they don’t have enough staff. But the staff of the Herald-Leader today is almost exactly the size it was when I left in 1991, which isn’t bad. You can do a lot with such a staff.
So, among the old media, the game is far from over.
My hope is that the new media, these wondrous vehicles for individual self-expression, will continue doing what they’re already doing: enriching the national conversation, keeping the old media honest and creating entirely new languages of journalism. I also hope that they’ll find ways to make more money and thereby to employ reporters in meaningful numbers.
At the same time, I’m hoping that the old media will continue to employ large teams of professional journalists, to propagate their traditional definition of ethical journalism, and, when necessary, to stand up decisively to the government and other big institutions.
With the combination of the two – the old media and the new – we, with a little luck and hard work, could be embarking on something quite wonderful. Something a jaded old editor might even acknowledge as unprecedented, even historic. I’ll go further, unveiling perhaps for the first time, the fragile flower of my own creativity, by saying that possibly — just possibly — we might live to see a new age, a golden age of journalism.
Let us all hope.
What’s your view of the future of journalism?
