On the eternally approaching death of print media
So Tim O’Reilly notes that the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble and this is another launching point for bloggers everywhere to promote the death of stodgy old media and the rise of miraculous new online media.
Let’s look at this one by Dave Winer. He’s got the solution to print media’s problems, he’s told you before and you haven’t listened so he’s ready to tell you again.
His first remedy is the easy to achieve “reform journalism school.” Classic journalism is dead, there’s no need to continue this - all you need to do is compress all of that learning into one or two semesters as a requirement for every student. What? How do you support this idea?
In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen, connecting sources with readers, who in many cases are sources themselves. As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added.
This is just wrong on so many levels. First, in his future world only “educated” people will be journalists, since that is apparently the viewpoint that matters. Second, every educated person will be a journalist, because in the magical future, everyone has time as well as the inclination to devote themselves to blogging about everything that matters to them. Thirdly he apparently sees no difference in picking a stock or finding the cheapest flight and researching a topic or event, writing coherently and convincingly and putting together a real article. Perhaps in the future everyone will have time because journalism will be so easy, we’ll all go to eJournalism and pick the topic we want to write about and put in our limit order as to how long it should be and it will be done for us.
Wonderful suggestion, what’s next?
Second, embrace the best bloggers. How? Easy — every time someone is quoted in your publication, offer them a blog hosted on your domain.
Wow, this is great. There’s really nothing better than a huge and growing pile of untended blogs on your website to pull traffic in. Also giving everyone an endorsed voice on the brand you’ve built is definitely a great idea. He doesn’t make mention if any of these people should be paid by you for putting work into the system, whether or not they should be moderated at all or really anything. But this horde of newly minted professional bloggers will expand your reach into all levels of society.
And look at this wonderful benefit:
Now your reporters just have to read the blogs to find the new trends, the quotes for their articles. They will learn a lot and perhaps even start having fun, instead of (as Markoff puts it in the O’Reilly piece) feeling like they’re at a wake.
Wow! Now they won’t even have to do any work! These blogs on your site, will be better and different than the ones already all over the internet that these depressed workers apparently don’t currently have access to. Gosh and it’ll be so fun to read this unedited posts and pull all that interesting information these people (who don’t yet have even their two semesters of required journalism courses) provide instead of using that stodgy old classicly trained journalism you foolishly went to school for to do actual research into topics.
Again, as ever my point is not that print media is perfect and doing great in it’s current trajectory. It is that the (blogging) world has decided that citizen journalism fills exactly the same niche (indeed fills it and provides so much more) as professional journalism. Blogging and user generated content is great and it fills a void and a viewpoint that has never before been filled - but it doesn’t replace professional journalism, it complements it. I agree that old media needs to open their minds and take some risks in embracing this new form of communication, but the solutions proposed by bloggers are just crazy talking.
