With Rupert Murdoch and other media proprietors are now looking at models to charge for online content, the question is whether journalism can be saved.
In his testimony to Congress, the creator of the fantastic HBO series The Wire David Simon sees a grim future ahead."High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet is a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery system of our future, but thus far it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin -namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host."
Simon says newspaper proprietors only have themselves to blame because they started cutting the guts out of the industry long before the recession and impact of the Internet.
So what new models are there? The online journalism blog suggests newspapers will have to start looking at new alternatives.
No one yet knows what model will save the industry but one thing is clear. We will see a new type of journalist emerging: one who knows how to freelance, market themselves across various publications and work to a tight budget. But that's not for everyone and many will be lost to the industry. So called citizen journalists are not up to the task and that will make society a lot poorer.
Simon summed it up best for Congress when he said high end journalism "requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. For a relatively brief period in American history – no more than the last fifty years or so – a lot of smart and talented people were paid a living wage and benefits to challenge the unrestrained authority of our institutions and to hold those institutions to task. Modern newspaper reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had. I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training, or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information.
"The idea of this is absurd, yet to read the claims that some new media voices are already making, you would think they need only bulldoze the carcasses of moribund newspapers aside and begin typing. They don't know what they don't know – which is a dangerous state for any class of folk — and to those of us who do understand how subtle and complex good reporting can be, their ignorance is as embarrassing as it is seemingly sincere. Indeed, the very phrase citizen journalist strikes my ear as nearly Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters."
no comment untill now