Printed Matters

I’ve just run across an interesting paper, published back in Nov. 2007, titled Journalism without journalists: vision or caricature? (PDF) The author, a German fellow who runs a CitJ site, talks about how CitJ sites will probably have to operate as non-profits for a good while yet.

He says lots of good stuff in there, but one thing in particular caught my eye:

With admirable frankness Rusbridger continued, “For at least ten years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant return (…), and we will do it with the expectation that these things will change….” Faith, of all things, may act as the last authority for a business that used to be spoiled by success.

That got me thinking about the difference between bloggers and journalists. Bloggers give their stuff away for free, while journalists expect to be paid. But how can journalists get paid when bloggers are giving away the “stuff” (information, news, in some cases even journalism) for free?

It’s a fact of life: people are not going to pay for what they can get for free. And on the Internet, you can always find a free version of whatever it is you want.

Sometimes, the trade-off is quality. That MP3 you got from Limewire might be the same song you can get from iTunes for $0.99, but you’ll have to sort the file yourself, as the metadata (including the filename itself) might be wrong. If you try a cracked program, you might get a virus. And you sure won’t get any support.

I’m not comparing blogs to warez, or citizen journalism to stolen materials. I’m just pointing out that you get what you pay for. The quality may suffer somewhat, but you might be willing to take the trade.

Suppose we lived in a world where all the mainstream media (MSM) kept their stuff behind pay walls, while bloggers continued to give away their stuff for free. Would they have many subscribers, these MSM? Not likely. One of the most compelling reasons why outfits like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have been busy taking down their pay walls is there’s not much of a business case for keeping them up: people will just go where it’s free.

What we can’t get for free elsewhere is a particular columnist’s voice, which is why the pay wall stays up in some places for things like columns and opinion.

We don’t live in such a world, because MSM’s would never survive it. Instead, as Rusbridger put it, we – I mean publishers – just keep throwing our “stuff” on the net for free, hoping that, someday, some advertisers will like us enough to throw lots of money at us. Or at least, enough to keep us journalists employed.

It comes as no surprise, then, that we journalists – I mean writers – have a bit of a problem with bloggers. We see them as a threat, because they’re helping themselves to our lunch. The Internet – and the bloggers, and Craigslist, and even Google – are stripping us of our ability to earn money at our professions. If no one can afford to be journalists, whose gonna do the journalism? Bloggers? Pah!

And there’s our publishers, throwing our stuff up onto the net for free, crumbling under the combined pressure of falling revenues, Internet competitors, and absolutely no clue about how they’re going to monetize the thing. Someone, they hope, someday, will figure out how to make ad revenues from it.

It’s not like they have a choice, either, with almost half of people under thirty getting their news from the web. And let’s face it, the web is quite simply a superior platform for news, because we can search it, we can hear it and see it with multimedia, we can mash it up with other data, we can get it on demand, we can filter it and we can be notified of stuff that interests us the minute it hits the e-press. It just is the way things are going to go.

MSMs have had a late start. They didn’t see soon enough the potential of the Internet to throw a wrench in their profit gears. Now the classified ad listings have gone to competitors. They’re losing subscribers and profits and they’re cutting newsrooms and working their editorial staffs to the bone.

I don’t think it’s too late, though.

MSMs have to use the platform – which, really, is a gift to journalism – the way it was meant to be used. I’m not just talking about the talkies and the slideshows, either. I’m talking about taking advantage of people’s innate need and desire to contribute, to take part, to help, to extend. I’m talking about true interactivity.

It stuns me to no end, for example, that you still can’t comment on most stories at the Toronto Star’s site. Why? Commenting on stories is just the beginning of opening up to the power of the web. It’s about 15 years after the advent of the web, an eon, really, and Toronto’s main daily still hasn’t got it.

MSMs need people who understand both ends, the web technology end and the journalism end. In the article above, the author mentions “bridge bloggers”, people who are both bloggers and journalists. I guess I am one of those. But more importantly, I think we need people who bridge between IT and JO – between the technology that drives the web and the principles of good journalism. I’m trying to be one of those.

I’ll leave off with a quote from the paper:

Ultimately, it won’t be the angry bloggers or the clueless citizen journalists, not the crazy kids from YouTube or the dark forces behind MySpace who will decide the fate of journalism. Ultimately, readers and advertisers will show what they are willing to pay for. Network Publishing is the natural ally of traditional media. Even in a completely new media world, together, they can help ensure that society gets the kind of journalism it deserves.

This is a critical time for journalism. Can you bridge the gaps?

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