The Future of Journalism: Top Stories

The narrative has become familiar to those well beyond the media world: Newspapers -- racked by corporate debt, staff cutbacks, loss of ad revenues and a migration of readers to the Web -- are in decline, and are running out of time to reinvent themselves under a new, sustainable model. For some, it's already too late. On Tuesday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last print edition, becoming an online-only operation. Weeks earlier, on Feb. 27, Denver's Rocky Mountain News folded entirely. By the end of this week, the Tucson Citizen is expected to stop its presses too. Dozens more are at risk of following similar fates.

News and opinion on the future of the newspaper business -- and journalism as a whole -- have received widespread coverage in light of these and other recent developments. Last week, our community tried to find the best of it. Led by media critic and journalism professor Dan Kennedy, we focused on the Future of Journalism, surfacing dozens of stories on the state of journalism today and what it might look like when the smoke clears.

In this News Hunt, many of the stories focused on the debate over the relevance of traditional media and the new methods and tools taking its place.

Our top rated opinion, however, came from the Daily Show. In 'Brawl Street: Get ready to buy low and sell die!' host John Stewart interviewed CNBC pundit Jim Cramer, berating him for consistently misreporting news on the financial crisis on his show ‘Mad Money.’ As evidence, Stewart used video clips where Cramer contradicted himself or exhibited a conflict of interest. The interview fared very well among our members, and received praise from other news organizations.

On par with Stewart's interview was new media expert Clay Shirky's 'Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable'. In this essay, posted on his blog, Shirky said the debate over how to preserve traditional media had "degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses." Shirky continued:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know ”If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is often: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. Many observers think it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Others weighed in on the fate of traditional media and new possibilities for news consumption. Alan Mutter, of Reflections of a Newsosaur, warned against donating to prop up an ailing local paper. Jeff Jarvis praised the Guardian's decision to make its content available for free to other sites and applications through the use of application programming interfaces (API). And Poynter Institute ran a highly rated interview with former Washington Post editor Jim Brady, who encouraged news sites to be more experimental.

Almost appropriately, our top rated news story was the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual 'State of the News Media 2009' report. Among its key findings were that Web readership accelerated substantially in 2008, but economic recession and a failure to develop new revenue sources continued to sap newspapers' finances. The report also suggested that many of the new financial models newspapers have pursued are less promising than other less examined models.

In another study-driven story, Pew Research looked at public opinion of local press, reporting that 43 percent of Americans say civic life in their communities would be hurt "a lot" by the loss of a local newspaper. In his review of the story, Dan Kennedy said this "deterioration of the community" was the largest issue facing news organizations. "Successful news orgs must not only serve the community, but foster it as well," he said.

New York Magazine reported on Columbia Journalism School's efforts to transition away from traditional news training toward a more digitally focused curriculum, while National Public Radio asked 'Where were the media as Wall Street imploded?' in a news analysis. The New York Times ran a well-received but generic story on the collapse of the newspaper business, citing the fall of the Rocky Mountain News and others.

Here's a sampling of our top news and opinion on the Future of Journalism:

News

The State of the News Media 2009
Journalism.org
For papers, a downsizing trickle becomes a flood
New York Times
Many would shrug if their local newspaper closed
Pew Research
Columbia J-school's existential crisis
New York Magazine
Where were the media as Wall Street imploded?
National Public Radio

Opinion

Brawl Street: Get ready to buy low and sell die!
Daily Show
Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable
Clay Shirky
Ex-WaPo editor Jim Brady to news sites: Experiment more, now
Poynter Institute
Preaching Ethics, D.C. pol threatens to squash tiny paper
Washington Post
Life, online, after the Rocky Mountain News
Online Journalism Review
The Sarcastic Times
Columbia Journalism Review
Defogging the economic crisis
American Journalism Review
APIs: The new distribution
Buzzmachine
Want to save your local paper? Read this first
Reflections of a Newsosaur

The Future of Journalism: Most trusted stories (full listing)
The Future of Journalism: Most recent stories (full listing)

Thanks to our host, Dan Kennedy!
We'd like to give our host for this News Hunt, Dan Kennedy, a special thanks for reviewing so diligently and astutely, and lending his expertise on this timely and important topic. Dan is a journalism professor at Northeastern University, a longtime media critic and columnist for the Guardian, and a NewsTrust editor. We're very grateful for his outstanding contributions this week, including great story submissions, thoughtful reviews, combined with his daily email reminders and blog posts. Thanks, Dan, for your insights, which are an inspiration to us all.

 

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This Week: Global Economy
Our featured topic this week is the Global Economy. As world leaders struggle to address the global economic crisis, how can they reconcile their competing interests to speed up recovery? How do President Barack Obama and his new administration plan to approach the upcoming G20 talks? Meanwhile, what are world governments doing to ease the effects of unemployment, inflation and debt on their citizens? Join this News Hunt on the Global Economy by reviewing a story, submitting a new story or visiting our Global Economy topic page.

By Derek Hawkins, with Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala

Comments

[Janice Sinclaire]

Here's a great article by the editor-in-chief of Miller-McCune.com, John Mecklin. It's on the digital revolution and how it is helping investigative reporting: http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/875.

Miller-McCune is a non-profit funded by the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy. We combine academic research with real-time reporting to address pressing social concerns. We cover everything, from studies about media to the environment and culture.

[Giles]

Modern journalism has some severe problems, as this investigative documentary about the Niger famine a few years ago illustrates.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4SYM8JsDg4
On the other hand, the fact that documentaries like these are made shows that there are still good journalists around.