Yesterday’s conference on the future of newspapers was interesting — if depressing — to sit through, though not very enlightening. The thing that struck me is that we, meaning people who work in or study the business, know that it is in crisis and have some sense of the changes and bad decisions that led us to where we are. The problem is that we have little sense of where to take it as we attempt to move forward.
It is not enough to say we need to embrace the new technology. We do, but that doesn’t offer us a sustainable model that maintains the ability of news organizations to do what we do best — i.e., investigative work.
And it’s not enough to bemoan the citizen journalist — that’s just foolish, by the way, alienating a public that has ceased to trust us by dismissing their efforts. (There are some good projects out there that would fall under the citizen journalism banner, like Red Bank Green and The Alternative Press).
What troubled me yesterday was the utter paucity of ideas — my colleague Fred Tuccillo, managing editor of The Princeton Packet and a longtime online editor/director, said much of what was put on the table yesterday had been tried with little success at various points over the last 10-15 years. The problem is that the news folks want to replicate what we’ve been doing, but on a different platform, when what we need to find is a new way to do what the public needs.
The reality is, as many who spoke yesterday pointed out, that professional print journalists still do the lion’s share of original reporting that serves as the basis for TV and cable news and commentary and much of what gets chewed over in the blogosphere. The handful of blog/online publications — Slate and Salon, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, among them — remain the exception. Others, like ProPublica, are good resources for information but seem to have little concept of general audience — it is a useful site for journalists but I’m not sure what the average reader gets from it.
Newspapers will survive in some form — in print (fewer and smaller), online, in SMS, etc. They are too important not to. But we will need to go through a period of extreme and wrenching change that will leave many of us by the wayside. In the meantime, those of us privileged — or is it cursed? — to be a part of the growing pains should embrace the uncertainty and engage with it.
To read my tweets from yesterday’s conference, go to www.twitter.com/newspoet41.
Hank Kalet 