[wk] Second session: Will the traditions of journalism survive
After you spend a year at the Nieman Foundation, says Jay Rosen, no one at your paper even asks what you learned. If you were Microsoft, sent an employee away for a year to learn, and didn’t even ask what they learned, you’d be fired. “This profession doesn’t value intellectual capital,” Jay says. “It doesn’t even really respect learning.” New media has forced traditional media to have to learn quickly. “It has not happened,” he says. “There’s this huge gap between what most journalists know about the Web and what’s actually happening on the Web.” If the traditions are going to survive, professional journalists will have to jump in and learn.
For example, Jay says, journalists often believe that people on the Web have no neutrality. But Wikipedia shows otherwise. Journalists think what’s on the Web is unedited. But the Web has its own way of editing: Readers edit.
The people who started online companies are moving towards journalism. When Yahoo! started, it didn’t think it would move toward journalism. Likewise for CraigsList [Craig is here. Yay Craig!]. If professional journalism is going to survive, it’s going to have move toward the ways of the Web.
Journalism has protected itself by separating itself from politics, economics, the public… That’s how you had integrity. Now the question is how you create connections. “That’s very much the ethos that professional journalists absorb.”
He is worried about this “learning deficiency.”
[Great. I love Jay]
Craig: During any serious change, jobs are lost. There’s a need for some sort of self-help. I’d be willing to put links — ones sent to me — about what these changes are about.
Rob Enderle: Big corporations, not just media, don’t take advantage of people’s learning. It should be up to the individual to drive through the organization what they’ve learned.
Len Apcar, Editor in chief of NY Times Digital says that there is a 150-year-old culture at The Times. If the website organization of The Times had found room in the newspaper’s building, it would have been crushed because of the culture. After ten years, the culture of the website and the newspaper have to come closer together. We’ve learned that “success breeds success,” e.g., Andrew Revkin‘s blogging a trip through Greenland. I don’t need money so much as a willingness to try. If Nick Kristoff wins a Pulitzer for his travel reports, Len wants the web person who went with him to be in the photo. That would be a huge step, he says. [I find it depressing that that would be considered a huge step.] Conclusion: We need a change in culture, not just more money.
Matt Thompson says that we need to talk about what “survive” means.
Dan Froomkin: It’s not that the new media branches are up on what’s going on and the old media branches aren’t listening. The new media branches generally aren’t up on what’s happening. It comes back to fear. We need boldness and time is running out. “Yahoo harvested online aggregation of breaking news before we even knew what it was.” The same thing is happening with hyperlocal reporting. “At least we still have tremendous value in our enterprise reporting and opinions.” He ends by saying, “It’s very depressing.”
Danny Schechter shows a bit of his film, Weapons of Mass Deception. [I don’t know why we’re watching this.]
Rebecca says it’s not the question whether mainstream journalism survives. It’s whether journalism survives. the MSM are doing more audience-pleasing content and are less concerned about doing the work that would advance the public good. We need to look at the business model issues, she says. If you’re working for a corporation that is most concerned about short-term business interests, can you do good journalism? [Yay, Rebecca!]
Len: I’ll go out on a limb and state four square that there are bedrock values: Judgment and editing counts for something. Some people need editors to get their ideas across. There are sometimes no right answers about what the lead should be, but there should be a discussion. He also favors fact-based reporting and true curiosity-based reporting. A good reporter does what happens at Wikipedia: aggregating the views and ideas of experts. That’s a useful thing. People don’t have time to do it themselves. We need independent media to uncover certain sorts of stories. [He actually gives an example of a story about accidents at railroad crossings. My question is exactly what types of stories are best done by media institutions.]
Jay: Exactly what limb did you go out on? The media system gained power at the expense of other actors such as political parties and old boss systems. During this period, journalists didn’t come up with new ways of explaining their value and the grounds of their judgment. Journalists have relied on the most innocent explanations of their work.
Dan: So how do we explain ourselves?
Jay: I talk about citizen journalism.
Rebecca reports on the webcred conference. We should stop talking about the conflict between MSM and blogging. Instead we should be talking about what we can do to keep citizens well informed and how can we help make the citizenry better able to understand what it reads. We’re all in this together and need to figure out how to improve the ecosystem. She asks if we really have the tools we need (a point Halley brought up earlier)? And what are the commercial incentives? Do we have the right business model for creating responsible credible media?
Craig: People are frustrated at what isn’t covered, at how stories get raised and dropped. [What’s most interesting to me is how we’re “taking back” not only content but metadata and even what constitutes a story.]
After lunch, we’re going to spend time building a list of what should change and what should be preserved.
