Falling sales and profits throughout the mainstream media seem to be sounding a death knoll for an entire medium and set of attitudes. It seems clear that serious news reporting as the 20th century knew it—expert, measured, investigative and able to hold figures in the public eye to account—is in a profound crisis, with every month bringing fresh redundancies and collapses in the local and national print media. But, against many commentators’ dire predictions, could a renaissance of the best values of such reporting in fact be occurring already online?
For our cover story this month, we have an expert debate on this question. On one side is Steven Johnson, the author, tech commentator and founder of the online service outside.in, who makes the case that the internet already offers an unrivalled news ecosystem with an unprecedented ability to cover current affairs in detail, to engage with local issues and to subject the actions of politicians and businesses to comprehensive public scrutiny. On the other side is Paul Starr, professor of public affairs at Princeton and co-editor of The American Prospect, who argues that resources for journalism are disappearing faster than the new media can create them, and that online journalism faces three enormous challenges: financing professionally reported news, creating an engaged public, and producing genuine political accountability. While there is already much that is good online, Starr says, the future of the news cannot be left to technology and market forces alone, and there is now a real need for private donors and public policy to support journalism, albeit not necessarily in its traditional form.
Who makes the stronger case? Is the loss of the news reporting model of the 20th century potentially an irreplaceable one; or are we witnessing the birth of a new but equally robust engagement with current affairs? Weigh in with your own views below.
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While I agree with Steven Johnson that hyperlocal information will thrive on the web, I’m afraid I share more of Paul Starr’s skepticism.
The fundamental issue is this: someone has to do the work of journalism: reading documents, showing up at meetings, asking questions, making intellectual connections. Unpaid pros and amateurs, in the case of my Atlantic Yards Report and NoLandGrab.org (both cited in the Johnson/Starr exchange), can do some significant work, but it’s not a very sustainable model. (It’s tiring when you hold down another job.)
Atlantic Yards is both hyperlocal (and thus too fine-grained in its iterations for daily print coverage) as well as macro (encompassing a wide range of beats, including real estate, public policy, sports business, law, and local politics). So traditional reporting skills are necessary.
In provoking a sophisticated online response, Atlantic Yards is probably an anomaly. 1) It’s a very controversial project (basketball arena + 16 towers). 2) Brooklyn is vastly undercovered. 3) Atlantic Yards impacts neighborhoods with a critical mass of well-educated people, of whom there are a few with enough free time and feistiness to look closly at the controversy, both via blogs and organizations like Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. 4) The local weekly Brooklyn Paper aggressively covered Atlantic Yards for years.
There should have been a few blogs that dissected the equally-controversial deal to build a new Yankee Stadium for America’s most famous baseball team. But the South Bronx was not about to spawn such blogs.
The mainstream media still play a significant role in this story. While I have broken stories by covering events and reading documents, only the New York Times, it seems, can get developer Bruce Ratner to talk.
So the withering away of newspaper journalism, however inadequate, would give us less to analyze.
One more point: Johnson suggests that “If they are smart, New York newspapers like the Times and the Post will draw upon this coverage, share it with their readership.”
In the case of Atlantic Yards, at least, that’s wishful thinking.
The precursor to my blog was a report critiquing the New York Times’s coverage of Atlantic Yards. The parent New York Times Company partnered with Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner in building the new Times Tower. That doesn’t mean that Times reporters are told to go easy on the developer. But it does mean that the Times has an obligation to be exacting and thorough in its coverage, and it hasn’t done so.
I periodically criticize the Times’s coverage. See for example: ?http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2009/04/open-letter-to-nyt-public-editor-why.html
You can be sure the Times hasn’t shared the above with their readership.
Paul Starr’s claim that aggregators “indiscriminately [mix] press releases and genuine reporting, without any standards of significance or trustworthiness” is self contradictory. The fact is that every aggregator embodies precisely such standards. That is what it means to be an aggregator — a standard of significance and trustworthiness — these standards stem from the selection by an aggregator of the sources it chooses to aggregate. Far from being indiscriminate, aggregators are by nature engines of discrimination. The real issue is how to improve the standards of selection, many of which are admittedly rather low. Excluding standards by definition from the nature of aggregation is not a way to do that.
Paul Starr gets to the issue and I have to say I find his analysis and argument much more compelling than Steven Johnson’s.
Hyperlocal sites are the preserve of very big business control (The biggest being Google); partisan opinion presenting itself as journalism or disinterested information and downright manipulation.
While the article was USA biased the same process is under way in the UK…Local weeklies, often held up as the exemplars of a new golden age of internet journalism are often little more than reprinted Council and business press releases—- Now many local councils, cash-rich unlike the traditional press; are producing larger and more comprehensive ‘council news’ papers themselves, or in partnership with local newspapers.
This of course goes to prove the point made by Mr Starr in the debate; that journalism requires subsidy and will find it; somehow.
In this case the subsidy is either by the supply of little bits of free news (Press releases and PR releases) or by the supply of whole chunks of ‘news and features’, made page ready by the council,and backed by paid for advertising and advertorial charges.
There probably isn’t that much wrong with all this as long as the public realise where disinterested reporting ends and opinion begins…and especially where a well-meaning or benevolent opinion ends and a biased and agenda driven one begins.
The internet isn’t causing this in itself but by supporting ‘hobby’ news sites and undermining professional news sites more powerfully due to the greatly reduced ‘barriers to entry’; it is accelerating it.
The direction of travel in this issue is illuminated by the whole Damien McBride incident—where the attention has been distracted by the lurid subject matter of the emails; rather than the idea that a website dedicated to disseminating news that wasn’t necessarily true was being set up almost casually, by people extremely close to the Government.
The thread connecting these disparate observations is whether society will value the skills of the ‘journalist’ or, as the trend suggests, will continue to discount them.
To remain with a UK example; pointing the BBC isn’t a solution either as that IS an extremely heavily subsidised organisation— and by means of a levy controlled by central government.
It has to be said that over some 30 years ‘journalism’ has been it’s own worst advocate as paid-for exclusives, celebrity and sport have been the more prevalent than the Thalidomide type investigation— but just as in the world of financial investment advice either one pays for the advice (the content)—or one cannot really complain when the advice which looks unbiased turns out not be to see.
You say : “newspapers have historically? supplied civic and public goods that are essential to a healthy democratic culture” – Well No ! On the one had you have Pravda, this was a great newspaper because no one believed anything it said apart from the weather – so it had no power. On the other hand you had the likes of the Times, NY Times etc… and far too many people who are in that grey region between being able to read and being able to think believe this stuff ! “I trust journalists more than I trust politicians” I have heard many a newspaper reader tell me after they read some expose on a politician” – “not too many exposes members of the board of directors of that newspaper you’re reading – must be because all those billionaires who names you don’t even know must be such good people” I reply. “You know what I think ?” they ask me “Let me guess, is what you think pretty much what you’ve just read in that anonymous Op-Ed ? – I think the phrase you are looking for is guess what I’ve just internalised ?” This gives enormous power to the shady billionaires who own these things. They can make and break governments. They could, like Conrad Black, chair shady anti-democratic groups like the Bilderberg, and kill the story of the very existence of these groups in the press they own and control. I don’t read newspapers because I simply don’t believe what’s written in them.
I am curious as to why Prospect has framed this as an entirely American problem? There are many elements in common but many more that distinguish the mess that the American journalism industry finds itself in compared to the situation in the UK, Europe and elsewhere.
Is it simply because the debate has been such as sterile black and white debate in the US and so makes it easier to have an oppositional debate like this? I would find it very hard to cast such as crude dialectic in the UK.
“First, newspapers have historically? supplied civic and public goods that are essential to a healthy democratic culture.”
Wrong-o. This is a bit of revisionist history. Newspapers have traditionally supplied obits and TV listings. Remember the adage “a reporter’s job is to fill space between ads.”
I find debates such as this — which are littering the dailies — highly amusing. What newspapers are doing is using their self-created soapbox to try to convince the public that they are somehow essential to a civil society and, therefore, deserve some sort of bailout. Mind you, it’s no different than age-old practice of shilling for advertisers. Maybe newspapers should prove they are essentialy rather then telling us they are. Mind you, that would require reporters to do some work.
I’ve been in the media and media analysis biz for decades and this discussion is nothing but auto-fellating rubbish.