From Subscription to Donation - Accountability Journalism is Changing

I just spent about an hour listening to Clay Shirky, a New York University "Internet Thinker", talk about what is happening to the newspaper industry as it struggles with the online world and the changes to its market.

My morning newspapers of the past have shrunk to a single one because their individual sizes did not add up to what one used to be - so we cut back to one and find more news on the web instead. With the crop of new e-book readers being shown this week in Las Vegas at the I may find one that will satisfy both my wife and myself for sitting at the breakfast table - then we'll cancel the last remaining one.

The problem Clay Shirky talks about is not the fact that the newspapers are dieing - but that the whole industry is fragmenting and we, the consumers who purchased the newspapers in the past, have to work harder to find our reliable sources of "commercial, long-range" journalism (as opposed to opinionism which is so rampant on the web, this blog being not much different).

Without the money generated from the newspaper's captive advertising market - where the advertisers paid because there was no alternative - there simply isn't any incentive, let alone money, for the types of journalism that exposed things like the Watergate affair or the Catholic church covering up pedophilia in their numbers. So the question is - who is going to replace the newspapers in doing "accountability journalism"? How are they going to be funded? Will the exposure-style of journalism die?

What has happened is that the "chaos scenario" of the online world has broken the centralized concept of news gathering - and spread the function around to individuals and relatively small online publications intensely interested in specific topics.

"You don't go to the (New York) Times - you go to the story" says Shirky. The fact is that if the story is on a private blog, put there because the blog owner spent the time themselves to research it and write it, the story still exists.

Newspapers, through the fact they provide the beat reporters who daily visit the courthouses and city council chambers of our land, have kept our politicians and bureaucrats honest - at least partly. They've kept our public companies and non-governmental institutions honest. They've had a tremendous influence on what our world has looked like over the years. What will happen when they no longer can afford to fund the beat reporter?

Well, the fact is that the beat reporter likely noticed that they were not the only ones visiting the courthouse, council chambers, investment houses, daily. In each location they'd see someone who may have gotten there before them and left after them - who was in fact dedicated to watching (some would say harassing) the particular institution - because there are people like that. Today those people have the ability to relate their tales on their chosen subjects in a forum that the search engines visit - and that the public can and will visit if/when something relevant to their lives comes up.

How do we, the viewing public, encourage such dedication? The fact is that the facility to find and display relevant and worthy "advertising" per se is not yet working well enough to directly fund many of these pigeon-hole sites. The newspapers, responsible for 85% of the general news gathering, found that as few as 6-8% of their traditional readership would pay to read their content online - and in their eyes this is simply not enough.

The model that does work fine with 6-8% of the market funding them today is the likes of National Public Radio (NPR) - supported by donation!

If you find good information about something you are interested in, you might consider making a donation to the organization that found it and reported it. Try really hard to find out the originator of the information. 

If you find a publication online that attracts you consistently, regardless of whether they are originators of "news" or simply agregaters or opinionaters, you might consider supporting them too. Doing this "for the love of it" will wear thin for many in the coming months and years - and we need some encouragement that it is worth while continuing.

The capitalist system will eventually winnow out the best-of-breed in the new news gathering and generating industry. Maybe some of the newspapers will continue - but I'm betting that few of them will look anything like the ones of the past 100 years.

richard

Tag: accountability journalism journalism newspaper advertising donation blog e-book