Friday, April 23, 2010

How to (Really) Save Journalism

I'm not the most experienced journalist out there, but that hasn't stopped me from formulating ideas on how to save the industry. In case you haven't heard, the newspaper business is in shambles because everyone is getting their news online these days. No subscriptions equals no money.

The New York Times' solution to this problem has been to start changing for online subscriptions. Later this year, you'll be able to read some of the paper's content online for free, but you'll have to pay to get all of it.

With all due respect to The New York Times, that's a terrible idea. Few are willing to pay for internet-based news, and the strategy risks turning the paper into a boutique publication with a very specialized—and limited—readership.

A better solution would be to eliminate most of the newspaper industry's physical infrastructure. Get rid of the presses, of course, but also close the offices. Shut down the phone lines. Stop buying cubical walls. Out with the industry's "things" and "places." Make everything digital.

At issue here is the fact that old media (newspapers) are trying to imposed old payment models (subscriptions) onto new media (the internet). Unfortunately for the papers, however, different kinds of media evolved their own, inherently different delivery platforms. Think about it: books radically changed the way people consume media. They all but killed oral tradition, and took learning out of the hands of a select elite.

Today, the printed word has had a good run, but that run is ending. (That link goes to Slate, by the way, which actually tried to charge for content at one point, but then gave up.) I think people still want to read the news, but they are doing it less and less on paper. To simply treat the internet as if it were paper is insanity. It ignores the fact that it's fundamentally different.

However, because the internet is a virtual place, it seems only fitting that internet-dependent companies become virtual as well. Reporters can still write and report, for example, without the physical office. They can work remotely, saving both themselves and their companies time and money, all the while adapting the content to the medium, not the other way around.

My two writing gigs have influenced my attitudes on this topic. First I write for Rhombus. Until about a month ago, I had actually never even met another person who works for Rhombus (I met the editor, coincidentally, on the street while walking home one day). We communicate entirely by facebook message at Rhombus, and there is literally no physical infrastructure for the magazine.

Contrast that, however, with my experience at the Daily Herald. There, I go into a gigantic building everyday where I have a computer, a phone, a desk, a break room, etc. All that stuff costs someone money, but the thing is, I don't really need any of it. I have my own cell phone, which I can just as easily use (and often do), my own computer, and a chair and table at my house.

In other words, I could do at least as good a job reporting for the Daily Herald at home, at the library, in a cafe, etc., as I'm currently doing. Who knows, I might even do a better job because I'd have fewer distractions.

In reality, I enjoy the social aspect of going into the office. I like being around people to work. But if it means that the industry will eventually dry up, or that the number of writing jobs goes from many thousands to many dozens, I'd gladly sacrifice that one aspect of the job to have the others.

Ultimately, major news outlets will probably always need some physical office for their head editors and executives. They may also need to occasionally call in their reporters for meetings (though I can't imagine why video chatting wouldn't be sufficient). However, a small office with a single conference room ought to be enough, even for the biggest papers. If someone needs specific tools to do his or her job, go ahead buy that person a computer and the software too. The company would still be saving money on rent, electricity, phone, etc.

These measures probably wouldn't completely offset the loses the newspaper industry is suffering, but they would represent a (currently absent) proclivity to look for creative solutions to new media-related problems. After all, it's called "new media" because it's not the same old thing, and the same old payment model just isn't going to work. And, in the end, even if they didn't completely solve the problem, they'd help. A lot.

3 comments:

  1. Jim, from what I understand one of the major problems with the quality of journalism right now is that the new journalists aren't getting enough contact with the older, experienced journalists and so aren't learning the best ways to do their job. They're taking too many short cuts, don't know how to get the best contacts, etc. Do you think going completely digital might make that problem worse?

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  2. hmm, that's interesting, I hadn't heard that. It might, though my experience with getting in touch with people is the the internet has made it remarkably easy to contact people and make connections. I've talked to some relatively big names, and used methods to contact them that some older people are less familiar with (and therefore less capable). Where other people might have spent days working through pulicisits or PR people, I can look up an artist's blog or facebook page and message him/her immediately.

    I have no doubt that some stodgy old journalist would disagree with me, and it might not work on some types of people (like foreign dignitaries, for example), but I think that left to my own devices I can produce a journalistic product that is just as good/useful as one produced by someone in a newsroom. It'd be interesting to put that to the test, though, in areas other than those I've worked in (features, entertainment, community stuff, opinion pieces, etc.), like international reporting, or business or something.

    I'd also be interested to see who is making that argument, and why. It seems like there two issues at stake: A) newspapers are closing b/c they lack funds, and B) reporting is getting worse. They might be connected, but I think at their root they are different issues. Without knowing much more about the second one, my inclination is to ask if it might be endemic to a particular branch of journalism, or even a specific publication or group of publications.

    Like I said, you know more about it than I do, but I'm always skeptical of arguments that condemn the supposed inadequacies of the rising generation, since it seems like every generation makes them, but in the end people typically do alright. But if the argument is that the problem is linked to some structural changes (like going digital) in the industry that would be interesting.

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  3. Joffe explained how Conficker meets the definition of a cloud service provider in a presentation at the Cloud Connect conference held last week in Santa Clara, Calif. Like legitimate cloud vendors, Conficker is available for rent and is just about anywhere in the world a user would want their cloud to be based. Users can choose the amount of bandwidth they want, the kind of operating system they want to use and more. Customers have a variety of options for what services to put in the Conficker cloud, be it a denial-of-service attack, spam distribution or data exfiltration.Joffe said Conficker has not been as active as it once was, but is still a threat. The last reported attack was in February on the network of the Manchester, UK, police department [6]. Joffe said the last major Conficker attack was in April 2009. Conficker is much more competitive than those legit vendors in many ways, Joffe continued. It has much more experience, dating back to 1998, has a larger footprint and unlimited new resources as it spreads malware far and wide to take over more computers. “And there are no costs. And there are no moral, ethical or legal constraints,” Joffe said, to chuckles from the audience. After all, the criminals stole their computing capacity from someone else.

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