Death of Journalism

Jeff Jarvis mocks the death of journalism here. Ron Rosenbaum takes him to task here. Rosenbaum's article resonates today as Time Inc has announced it would like to cut 600 jobs and there are rumors that NG will do something nearly as drastic this morning. 

Jarvis (founder of Entertainment Weekly)  faults journalists for not giving consumers what they want. Rosenbaum counters with Gershams Law 

"trash drives out value."

I think that Jarvis confuses journalism with media. Journalism is not about giving people what they want but information that they need. Over the past 7 years journalism has broken down in this country. Major publications have given consumers too much information that they want and little of what they need. The pressing question for me is how do we have a free society without good information?

Do we need to go down the list of recent journalism failures?

Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq
Link between Iraq and Al-Queda
politicization of the justice department
relaxation of capitalization rules leading to the current financial crisis
global warming (ok maybe we get a break on global warming)

There are many more feel free to ad to them...

What to do about it? This is the tough part. Journalism -as viewed by the people who run media companies- is a commodity. As good capitalists the people in charge want to see how cheaply they can make their commodity (call it product or the dreaded "content") and still sell it. We shouldn't fault them for this, it is their job. The CEO, CFO etc of Time Warner is responsible to the shareholders and the CEOs of other media giants are responsible to their investors whether they be shareholders or individuals.

Maximizing profit is their job. 

Journalism, good journalism on the other hand is expensive. Do you have any idea what it costs to keep a writer or photographer in the field? How about filing freedom of information requests? Or compiling financial data? Or spending years cultivating sources in government. It costs money and time. Spending that money runs counter to maximizing profits. 

So what is to be done? Well we could ask the shareholders of Time Warner to accept lower dividends. I think that is doomed to failure. There should be a way to remove news gathering, true journalism from the profit driven cycle. Some of the best journalism done is publicly funded, Frontline, Nova, NPR. I think that there has to be a way to treat journalism as a public necessity rather than as entertainment and business.

Sort of a not for profit, endowment funded institute for journalism. There are several small scale grants and endowments, Aftermath,  Alexia and the Pew come to mind, but I am thinking large scale. When my ideas get more sorted out I'll post about it. Tomorrow I promise to get back to photography.

-Stephen Alvarez

Comments

[Stephen Alvarez]

interesting question. Let me mull it over and post about it in a day or two.

[R. S. Reitz]

When you talk about the expense of keeping a writer/photographer in the field... am I being hopelessly unrealistic to ask why the big companies don't use more local journalists to capture their stories?

Understandably this isn't feasible in all foreign news markets, but it would seem to be the better merging of both citizen journalism and globalism to take better advantage of the journalists who are already on scene (or near to it) than for everyone to ship their own name talent to the latest hot story.