Is Journalism Dying?

I am a News Hound. I read, watch and listen to the News for most of my day. I subscribe to a dozen or so email newsletters from Australia and around the World and my first task after firing up my computer is to read these newsletters. My local print newspaper is The Courier Mail and I read the newsletters, online and print versions. We also have a local online only newspaper, The Brisbane Times. Yes, I call it a newspaper even though it is online. It is laid out and presented in the style of other online versions of newspapers. When the Brisbane Times was launched it was mooted that a print version would follow. We are still waiting for that.

I am not a Journalist or an author of fiction. My claim to fame with the written word is that I wrote manuals; Technical, Procedure and Training Manuals. My efforts were mostly print versions but include some online publications. My crowning achievements in this field is a Search and Rescue Manual for the Army and a 300 page book on The Use and Handling of Explosives which, for a while, was used as the text for people attending courses to get their Explosives Licences in Queensland. I have also penned a couple of dozen other manuals. I realise that technical writing requires a different skill set to those required by News Journalist and writers of thrilling tales.

My intent is to highlight the new and innovative approaches to journalism that are emerging in an information empowered world. I make these observations from a reader's perspective.

So what does the journalism profession become when information is free and everyone is a publisher? One of the biggest innovations is the Citizen Reporter. There are Blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia, social networks and interactive participation with the ability for reader's comments. There is also Mobile Phones, Instant Messaging and Multimedia (Photos and Video) all of which can provide a blow by blow commentary of events.

Many of the practices and conventions of journalism today were actually invented to cope with an age when timely information was difficult and expensive to gather and deliver. Journalists do what they do in large part because they have had to deal with deadlines, transport schedules and news stands, all of which added time and cost. They don’t have to worry about that stuff any more.

Today, everyone is potentially a journalist, even if only for a few minutes. Technology has made it possible for news to be reported in near real-time and readers have come to expect this. The cost of reporting and publishing news is now effectively zero.

Publishing is now a beginning, not an end. Once a story goes online, updates and refinements may last for years.

Any person or institution with an interest in a story has the capacity to publish facts, commentary and updates without seeking anyone’s permission. Responsible journalists need to incorporate that information into their work as appropriate.

All of these realities reverse rules that have existed for years. This is why publishers need to rethink everything. Nearly everything has changed.

But some things haven’t. People still want trusted sources of information. They want clear distinctions between fact and conjecture. Governments and Institutions need to be monitored. We need to know whom to trust. These needs won’t change if newspapers go away, so someone will need to fill the void.

How does journalism need to evolve? Let’s start with the role of the reporter, because that function is likely to change the most. The traditional function of reporter doesn’t make sense any more. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people in cities around the world put their faith in the hands of a small number of people to gather and deliver the news. For the most part, these people aren’t experts in the topics they cover. Reporters get shifted to new beats all the time. Reporters are resourceful, however. Most of them are pretty good at learning on the fly, figuring out what’s important and presenting that information clearly and succinctly. These are important skills and they’ll be needed for a long time to come.

There’s a lot of waste in reporting, though. Most of what a reporter learns in the process of working a story is discarded. Even more waste occurs when a story is cut for space. In the end, a task that requires hours of information-gathering may be boiled down to a couple of hundred words on a page. This was necessary in a time- and space-limited world, but it isn’t necessary any more.

The traditional limitations of print and broadcast media have required reporters to make scores of value judgments during the reporting process. An hour-long interview may result in a single sentence of published information or a three-second sound bite. In essence, one trained person makes decisions affecting what hundreds of thousands of people may know. Reporters do a pretty good job of upholding the trust that readers put in them, but the rules are all different now. No one should be denied access to information just because there wasn’t enough space.

Today, nearly every relevant fact about a story may be captured and shared with anyone who’s interested. This service may be provided by the reporter, participants, observers and commentators. This information doesn’t have to be part of the story that the reporter submits for publication, but it should be available to those who want to know. The reporter’s role expands to include not only making judgments about what information to include but also about where to link for more information. The “story” becomes an entry point to an archive of relevant content that may be of interest to different people. The ability to make these associations becomes a core journalism skill. The choice of where to link and what background to provide becomes part of editorial voice.

This new reality should be liberating for readers and journalists alike. No longer do journalists have to make difficult choices about what readers may know. No longer do readers have to regard media institutions with suspicion. Everyone is free to contribute, correct and weigh in on the story. Whatever the media entity chooses not to cite in its published account can be discovered through search. Journalists will be more accountable and readers will be more confident that they can trust the information they receive.

A lot of media veterans are uncomfortable with this idea, though. Their profession has long been shrouded in mystery. Editors are accountable only to a small group of higher-ups who share the same priorities as they do. A self-policing strategy rarely works. Very few readers understand what goes on in a newsroom, and this makes them suspicious.

We’re going to start opening that up. When readers and viewers have access to the source material for a reporter’s story, they feel more confident that the account is accurate, even if they never consult that background. The basic point is that the reporters will increasingly become aggregators and topic stewards. They will be obliged to present a variety of inputs and opinions because those opinion-makers will publish whether the reporter wants them to or not.

Reporters will also come to write not only the first draft of history, but subsequent drafts as well. A story will evolve the same way that an entry in Wikipedia begins as a one-sentence stub and evolves into a comprehensive account representing multiple sources and points of view and the public will participate in this process. Mostly, they will observe, but they will have confidence that the process by which the truth is reported is transparent and accessible if they so wish.