Journalism has had a rough decade. The advent of the internet damaged the business model of most news organizations and many haven't figured out a new one. Evidence of this comes from practically every large news outlet. They have closed most of their foreign bureaus, leaving readers with nothing more than clipped and edited releases from the AP and Reuters newswire. Print ad revenues have gone through the floor, leaving many newspapers questioning how they will survive. Even television news is having a difficult time in a world where their entire program can be condensed into 25 minutes and downloaded as a podcast from iTunes. At the same time we have experienced eight years of no governmental oversight of industry or finance, trusting consumers to hold producers accountable based upon information which should have been readily available. These factors combined into a perfect storm which was able to destroy our nation's economic, foreign, environmental, and domestic policies; potentially undoing the growth and progress which has been made following the end of the Second World War.
News agencies doing their own reporting has become a thing of the past. In many ways this makes sense. Why send out a reporter to collect statements from witnesses when many are more than happy to post their account complete with images or video to their blog? In an era of surplus of fact investigative reporters have become a rare need. Most news agencies have realized this truth and have eliminated the majority of their reporting staff, opting instead to parrot the facts as described by the Associated Press or Thompson Reuters. CNN has begun to incorporate blog-style reporting of events, hosting accounts of people who were witness to events, but who may not understand the need for journalistic rigor. This begs the question, if two agencies are doing the reporting for the major news outlets, what is their purpose for existence?
This is an issue that the news industry is still struggling with. The television outlets have coped by adding commentary, incorporating shows which blur the line between reporting of fact and preaching of opinion. This was made shockingly clear in Jon Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer when the "economic expert" frequently professed that he was a commentator or pundit as opposed to a reporter. The information is presented as if it is news, when in reality it provides fact so wrapped in opinion and ideology that it drafts the viewer's response for them. Furthurmore when confronted on the subject Cramer responded that this type of programming is what there is a market for, implying that during this transformation the best way to maintain viewership is to give viewers what they want instead of the facts they need. CEO interviews were taken as gospel without comparisson to public records, government reasonings were taken as absolute truths and never confirmed, and the complacency continued through a terrorist attack, two wars, and one of the worst responses to a hurricane in the history of having the government respond to hurricanes. In struggling to survive the development of the internet, the media forgot what it was trying to survive to do.
Media outlets are considered good when they reveal something that another outlets didn't reveal. Divulging hard to get information or drawing complicated connections which media consumers then use to make what they feel are better decisions expands an outlet's market. News organizations seem to have overlooked this important point. Print media is dying because they aren't providing their readers with information which couldn't be easily retrived in a google news search. Television media is degrading because, in order to maintain ratings and advertising revenue, the decision has been made to trade information quality for entertainment value. The unfortunate detail is if any business in either of these mediums had been able to use actual journalism to break either the Bernard Madhoff story or the subprime mortgage story three years ago they would have secured their market at worst and saved the economy at best. In choosing to concede their independence and power to generate change, old media sources have chosen to become irrelevant.
This irrelevance, however, does not have to be a permanent one. There are aspects to old media sources which print and television news have chosen not to use to their advantage. One of these qualities is credibily. No matter what anyone may say, an article in a newspaper or a television expose will always carry more weight than a similar story posted by an unaffiliated blogger on the internet. Despite how complacent these organizations have become, they still have some of their reputations behind them, which they can use to push the really tough and complex stories. If the New York Times had published the evidence of the Madhoff whistleblower the man would have been investigated right then and there. Instead SEC, who had the evidence in their hands twice over the last decade, determined that an investigation wasn't worth their time. Some of this can be accounted for as sloth, some as a lack of faith in the source of the evidence, but both would have been overcome with the pressure a large, reputable newspaper and its readership can provide. Beyond being able to throw around their credibilty these information conduits have the advantage of focus. The internet is full of information spread across more pages than an individual can read from more sources than an individual can put through a polygraph. Old media styles have the ability to mine this data, combine it together, refine it, and present it in an accessible way. This focus can give old media the ability to produce better quality news instead of competing with the internet's greater content of news. By combining credibility and focus print and television media can generate stories which actually hold people to account for facts and events, not opinions and rumors, and in holding these people standards they can regain their relavance.
The death of the newspaper makes me unbelievably sad. The ironic part of this is I have never been a consistent patron of the newspaper. Despite my lack of fiscal support I understand that print media has an important role in our society, as does television media. Their downfall comes because they have not provided a unique product, but that is not to say that they cannot. Returning their focus on important stories, being the first and the most correct, and revealing more in depth details than the copy and paste internet media sources would lead to a resurgence in the industry. By returning to their roots these formats can provide a service that is more complex and powerful than any newsblogger. In choosing to compete with the internet and the newswires these formats can reclaim their importance. The alternative is the continued reporter firings and growing corruption these employees would have been able to uproot.
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