We face, as Alan Rusbridger puts it, “some kind of emergency,” and we think that some of the differences the respondents have with us concerns characterizing that emergency, and identifying just how profound it may be. Other differences have to do with just how to name the key distinctive features of the emerging new journalistic scene. Rusbridger’s notion of mutualized news (cited in the report) seems a well-chosen word. Others have discussed more horizontal than vertical newsgathering and news dissemination, more interactivity in the process of reporting, and a thoroughly mixed blend of shoe-leather reporting, telephone reporting, Googling all day long, and the kind of database reporting made more and more possible by online resources.
You really can do first quality reporting in smaller news organizations with fewer reporters than you could have a decade ago. You can’t in any sustainable way do it without organizations that pay people to report. What impressed us is that there are so many interesting experiments going on that are trying to make such organizations work.
Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
If journalism is going to survive it is going to require some radical changes.
There are none suggested here, and apparently not much willingness to grapple with the larger issues at hand.
This is what it must have been like in the board room at GM towards the end.
Too bad.
#1 Posted by Michael Rosenblum, CJR on Fri 23 Oct 2009 at 06:03 PM
Yes, Mr. Rosenblum. And if folks want to come to you and pay the thousands of dollars you charge them as an industry consultant, I'm sure you will be happy to tell them what these "radical changes" should be and how then can best be implemented.
Chris
#2 Posted by C.W. Anderson, CJR on Sat 24 Oct 2009 at 12:51 PM