3 Comments

• Dave Hughes says:

  January 31, 2009 at 8:35 am

  Well the shrinking of newspapers may be caused more by the fact that people now have affordable (to them) ways to get, put, and discuss the ‘news’ they seek or are interested in, other than newspapers OR television OR broadcast radio OR magazine - as any other factor, left or right or neutral.

  Sure, ‘economics doesn’t care’ but people do! From the beginning of time ‘people’ have wanted to ‘know’ - what is over the hill, what is this object they found, what is in the head of those other people around them.

  Until ‘journalism’ appeared (starting with town crier’s I think) they could only find out by going there, listening to travellers, talking to the people around them. Journalism arose as a BUSINESS when some people decided what other people ‘wanted to know’ and they provided it - for a price. But things started to go astray when the ‘economics’ dictated that the news vendor spend time trying to figure out what the largest portion of the reachable people ‘wanted’ to know. Thus was born the idea of ‘news’.

  Trouble with that was that it had a built-in imperative for ‘massification’
  While individual people still want to know what they want to know.

  Google is a greater threat to newspapers AND journalism than any blogs. For it delivers, for a price (looking at ads) just the content the individuals want.

  Even though I am an advocate of ‘blogging’ for what it can do for ‘democracy’ - people discussing what they ‘know’ or have ‘learned’ from many sources to help them make up their own minds who or what to support - and using the same technology for ‘education’ - distance learning, I still think, down at bottom, telecom technology and its associated economics permits people to learn about things (via image, sound) and what others ‘know’ or think.

  The real question for newspaper journalists is to figure out what THEIR role can or should be when everybody can reach everybody and every place by themselves, raw and unfiltered.
• John Robinson says:

  January 31, 2009 at 12:33 pm

  Not surprisingly, Jeff, we had similar thoughts.

  http://blog.news-record.com/staff/jrblog/2009/01/a_lot_of_people.shtml
• Jeff Thomas says:

  February 4, 2009 at 4:47 pm

  My thoughts exactly, Dave.

  I’ve said this before: Journalism is a tool, invented by free people, to provide the information they need. Because every human does, in fact, have a need for information about the world beyond his or her personal experience. As you say, people always will want to know what they need to know.

  Everything else is just method.

  For more than a century, those methods were very expensive and thus, limited and generally managed by a professional class, which grew up precisely because it took special skills to do a job most others didn’t have the tools or time to do. Now those tools are virtually free. This is not merely changing newspapers; it is, first, changing society, which in turn is changing newspapers.

  Google’s not a threat. It’s an aggregator and filter. It can aggregate only what has been created in the first place. Creation is still primary, and creation requires labor. That labor is being democratized at a rapid rate because of cheap digital tools, and the task for journalists now is to discern what types of creative labor still require some specialization that society will reserve to journalists. Lots of people can paint their walls, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to be a professional painter.