One Man's Opinion -- for what it's worth

To:         Mathew Ingram - mathew@mathewingram.com

From:     Doug Skoglund - skoglund@pdmsb.com

Date:      Sunday, Feb 26, 2012

Subject: Science 00 - Introduction

Journalism is in trouble, and has been for a number of years. Mathew Ingram is a prominent journalist, with gigaom.com, that has written a number of timely posts on the subject. His latest, "John Paton to news execs: Abandon the gatekeeper model" was published Friday. He wrote:

The MediaNews Group chief executive (who got his start in journalism working at a tabloid newspaper based in Toronto) started his talk off with a bang by saying that the newspaper industry and journalism as a whole are more at risk from "crappy newspaper executives" than from any changes that have been wrought by the Internet. Their refusal to try and adapt to the new digital reality, Paton said, is "like aging ingnues... declaring they can still play Juliette. And nobody has the heart to break it to them." Paton added:

[W]orse still [are] mediocre journalists, wrapping themselves in the flag of long-form journalism, to deride the value of social media as a reporting tool... and then having to watch them use that ignorance to dismiss the phenomenon of participatory journalism. And while these false, zero-sum arguments play themselves out, Rome burns.

Well said; however, nothing changes -- journalists have been publishing this kind of thing for years now -- stories, more stories -- when the world needs reports. Mr. Ingram glossed over some important information in a previous post, "Debunking the 'original sin' of online newspapers."

Another outlet that took up the idea of an "original sin" was the American Journalism Review, which wrote about how the failure to charge for content when newspaper websites first appeared was a decision that doomed the industry to poverty and irrelevance. As one journalism professor quoted in the piece put it:

When newspaper publishers decided they couldn't charge for content, Reisner says, they started giving it away, and wound up "being sluts who'd put out for any old Google that came their way."

This idea is part of the same conceptual framework as News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch's continued insistence that Google and other online news aggregators are "stealing" content from newspapers, and that they should be forced to pay for it. Both viewpoints are an attempt to reimpose the traditional structure of the media business -- in which newspapers had something close to a monopoly on the news, and also controlled one of the primary platforms through which it was distributed. 

In a way, IMHO, Murdoch is correct -- Google is violating Copyright restrictions by reproducing content with out prior permission. How else does one get the data into a database??

The problem with Journalism stems from its inability to understand the nature of technology and its effect on the news business. They failed to properly analyze the cause of diminishing revenue, blaming the Internet as opposed to acknowledging their poor service.

People were leaving newspapers -- not because of the Internet -- but, because of poor service. And then journalism blamed their business model as opposed to their inability to acknowledge service shortcomings -- no wonder Paton writes about, "crappy newspaper executives."

To be continued (I Hope)

Doug Skoglund - skoglund@pdmsb.com

This page has been posted at http://ifihadmyway.com/scienc00.htm

2012 Archive List

2011 Archive List

2010 Archive List