NRJ Book Review: Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America's Appetite for News

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Rachel Davis Mersey, Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America's Appetite for News, (Praeger, 2010) 143 pages, $34.95 (hardcover).Review by Steve HallockThe short answer to the title of Northwestern University assistant professor Rachel Davis Mersey's book, Can Journalism Be Saved, is yes. The author also responds in the affirmative to the second question she poses early in the book: Should journalism be saved? But the answer to both questions is a qualified one that takes in a proposal that not every journalist, journalism professor or consumer of journalism might accept. Mersey believes that saving journalism will require accepting the demise and abandonment of the social responsibility model of journalism that is driven by agenda-setting and gate-keeping theory. To replace it, she invokes the uses-and-gratification theory for what she terms identity-driven journalism, which is intended to identify and delineate news and information for consumers based on a demand-and-supply approach.Mersey's argument, couched in a well-researched, accessible piece of writing, is not new. Longtime newspaper reporters and editors will remember the old newsroom arguments of the 1980s and 1990s about so-called communitybased news content and citizen journalism, buttressed by focus groups and readership surveys that led publishers and editors to conclude that readers were abandoning newspapers because the traditional content was losing its appeal. Give what they want rather than what they need became the mantra of many newsrooms, and the advent and growth of the Internet and its user-friendly environment have raised that chant a few decibels.It is an appealing argument, strengthened by Mersey's summation of traditional media and news organization woes-long familiar to news industry personnel and analysts-of circulation and audience losses and of the accompanying shift of advertising revenue to other venues, primarily the Internet. The author will find an audience of readers who agree that the old businessbased model of journalism is in trouble, and some of the alternatives, such as publicly financed models or newspaper/website hybrids adopting a myriad of viewer-pay options, aren't quite the answer.Yet rather than rely on the social responsibility model, in which so-called elitist journalists decide the compelling agendas and take care of the information gate-keeping duties for the audience, journalists and journalism organizations instead should strive to identify the interests and needs of their and try to meet them. The use of the term customers here is deliberate, as Mersey uses the phrase, product, for news content, a term that has long been anathema to traditional journalists. It is a perfectly acceptable word in Mersey's argument, however, because she uses much of her book to describe news as a process to produce an economic commodity, one that is evolving toward user wants and individual needs - like it or not. Hence, key words in Mersey's case for a more meaningful and successful journalism include engagement and relevance.Engagement is a complicated concept and difficult to measure, Mersey writes:But part of the purpose of this book is to assert that the media/identity experience-the way media use reinforces who we are and helps us understand who other people are-is at the very core of creating engagement. Therefore, identity is a key to developing working business models of journalism. The reality is that much of the industry's efforts to emphasize the audience have come from the approach of either demarcating the audience to fit a preexisting product or developing new services for a large general-circulation audience. Instead, the industry needs platform agnostic information delivery that responds to the audience members' stated needs and, better yet, the needs they did not even know they had.The idea is complicated, indeed, and Mersey by this point has us anxiously awaiting, like readers of a murder mystery eagerly pursuing a denouement, a workable business model proposal, especially for the daily press as opposed to the successful niche magazine advertising-based model she lauds. …