Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present

Abstract

Introduction: Transformation of American Journalism Is UnavoidableThis paper is part survey and part manifesto, one that concerns itself with practice of journalism and practices of journalists in United States. It is not, however, about the future of news industry, both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as news industry anymore.There used to be one, held together by usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.If you wanted to sum up past decade of news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. newsmakers, advertisers, startups, and, especially, people formerly known as audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside old strictures of broadcast and publishing models. past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques, and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked old clarity.There's no way to look at organizations as various as Texas Tribune, SCOTUSblog and Front Porch Forum or such platforms as Facebook, YouTube and Storify and see anything like coherence. There's no way to look at new experiments in nonprofit journalism like Andy Carvin's work at NPR during Arab Spring and convince yourself that journalism is securely in hands of for-profit businesses. And there's no way to look at experiments in funding journalism via Kickstarter, or coverage of protest movements via mobile phone, and convince yourself that making information public can be done only by professionals and institutions.Many of changes talked about in last decade as part of future landscape of journalism have already taken place; much of journalism's imagined future is now its lived-in present. (As William Gibson noted long ago, The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.) Our goal is to write about what has already happened and what is happening today, and what we can learn from it, rather than engaging in much speculation.The effect of current changes in news ecosystem has already been a reduction in quality of news in United States. On present evidence, we are convinced that journalism in this country will get worse before it gets better, and, in some places (principally midsize and small cities with no daily paper) it will get markedly worse. Our hope is to limit scope, depth and duration of that decay by pointing to ways to create useful journalism using tools, techniques and assumptions that weren't even possible 10 years ago.We also highlight ways new possibilities for journalism require new forms of organization. Traditional news organizations have tended to conserve both working methods and hierarchy, even as old business models are collapsing, and even when new opportunities do not fit in those old patterns. In interview after interview with digitally focused members of traditional press, theme of being thwarted by process came up. Adapting to a world where people formerly known as audience are not readers and viewers but users and publishers will mean changing not just tactics but also self-conception. Merely bolting on a few new techniques will not be enough to adapt to changing ecosystem; taking advantage of access to individuals, crowds and machines will mean changing organizational structure as well. (We recognize that many existing organizations will regard these recommendations as anathema.)This paper is written for multiple audiences - traditional news organizations interested in adapting as well as new entrants (whether individual journalists, news startups or organizations not previously part of journalistic ecosystem) - and those organizations and entities that affect news ecosystem, particularly governments and journalism schools, but also businesses and nonprofits. …