Jay Rosen is quite simply the most exciting thinker on journalism and the future.
Those of us who were at the first Future of Journalism seminar in Sydney last year will remember his wonderful metaphor about media futures, in which he compared journalists to people forced to journey to a new land. Not all the boats will make it, so we have to send plenty. When we get there we will find that others are there before us, and we will no longer have exclusive claim to the territory. The challenge will be that faced by all migrants – working out how many of our old customs are still useful, and how many we should leave behind in the old country.
More prosaicly, Rosen’s latest post on his Pressthink blog is a collection of links, with commentary, on the future of news. As Rosen remarks, there have been a lot of posts around the world on this topic over the last month as so many newspapers approach the abyss.
Rosen’s concluding word echoes the pushing-out-many-boats metaphor. Let’s just hope some of us make it:
I don’t know what will replace the newspaper journalism we have relied on. It’s a terrible loss for the public when people who bought the public service dream lose their jobs providing that service, and realizing that dream. I do not look forward to explaining to my students the contractions in the job market and why they’re likely to continue for the near term. It feels grim to have to say: “There is no business model in news right now. We’re between systems.”
I honestly don’t know what’s next. But I’m a professor of it. So I’m supposed to know where journalism is headed. Instead of that, I have this: my flying seminar from the last month of trying to figure it out. You’re supposed to take the course and feel caught up. I’ve given you a lot of looks at it because the only solution I have to offer is pluralism itself: many funders, many paths, many players, and many news systems with different ideas about how to practice journalism for public good (and how to pay for it, along with who participates) alive at once.
The future of news is open, more entrepreneurial. Open can also mean broken, repair date unknown. If you know how the old one fell apart, it’s easier to put something new together. That’s the faith that makes a seminar like this fly.
3 Comments
And if we do successfully colonise the new land, then in about 200 years’ time, we’ll probably have a lot to apologise for.
And speaking of future news, I am concerned by Alan Kohler’s ‘journalism will bloom online’ piece on the front page.
His sole argument for the demise of journalism off-line appears to be its current state of inherent lawlessness and the un-ethical nature that has developed in what was once a style practiced by writers who really did believe in truth and justice.
Rightfully he laments the passing of journalism. And rightfully he rallies against falsehoods and the irresponsible gimmickry featuring in so much journalistic content today. Sadly, these are all characteristics shared by ‘journalism’ online. In fact, journals online are written by many of the same people who once wrote off-line, and online journal keepers have even greater issues in ethical practice to deal with than paper based journalists did. Even the most ethically minded journalist online knows that the content he or she produces or the stories he or she covers change at a phenomenal rate, and that most online journal ‘facts’ are buried by questionable information and a tendency toward opinion oriented postings.
I suspect quality journalism online died before it even had a chance to draw a breath. I cannot call most of what passes for journalism online journalism at all. A lot of it appears to be entirely fictitious. Journalism has not bloomed online, instead, in my opinion, it has been dealt its final blow and is now even more prone to manipulation, deliberately planted misinformation, vicious assaults on other peoples’ character, and segregation through gated subscription to content that most news consumers don’t even realise exists, than print media has ever been before.
true