FT editor: here’s a tipping point in journalism
October 19, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
“There are plenty of opportunities for growth [for newspapers], starting with a renewed focus on local news; a more sophisticated blend of online and print content; and a more adventurous approach to what readers and viewers want, particularly younger ones.”
The Financial Times publishes an essay on journalism written by its editor-in-chief Lionel Barber.
Some highlights:
“The Watergate scandal was a curse as well as a blessing for US journalism”:
“In 2002, Jonathan Yardley, a [Washington] Post columnist, noted how ‘All the President’s Men’ [a movie on Watergate] made celebrity a goal to which many journalists now aspire…
Writing in The New Yorker in March this year, Eric Alterman went further: ‘As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected … top reporters, anchors and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, Cabinet secretaries and CEOs they reported on. Just as naturally, these same reporters sometimes came to identify with their subjects, rather than with their readers.’ ”
“The mainstream press lost touch with its audience at the very moment when technology, via the internet, was dramatically lowering the barriers to entry”:
“According to Michael Elliott, the British-born editor of Time’s international edition who has spent almost 20 years working as a journalist in the US, the decline in US journalism can be summed up thus: a broken business model overly reliant on classified advertising revenue that has now moved online; a mistaken notion that post-1945 newspaper staffs of 800-plus journalists were the norm rather than a historical aberration; and, crucially, a stultifying failure to innovate because of the lack of competition.”
“The contrast [between US and] British journalism is irresistible”:
“In a post to an FT.com debate this summer on British and American journalism, Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, wrote: ‘The London media … is much less professional, much more sensationalist, even in the so-called quality broadsheets … and much less scrupulous about sources.’
Emmott added a caveat, however. The British media’s willingness to blur news and comment has allowed them to be more opinionated and, therefore, more creative than their US counterparts. Thus, The Independent metamorphised into a ‘viewspaper’ with campaigning front pages (though it now appears to be changing back to a more traditional approach). The tabloids have remained in touch with a mass audience, whatever the misgivings of the more politically correct. The Times and The Guardian have experimented with new formats, which in design terms put their American colleagues to shame.”
“It seems undeniable that 2008 – and the coverage of the presidential election – will be seen as a tipping point in American journalism”:
“The imperial status of the mainstream media – the television networks, big metropolitan dailies and lofty commentators – has been shaken. The lay-offs of hundreds of US newspaper journalists are a symptom of a wider malaise. We are witnessing a shift in the balance of power towards new media, with wholesale repercussions for the practice of journalism…
[Eric] Alterman, in The New Yorker, summed up the change: ‘Whereas a newspaper tends to stand by its story on the basis of an editorial process in which professional reporters and editors attempt to vet their sources and check their accuracy before publishing, the blogosphere relies on its readership – its community – for its quality control … Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false, defamatory or offensive does an editor get involved.’…
In the new world of citizen journalism, the role of the trained journalist as trusted intermediary no longer holds. Some may argue that this privileged status was always precarious, even a fiction. Perhaps there is no such thing as a neutral filter or objective truth, and (print) journalists were imposters to suggest as much.
Yet to abandon the quest to write the first draft of history carries risks. There will always be powerful forces seeking to suppress injustice or inconvenient truths. For all their failings, newspapers, especially the well-financed family-owned newspapers, have served as a counterweight…”
Tagged: business model, Case studies, newspapers
Print This Post
(No Ratings Yet)
Comments
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!