Future Journalists: Here's a Blook For You

How far in the future will we stop speculating about the future of journalism?

Now there's even a futuristic blook about the Future of Journalism.

Blook?

A blook is a collaborative system to fill the gap between a blog and a book. It fuses opinions from us and you to create a polished and comprehensive set of topic discussions.

Well, it's an onscreen flipbook collection of essays by academics and professionals who talk about the pros and cons of government bailouts of newspapers and citizen journalism and ... well, go look for yourself.

On the OurBlook website, you can find blooks on all sorts of topics, and read and watch video of the interviews with their contributors. Here are some that pertain to journalism:

* Future of Journalism

* The Future Journalist

* Reporters and the Media

* Citizen Journalism

* Social Media

Advice for newspapers that want to live to see the future? Nothing especially original, but here it is, in a nutshell:

Step 1. Abandon print (unless you're USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Washington Post). It's obsolete.

Step 2. "Carve out a niche that makes the paper's web site dominant, irreplaceable and one of a kind." Translation: local news. (We would add: Dynamic multimedia and videojournalism.)

Step 3. Start charging (via subscriptions or micropayments).

And, as you can judge from the book's cover (pictured) -- if you click to enlarge it, and read the fine print -- one thing we'll definitely still need in the future is editors.

CJR: The Reconstruction of American Journalism

"The Reconstruction of American Journalism," a comprehensive, in-depth report by Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson, for the Columbia Journalism Review, is mandatory reading.

Leonard Downie Jr. is vice president at large and former executive editor of The Washington Post and Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Michael Schudson is a professor of communication at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

The report proposes "new steps for maintaining a vibrant, independent press, with special emphasis on local 'accountability journalism' that is essential to civic life."

(Commentary from five responders, and a podcast with the authors, can be found here.)

Some highlights:

What is under threat is independent reporting that provides information, investigation, analysis, and community knowledge, particularly in the coverage of local affairs....

Reporting is becoming more participatory and collaborative. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers, but freelancers, university faculty members, students, and citizens. Financial support for reporting now comes not only from advertisers and subscribers, but also from foundations, individual philanthropists, academic and government budgets, special interests, and voluntary contributions from readers and viewers. There is increased competition among the different kinds of news gatherers, but there also is more cooperation, a willingness to share resources and reporting with former competitors. That increases the value and impact of the news they produce, and creates new identities for reporting while keeping old, familiar ones alive. “I have seen the future, and it is mutual,” says Alan Rusbridger, editor of Britain’s widely read Guardian newspaper. He sees a collaborative journalism emerging, what he calls a “mutualized newspaper.”

The Internet has made all this possible, but it also has undermined the traditional marketplace support for American journalism. The Internet’s easily accessible free information and low-cost advertising have loosened the hold of large, near-monopoly news organizations on audiences and advertisers. As this report will explain, credible independent news reporting cannot flourish without news organizations of various kinds, including the print and digital reporting operations of surviving newspapers. But it is unlikely that any but the smallest of these news organizations can be supported primarily by existing online revenue. That is why—at the end of this report—we will explore a variety and mixture of ways to support news reporting, which must include non-market sources like philanthropy and government....

What is bound to be a chaotic reconstruction of American journalism is full of both perils and opportunities for news reporting, especially in local communities. The perils are obvious. The restructuring of newspapers, which remain central to the future of local news reporting, is an uphill battle. Emerging local news organizations are still small and fragile, requiring considerable assistance—as we have recommended—to survive to compete and collaborate with newspapers. And much of public media must drastically change its culture to become a significant source of local news reporting.

Yet we believe we have seen abundant opportunity in the future of journalism. At many of the news organizations we visited, new and old, we have seen the beginnings of a genuine reconstruction of what journalism can and should be. We have seen struggling newspapers embrace digital change and start to collaborate with other papers, nonprofit news organizations, universities, bloggers, and their own readers. We have seen energetic local reporting startups, where enthusiasm about new forms of journalism is contagious, exemplified by Voice of San Diego’s Scott Lewis when he says, “I am living a dream.” We have seen pioneering public radio news operations that could be emulated by the rest of public media. We have seen forward-leaning journalism schools where faculty and student journalists report news themselves and invent new ways to do it. We have seen bloggers become influential journalists, and Internet innovators develop ways to harvest public information, such as the linguistics doctoral student who created the GovTrack.us Congressional voting database. We have seen the first foundations and philanthropists step forward to invest in the future of news, and we have seen citizens help to report the news and support new nonprofit news ventures. We have seen into a future of more diverse news organizations and more diverse support for their reporting.

All of this is within reach. Now, we want to see more leaders emerge in journalism, government, philanthropy, higher education, and the rest of society to seize this moment of challenging changes and new beginnings to ensure the future of independent news reporting.

Read the entire report here.

Big Ouch: Gannett Axes 1,400 Jobs

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher by daily circulation, will cut between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs out of its 41,500-person work force in response to continuing revenue declines, according to a person familiar with the company's thinking.

The cuts will come from the U.S. Community Publishing division, which consists of Gannett's more than 80 local dailies, the person said, and won't affect the company's flagship, USA Today.

AP Business Writer Andrew Vanacore provides a more specific number:

Newspaper publisher Gannett Co. plans to cut 1,400 jobs in the next few weeks, about 3 percent of the work force, as it faces a prolonged slump in advertising revenue.

Tellingly, the most likely place to find that AP story is not at a newspaper Website, but at Yahoo or Google News , neither of which pay for its use, but make money whenever someone views the story on their respective sites. And therein lies the problem.

David Simon Blasts Citizen Journalism, Prescribes Non-Profit Newspaper Model

We listened to articulate, qualified, high-minded participants in Sen. John Kerry's subcommittee hearing on the bleak future of journalism this week (as his hometown paper, The Boston Globe, struggles to stay afloat).

One who impressed most was longtime Baltimore Sun cop reporter David Simon, who parlayed his journalism experience into a thriving career as a top TV drama producer. His venerated shows (including HBO's "The Wire") often investigate thorny journalism issues.

As Sen. Kerry noted, newspapers are an "endangered species," and Simon brilliantly took to task both old and new media: "A plague on both their houses... High-end journalism is dying in America."

Simon's reasoned rant was both diagnostic and prescriptive. He shares our disdain for the anti-professional notion of "citizen journalism," which he eloquently lambasted -- and every word is worth savoring:

I’m not making a Luddite argument against the internet and all that it offers. But you do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars where police officers gather. You don’t see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You don’t see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.

Why? Because high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and, in some ways, most gratifying job I ever had.

I’m offended to think that anyone anywhere believes American monoliths, as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives, can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care who it is they’re lying to or who they’re withholding information from.

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

But Simon also endorsed a solution:

A nonprofit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything the government can do in the way of creating nonprofit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued. And further, anything that can be done to create financial or tax-based incentives for bankrupt or near-bankrupt newspaper chains to transfer or donate unprofitable publications to locally based nonprofits should also be considered.

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