joshuago’s journalism Bookmarks

Sometimes, of course, it can seem boring. Sometimes the devotion to balanced he said/she said panel discussions can leave you frustrated and angry and no smarter than you were 15 minutes earlier. Sometimes the interviewing is less challenging than one might hope. But the luxury of an uninterrupted hour of serious, straight-forward news and analysis is just that these days, a luxury. And, in today's world of media where fact and fiction, news and opinion, too often seem hopelessly blurred, it is good to have Lehrer — clearly a person of trust — still at work.

This is what a publisher should do: ensure the ongoing financial success and growth of his or her publication. Instead, what we have now in the media industry are publishers who believe their duties include dictating the editorial mission on behalf of a business principle. This is when publishers go wrong and, generally, is when they should be taken out back and shot.

Wistful thinking, seat-of-the-pants supposition and wild-ass guessing are hardly the ways to address the multibillion-dollar business problem underlying the journalism crisis that threatens the health of our democracy.

If you want to find out if someone can do the job, you have to let them do the job. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. And more.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance. In that world, consumers will value scarce, relevant insight over abundant facts.

Journalism's problem isn't with supply. It's with demand. We'll need to transform ourselves from passive consumers of media into active users. To accomplish that, we'll have to instill throughout our society principles that add up to critical thinking and honorable behavior.

Content matters. And you must find a way, in the brave new world of digitization, to make people pay for that content. If you do this, you still have a product and there is still an industry, a calling, and a career known as professional journalism.

Everyone who thinks online subscription fees can save the newspaper industry is effectively arguing that the world will change to support newspapers. The truth is that newspapers must change to adapt to the world.