LewisBlog: Thinking about the Future of Journalism

Blogging for the Knight Center

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:11:00 +0000

This summer I'm working as a blogger for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, housed here in the J-school at UT. The Knight Center is moving away from its traditional weekly newsletter about journalism in the Americas toward a "news blog" format that aggregates items throughout the week. So, that might mean fewer posts here (not that I was posting that often, anyway!) as I post more there.

Journalists and technology

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:26:00 +0000

I've been wondering for some time how the profession has been absorbing the massive changes that have been buffeting the news biz of late—from external (read: financial, audience) pressures to internal (read: technological, cultural) changes, to a whole lot that fall somewhere in between, a veritable 360-degree squeeze.

When I left the industry for grad school in 2006, even with the recent demise of Knight Ridder and the increasing troubles for newspapers, a print-first attitude was pervasive—after all, old habits die hard, and the print version remains the cash cow in many places. And yet, since that time we seem to have reached a tipping point, a sort of inflection point at which the legacy media realize that the problems with audiences and the Web-first necessity and the social networking phenomenon and the citizen-empowered environment—taken together, this train has left the station, and there's no looking back to ink-and-paper only for help.

But what's striking is that anecdotal and survey data now seem to tell us that the hand-wringing over technology and its impact on their livelihoods—that fear and anxiety that used to grip the newsroom—is beginning to fade. Perhaps the most interesting account of this came in the State of the News Media 2008, released earlier this month by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Read the full report on a 2007 survey of journalists here, and a key section on technology is below:

The journalists here do not sense that the Internet has become all-consuming or that new technology has become the core of what they do. That is evident in the fact that majorities of both print and broadcast outlets say their organizations’ main focus is still the legacy media.

And that is borne out in how journalists spend their time. A good portion of those surveyed still work only or mostly on the original product. Around a quarter spend no time on the Web product. (This holds true for journalists at both the national and local levels.) The multimedia work also appears to be going on more at a national level. National journalists are more than three times as likely as local to devote half or more of their time there (19% versus 6% of local). And it is perhaps a harbinger of the future that national print journalists are the most likely to be multimedia. More than a of quarter of them (26%) spend at least half of their time producing Web content. This was true of just 9% of national TV and radio journalists.

Nor did we find evidence, as some might have expected, that journalists resent having to split their time. Those who do straddle technologies tend to see it as a good thing. About half say it has improved their work, twice the number that has doubts. This could be self- selecting. The doubters may have resisted or even taken buyouts. But, one way or another, the profession is becoming more accepting. ...

And that connects to another change — the decline in concern over journalistic cynicism. In 2004, roughly four in ten said cynicism of the press was a valid criticism. That number has now dropped down to three in ten. Technology, while posing profound economic problems, seems in some ways to have alleviated the concerns about disconnection and isolation, key elements of what many considered the credibility crisis of the a decade ago.

On "30"

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:52:00 +0000

On Saturday I turned 30. And while I could wax all philosophical and ontological and epistemological about turning 30, I'll just note this one thing: In journalism, especially newspapers, the tag "- 30 -" traditionally has meant the end of the story—that's it, there's nothing more, that's all she wrote, finito. When I was 16 and wrote my first newspaper story (on a high school football game, attended by maybe 75 people), I remember how my dad, a newspaper veteran from the hot-type days, made certain that I ended with "30."

So, let's hope I'm not "finished" at 30—heck, I haven't even finished school, so life has only just begun.

on the future of news

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:36:00 +0000

Our semester in Max McCombs' "Future of News" course is wrapping up and we're about to write chapters for our forthcoming book on the subject—or, at least draft chapters, since getting this work in order for publication will take longer than one semester, of course. My chapter will cover the future of participatory news. I'll try to post a draft as I go. Meantime, I've collected some possible material for the chapter—on citizen journalism here, and the future of news generally here.

Bubbling over ... is over

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:16:00 +0000

This is off-topic, but as the bottom falls out of the housing market around the globe — and particularly in Ireland and Spain — I'm reminded of this little piece I wrote for Foreign Policy after my fellowship as a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid. Back in 2006, such bubble-pricking economic turmoil seemed somewhat inevitable, and yet so distant, disinfected, even quaint. Not so anymore.

Online Journalism Symposium

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:42:00 +0000

UPDATE: Photos from the symposium, such as the above: Paul Alonso and I hard at work (?) in the symposium newsroom.

I'm here this morning at the ninth annual Online Journalism Symposium put on by the J-school at the University of Texas — or, more specifically, by the remarkable Rosental Alves. I'm working the "newsroom" of this operation as the copy chief, returning to my former role of sorts.

As usual, the conference is packed with great panels, paper presentations, and more (see program here and research papers here); you can read about it here or watch it live via webcast.

I thought about trying out Cover It Live, this nifty (and free) liveblogging tool, but I have so much else to squeeze in today that I might defer instead to the "official" blog and liveblog.

I'll post some thoughts via Twitter.

Mark Dewey: Present trends predict the future

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:24:00 +0000

OK, we're finally catching up after spring break and a long hiatus from the blog. Below is my write-up on a Future of News lecture by UT professor Mark Dewey, a former journalist at CNN and a new media expert from his days at AOL.

Also worth mentioning: Dewey's self-described controversial letter that appeared recently in American Journalism Review.

-------------

Mark Dewey sums up the competitive nature of the new media model this way: For traditional media, competitors offer information—all kinds of information, from sports to weather to news to social networking—that is better, faster, and cheaper.

Oh, and in most cases, it’s free.

The problem for traditional media, especially newspapers, is that they haven’t figured out how to navigate this new landscape.
They have failed to recognize what value (or core competency, in business speak) they can (and can’t) bring to the media environment.

“Editors don’t understand their core competency,” Dewey said. “They think it’s picking stories. That is dead wrong. If you want proof of that, look at Matt Drudge. People are more interested in how Matt Drudge picks stories than the editors at fill-in-the-
blank newspaper.”

Rather, journalists’ value-added comes in their local coverage—but because they have missed this, and missed opportunities to provide can’t-find-it-anywhere-else coverage to drive traffic, “digitalization has left the papers behind,” Dewey said. As evidence, he points to the top 100 sites on Alexa; only one newspaper (The New York Times) makes the list.

He sees three key trends emerging in the future of journalism:

1. Digital distribution: “With digitalization comes complexity [think multimedia storytelling]. It’s not just writing, not just inverted pyramid. It takes the realm of communication so far beyond the inverted pyramid.”

2. Specialization (aka disaggregation): “It’s a decoupling of ad revenue from news categories. It’s blowing up our old paper of news, weather, sports, and other categories. It’s a whole different model, and it’s changing the game.” One result of this: It’s not just old media breaking news anymore. It was a niche publication, Wired, that broke the story of wiretapping, thanks to the documents provided by Mark Klein, an AT&T worker with knowledge of NSA’s secret access to Internet traffic. Why Wired? Because the Los Angeles Times turned down an opportunity to investigate and publish it, Dewey said.

3. Too Much Information: There’s more data than we can ever absorb in a lifetime. [See “shift happens” on YouTube.] The result: “News becomes worth less. Not worthless, but worth much less than before.” One problem: We have so many reporters covering the same thing, rather than deploying those resources to cover specialized, localized things. Meanwhile, there are more and more ways for dealing with and aggregating this TMI through widgets such as Digg, reddit, del.icio.us, etc. Dewey also pointed to a couple of interesting sites—Globalincidentmap.com and Daylife—to illustrate the power of visuals to communicate a lot of information in a digestable way. “As artists improve on the Internet, there’s no way the piece of paper can ever communicate all this information.”

What's so different about Web 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:53:00 +0000

Paula Poindexter: Will there be an audience for news in the future?

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:34:00 +0000

Introducing her new book, UT journalism professor Paula Poindexter raised the question: Given current trends, will there be an audience for news in the future? “The answer to this question,” she said, “is directly related to the future of news media, the future of education, and the future of democracy.”

Perhaps the short answer is, well, maybe. If news organizations continue with business as usual, reporting in a distanced and detached way, not to mention with little attention to issues that interest women and young people, then there’s no hope, Poindexter said. “Unless there is something done on multiple fronts, there may not be an audience for news in the future. This isn’t just a problem for TV, or for newspapers, etc. It’s a problem for all of us.”

To better illustrate the present landscape of news audiences, Poindexter introduced a taxonomy of news user types:

1. news enthusiasts—who are strongly connected to the news because of their passion for it;
2. news monitors—who are connected to news so they can keep track of things of personal interest;
3. news betweeners—who are connected to news one to six days a week;
4. news eclectics—who are more or less connected to the news but have no pattern for news use nor have an allegiance to a specific medium or type of news;
5. news accidentals—who have a weak connection to news and whose news consumption is non-purposeful (e.g., stumbling upon news while reading mail in Gmail or Yahoo);
6. news intenders—who plan to read or watch the news but always find something gets in the way;
7. news avoiders—who deliberately shun the news and prefer to stay disconnected. (see Table 1.2 on p. 9)

Poindexter further introduced a model of the factors and forces influencing how people approach news; it can help us think about what we (that is, journalists) can affect in changing consumers’ relationship to news, she said. The illustration in her book is much easier to understand, but I’ll try to walk through it here:

1. Individual differences—demographics such as age, income, social status, and education—are preeminent, the first and most important factor in guiding news-use decisions and habits;
2. These differences feed into socialization, which is a process that takes place throughout life as our peers, assumptions (say, about what is newsworthy, or whether it’s important to follow the news), family background, and other socio-cultural factors combine to shape our outlook toward journalism;
3. These factors, combined with attitudes, normative beliefs, and motivation, lead consumers to arrive at a “decision” (conscious or not) of the type of news user they are going to be—an avoider, an intender, an accidental, etc.

Drilling down on this picture of the news consumption process, Poindexter turned to another breakdown—of “attitudes and dimensions of the news-centered object” (p. 30). Here, we recognize that all-important attitudes toward news are shaped by dimensions (or characteristics) of news—such as the medium, institution, cost, time, access, complexity, multitasking capability, and “feel.” (Those latter two are especially important for the next generation of news consumers, for whom newspapers don’t “feel” right—being so bulky and hard to recycle—and for whom communication is a multi-way blur of Facebooking, text messaging, Twittering, and more all at once.)

In the what-can-we-do-about-it category, Poindexter said the focus should be on socialization.

“The present young adult generation, in college now, is lost, but we can help the upcoming generation. One way to do that is [Newspapers in Education]. NIE studies have shown that young people exposed to newspapers in schools have become newspaper readers. Same goes for young people exposed to newspapers at home. So there are two key areas of socialization: home and school.” (But for NIE to be done right, she said, it can’t be presented as a “textook,” which then makes it feel like “work.”)

To our audience of mostly Ph.D. students, she concluded: “What does it mean that there may not be an audience for news? There will be no advertisers spending money to reach no audience that’s not there, which means there will be no newsrooms, which means there will be no money to pay journalist salaries or invest in journalism, which means there will be no reporters and producers to create the news. If there are no reporters, there will be no need for journalism schools, which also means there will be no journalism professors.”

Rusty Todd: The fate of civic information as the media fragment

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:10:00 +0000

Picking up where Wanda Cash left off, figuratively and literally, UT journalism professor Rusty Todd posed a question during his lecture Wednesday: Does democracy really need the press? How central is a good and honest and effective news media—a news media focused on public affairs reporting and civic information—to the preservation of freedom and maintenance of government?

The answer, he suggested, may be more complex than we think, and it might challenge our dominant idea—indeed, the very starting point from which we consider journalism’s purpose and place in the public sphere—that good democracy is dependent on good journalism. “This bothers the hell out of me because I spent most of my adult life thinking the answer is yes,” Todd said.

Why such worries? As he has studied journalism’s past, Todd has found that “some of this country’s ‘finest moments’ came during times of irresponsibility on the part of the press.” So, even as hard news goes soft, and Britney Spears and Michael Vick drown out reporting about schools and the environment, Todd sees the present spike in political participation as evidence that, well, maybe public affairs news doesn’t matter like we thought it did. Perish the thought. What’s more likely, however, is that we have more “drones,” as he calls them: uninformed folks who get involved and vote.

But what of the future of news? (It’s worth mentioning here Rusty’s definition of news: “Stuff you need to know, but you don’t know you need to know it.”) First and foremost: “Newspapers eventually will die, and they will die when their readers die.” He cites as the National Observer, a smart weekly paper around during the 1960s and 70s; it had one of the highest subscriber-retention rates around, but it also had one of the lowest new-subscriber rates because its high cost. So, as its older readers eventually died, so did the paper.

Next: “We’re going to gather news all the time. The news cycle is dead.” Think of news as one continuous RSS feed, although there will still exist “structured” products—such as story packages—that appear on, say, TV broadcasts. But the trend will be toward a fluid, always-updating flow of information, aimed toward increasingly specialized audiences.

Speaking of which, an obvious point from Rusty: The mass media are scrambling to figure out to reach the increasingly fractured audience. Consumers are cracking, cracking, cracking into ever-smaller niches, so in the future information will be gathered once and sold many times via multiple media to multiple audiences. (Something like this has happened in the past with specialized financial news wires, but it’s becoming more apparent in media convergence today.) It’s the Long Tail at work in news: “If you can find a tail that’s profitable, you don’t really care about the big bulge.”

In the future, he said, the market for national public affairs news will shrink but remain viable. One interesting twist has been the way in which news media today are turning Election 2008 into an “American Gladiator” style contest of this character vs. that character. Rusty considers this framing of politics as sport an entertainment as a last-ditch—and possibly successful?—attempt at hanging on to a mass audience for public affairs news.

The puzzle, he said, is getting civic information to these mini-audiences without resorting to gladiator-style reporting, even as aggregation online (think of Google and Yahoo news personalization) make it easier than ever to avoid public affairs journalism. Perhaps the upshot to all this “new” media, ironically enough, is a return to something akin to the “old” news media of the 1800s: fragmented, partisan, and hucksterish. “I’m afraid where we’re headed is back to the pre-mass media age where public affairs journalism is only read by the elite,” Rusty said.

Is that any way to run a democracy? I guess we’ll find out.

("Disclaimer" of sorts: I am the teaching assistant for Rusty's copy editing class.)

Wanda Cash: How “old” journalism fits into “new” journalism

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:08:00 +0000

As we move into a newer media terrain, and as the news industry faces fresh challenges on all sides, it’s critical that journalism—in whatever form it takes in the future—carry “all the critical DNA,” University of Texas journalism professor Wanda Cash told us during her lecture Wednesday.

That is, today’s “new” news needs to be infused with old-time elements, exemplified in Kovach and Rosentiel’s famous work: Journalism needs to make truth its first obligation, and citizens its first loyalty; it needs to emphasize verification of facts and independence from those covered; it needs to provide a forum for public critique and compromise, and it needs to speak truth to power. In essence, she argued, it should be thought of like a public utility, a civic asset accessible to everyone but beholden to no one individual.

But those fundamentals often remain ideals in a 24-hour news cycle that is becoming an “every-minute” news cycle online. The Internet, she said, is a “voracious beast” always aching for more, more, more, and with updates on the minute. (Gee, wasn’t feeding the newspaper beast on a daily basis hard enough?) The result has been that the scoop-or-die mentality—long a bane of newspapers and television—has metastasized in the online environment, such that, “In the rush to be first, we’ve forgotten how important it is to get it right.”

That has led to journalists losing sight of their roles and spending too much time on technical matters—or even trivial matters, such as whether you’re wearing the right shirt for that stand-up video for the Web. So, as this generation embarks on a new kind of journalism, it’s clear that the news paradigm is evolving … but does it retain the same DNA?

(Also worth mentioning: The most “controversial” point of the lecture was Cash’s assertion that “the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with information they need to be free and self-governing.” Sounds rather innocuous, right? Well, among critical and cultural scholars in our field, there are concerns that journalism is such an agent of power that it can hardly be trusted to provide the right kind of information. Or, as I might argue another way, can we say that “old” journalism ever really achieved that aim? Haven’t certain traditional elements—most notably “objectivity”—sown the seeds for the present journalism’s lost-in-the-wilderness struggle to retain credibility and public trust?)

Our class on the future of news

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:04:00 +0000

As mentioned before, I'm going to post thoughts that emerge from a highly relevant class I'm taking this semester with Dr. Max McCombs. It's called Contemporary Trends in Journalism, and this year the subject is the future of news. As part of the class, a number of other faculty from UT's School of Journalism (and the College of Communication) will be speaking to us. Here's the rundown.

This is why people hate journalists

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:04:00 +0000

... especially TV journalists.

For more on the problem of the Master Narrative in journalism, read Jay Rosen on the subject, or see one of his more recent posts here. Also worth reading: "The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us."

Work-life convergence

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:41:00 +0000

In case you missed it earlier this month, this New York Times piece was spot-on in assessing what's happening in the law and medical professions. What caught my attention is that it illustrated well a larger change in the way we perceive and engage in career work: My generation's impatience with traditional conventions of working your way up rung by rung, and our willingness (indeed, eagerness) to roll work, friends, family and socializing into one melded "life" where we're always on, always connected, always networking, always "ourselves."

This is particularly true in the creative industries (such as journalism), where young people are less and less interested in separating their work and family/friend lives, opting instead for an integrated "workstyle" where they can plug in and out of their various roles on demand, maintaining a constant sense of connectivity. Even older workers, I believe, are increasingly willing to accept the encroachment of work into our after-hours free time, if the flip side means they have more autonomy and flexibility in doing their creative work. Mark Deuze has written much about this "liquefaction" of work life in the media industries.

Below is a telling passage from the NYT article.

“The older professions are great, they’re wonderful,” said Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” (Basic Books, 2003). “But they’ve lost their allure, their status. And it isn’t about money.”

OR at least, it is not all about money. The pay is still good (sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

“There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self,” he said. “Now they just want to be themselves. It’s almost as if they’re interviewing places to see if they fit them.”

The future of news

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:32:00 +0000

This semester I'm taking a course with the legendary Max McCombs (father of agenda-setting) that is entirely focused on researching and writing about a topic close to my interests: the future of news. In fact, that's the title of a book that will be published as a result of the course — a McCombs-edited volume called "The Future of News: An Agenda of Perspectives." The 10 students in the class will contribute, either individually or as co-authors, to the various chapters in the book.

Based on what I can see of it now, the project will be a massive lit review of academic and professional thinking on this subject, synthesized in a way that allows us to make some projections about the future of journalism. Right now, of course, we're in the preliminary scanning stage, scouring for sources high and low. I'll publish soon some of our initial readings, and I expect the class will provide good fodder for posts here. I welcome all suggestions, too.

Recession and the newspaper industry

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:45:00 +0000

As global markets go into panic mode, it's a good time to consider what a deep and prolonged recession would do to employment in the news industry. Especially the newspaper industry, for which 2007 was another bleak year.

During times like this, I think of my former employer, The Miami Herald. It offered buyouts in the wake of the 2001 downturn after the dot-com burst, but mainly has relied on attrition since, not to mention round after round of expense cuts. Last month the paper announced would outsource certain copy editing duties to India, only to reverse course recently. What's interesting is that they considered outsourcing some editing of the Neighbors sections, the most "local" of news products. Not only is news judgment a competitive advantage newspapers need to maintain, as Steve Yelvington points out very well, but the local news, of all the copy flowing through the system, needs the closest scrutiny — and certainly "local eyes" on it.

Still, this raises the specter of what we might see in 2008 from the newspaper industry: Increased outsourcing? (which isn't necessarily bad if done right) Job losses through automation? Or more of the slow-bleed attrition that has been the norm at many newspapers for several years? Probably all three and more. What's clear is that newspaper journalists, like newsworkers and mediaworkers generally, increasingly must build and maintain their own personal competitive advantage — e.g., through skills with new media, or at least an open-mindedness that's so often missing in newsrooms — if they are to withstand the job erosion that could get quite nasty in a recession.

Welcome to this blog

noreply@blogger.com (seth) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:15:00 +0000

With the new year around the corner, I feel compelled to start something that's I've been wanting to do for some time — create an online repository where I can unload my thoughts on the future of journalism, and globalization and journalism, and young adults and news ... and other areas of research interest. In time, I hope this will be less of a digital dumping ground than a collaboration point where I can engage feedback from like-minded scholars and journalists.

In this sense, I hope to follow in the long shadow of two favorite scholars of mine, Mark Deuze* and Jay Rosen, although I never expect to be as academically prolific as Deuze or as professionally influential as Rosen. Nonetheless, I appreciate their examples.

So, I give you LewisBlog.

And Merry Christmas.

*My blog name is even loosely based on "Deuzeblog."