Marcel Weiss's Bookmarks tagged journalism →  View Popular

James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, E.W. Scripps and Joseph Pulitzer were not just earlier versions of Woodward and Bernstein. They were entrepreneurs, visionaries and risk takers who experimented and explored the capabilities of new technologies with a goal of meeting readers needs and growing audience.

They put ads on their front pages. They ran straight murder trial transcripts. They sent row boats out in the harbor to meet incoming ships so they might be the first with the news Europe. They produced multiple editions in the race to build reader loyalty. With the penny press, they disrupted the incumbent six-penny newspapers. They pushed partisan positions. They crusaded, some times to the point of unjustly influencing the course of events.

It took a long time for newspapers to build the cash flow to afford big time, expensive investigative journalism, and for publishers to recognize its value (and some of them still aren't convinced) in helping to retain readers.

So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?

, the internet offers its own democratic way of filtering content, allowing what people think is important, relevant and interesting to be aggregated and heard. It may be messy and far from perfect, but then, so is democracy.

Newspapers, in contrast, are many things, but they are not democratic. They are hierarchical authoritarian structures designed to control and shape information. This is not to say they don’t provide a societal benefit—their content contributes to the public discourse. However, how is having a few major media outlets deciding “what is news” democratic, or even good for democracy? The newspaper model isn’t about expanding free speech; it is about limiting it to force readers to listen to what the editor prescribes. When is the last time you had an opinion piece or letter published in a newspaper? There are many more voices in America that deserve to be heard aside from Ivy League educated editors and journalists.

Now is the time to be bluntly honest: What is the real value of newspapers as they are made today? What are they worth?

That is asking the question from the customer’s point of view, and that is where this discussion must start.

This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:

Die traurige Liste des unkritischen Nachplapper-Wissenschafts-Journalismus:⁸





• Bethge, Philip: Herr der Pointe, Der Spiegel, 01.01.2008


• Dambeck, Holger: Das Geheimnis des männlichen Witzes, SpiegelOnline, 22.12.2007


• Obermüller, Eva: Männlicher Humor: Vielleicht nur versteckte Aggression, ORF-Wissenschaft, 21.12.2007


• Heinemann, Pia: Humor hängt vom Testosteronspiegel ab, Die Welt, 20.12.2007


• Bartens, Werner: Ein Einfall mit dem Einrad, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21.12.2007


• Murr, Angela: Testosteron sorgt für Spott, Men’s Health, 27.12.2007

The word “blog” has way too much baggage — it’s too often equated with opinion. But a blog is just a content management system, and you can use it to publish shrill opinion, or you can use it to publish traditional journalism…or you can use it to publish journalistic reporting with a bit more point of view.

Most newspapers are actually using blogs as platforms for daily online publishing — platforms that allow one person to publish a “mini-publication.”

The big problem with transforming newspaper business models is that there’s still so much less revenue online, and only the print revenue can cover the huge cost base of publishing the print paper.

But if newspapers adopted this lean, flexible, networked blog model, and stopped publishing in print, they would shrink costs radically, and, maybe…increase online revenue enough to make it work, IF online was the only game in town.