Calling BS

If I have one strength in life, it’s that I’ve done my best to keep myself mobile as far as career options go.  I’m on my third career (fourth if you count my time as a nightclub DJ, and I certainly don’t), and I’ve done my best, so far, to try to make and keep myself as marketable as possible, and to try to rely on me, rather than a job or union or company, to ensure my viability.

In hard times, there are no guarantees; even being adaptible and light on your feet aren’t going to pay the mortgage if things come to a crashing halt.  But every little bit helps, as they say. 

Of course, the news media – especially traditional “journalism” – have been depressing rapidly for quite some time, now.   

Jeff Jarvis, himself a J-School faculty member, judges the journalism biz, finds them wanting, and they’ve brought it on themselves.

The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists’ fault.

It is our fault that we did not see the change coming soon enough and ready our craft for the transition. It is our fault that we did not see and exploit — hell, we resisted — all the opportunities new media and new relationships with the public presented. It is our fault that we did not give adequate stewardship to journalism and left the business to the business people. It is our fault that we lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault that we sat back and expected to be supported in the manner to which we had become accustomed by some unknown princely patron. Responsibility and blame are indeed ours.

[The WaPo’s Paul] Farhi’s rationalization on behalf of his fellow journalists makes many bad assumptions and blind turns and Greenslade only follows him down those alleys, piping in with (my emphases follow) an “unhesitating answer” of no to accusations of journalistic guilt. “There cannot be any doubt that journalists themselves … cannot be held responsible for either the financial woes of the industry nor for the public turning its back on the ‘products’ that contain their work.” He piles on: “They are blameless.” They have “no reason to feel guilty…. It isn’t our fault…. The truth is that we are being assailed by revolutionary technological forces completely outside of our control…. We journalists are not [his emphasis] paying the price for our own (alleged) failures…. you are not the cause of the current calamity.”

The hack doth protest too much.

The old model – journalists as high priests of knowledge, passing information down the hierarchy to the unwashed masses – has been dying for a decade.  Drudge put the bullet in the gun; Powerline pulled the trigger four years ago. 

And yet the people in the newsrooms still cling to that old model:

The internet does not just present a few glittery toys. It presents the circumstances to change our relationship with the public, to work collaboratively in networks, to find new efficiencies thanks to the link, to rethink how we cover and present news. No, the essence of the problem is that we thought the internet represented just a new gadget and not a fundamental change in society, the economy, and thus journalism.

By maintaining the newspaper and its newsroom as essentially static entities, Farhi also makes the common and dangerous assumption that their budgets are also fixed: They are what they are because they always have been and so that’s what they need to be. So it’s not their fault that they need to be supported at that level. But newsrooms are terribly inefficient and too many of their expenses were fueled by ego. We bear business responsibility. That is why I am teaching business in a journalism school, so we can be better stewards.

Like most of what Jarvis writes, it’s worth a read.

2 thoughts on “Calling BS

  1. If the pioneer press published more stories about clowns and compliance officers being beaten by angry mobs I would subscribe.

  2. I’m on my second career. My first was as a video producer. My undergrad studies started in 1991 at Iowa State University. While I was there, they merged their film school into the j-school, & I became an accidental journalism major. I had to take all the required research, reporting & writing classes required for the J-degree.

    A little historical perspective: around 1991, Apple had a much larger market share in computers than they have even today. PC’s were still using the crude DOS interface, because Windows was being held back due to litigation. The Mac was definitely the superior machine at the time, arguably still is but I digress. The World Wide Web was a fairly new concept & I think there were fewer than 300 websites total, could have been much fewer I just don’t recall.

    Even though I was a journalism major with an electronic media studies emphasis, my first exposure to the WWW was in an elective course I took in the Design Studies school! Even that class just gave a totally lame primer to teach you how to type in a URL, & actually navigate to a site (what’s a search engine?).

    The J-school totally ignored the subject. Ironic since the sites that did exist at the time were nothing more than text with a few photos… sort of like a newspaper? They did indeed blow it.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.