At the Personal Democracy Forum last week, which I did not attend, Jay Rosen delivered a talk in which he described the turmoil in today’s newsrooms as a phenomenon of tribal migration from the old print world to the Web:
The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on — also called their business model — no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform….And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land.
This astute piece reminded me of the creative but premature choice of imagery John Markoff used back in 1995 when he wrote about the launch of Salon as a harbinger of “tribes of journalists” departing newsrooms for the Web. Today, Rosen suggests, this diaspora is finally beginning in earnest.
I think that his analysis is accurate as far as it goes, and offers a useful metaphor, but that it lets the “tribe” off too easily, in two ways.
First, there is the not insignificant point that Brad DeLong brings up — that the tribe is not composed of blameless victims:
the press corps’s flaws are much deeper than that–it’s not just that it doesn’t understand the new ground to which it is migrating, it’s that it did a lousy job on its own ground as well.
There’s no question in my mind that the woes of the journalism profession today have been at least partially self-inflicted. At the very historical moment that the news pros faced relentless new scrutiny from a vast army of dedicated amateur watchdogs and expert critics, they offered up a relentless sequence of missteps and disasters. Some were failures of professionalism, from the Jayson Blair meltdown to the Dan Rather screwup. But the biggest — the absence of a stiff media challenge to the Bush administration’s Iraq war misinformation campaign — was a failure of civic responsibility. With that failure, the professionals forfeited their claim to special privilege or unique public role as challengers of official wrongdoing and ferreters of truth. The democracy still needs these roles filled, of course. But after the Iraq bungle, the professional journalists’ claim to own them exclusively became much harder to accept.
The other area in which Rosen’s piece lets journalism’s incumbents off a little easy is in its picture of the change in the business landscape as a sort of vast, impersonal inevitability. Like the Irish Potato Famine or the pogroms, the digital age is just there, a force of history that is uprooting the tribe for reasons beyond its control. But in fact the tribe bears some responsibility here — at least its elders and leaders do. Perhaps the average newsroom grunt was in the dark, but top editors have been in a position for at least two decades to see the disruption ahead. Any of them could have sat down with their corporate bosses during that time and said, “This business is doomed unless we take some of the 20-25 percent profit margin you are enjoying and reinvest it in a totally different direction that won’t pay off for a long time.”
Now, I’m not naive enough to think that such advice would have been taken. The public corporations that own most newspapers today (and the private ones, too, for that matter) like their short-term profits. But a newsroom leader ought at least to have been able to frame this choice for the owners. Did that happen anywhere? If so, it happened so quietly it made no difference.
The incumbents of the journalism field are no more likely to risk giving up their profits and their privileges of place than those in any other field. Sunday’s NY Times Business section has an essay by Randall Stross arguing that Microsoft ought to give up on the new Windows 7 and rewrite its operating system from scratch. This would be exciting and bold and could pay long-term dividends, but would entail massive short-term disruption and revenue loss. It is no more likely to happen than the Times deciding tomorrow to shut down its presses and move all its news delivery online.
Migration is certainly still an option for many individual journalists. For institutions, I think the ships may have already sailed.
Post Revisions:
- December 12, 2008 @ 10:44:39 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- November 24, 2008 @ 23:02:06 by Scott Rosenberg
“But the biggest — the absence of a stiff media challenge to the Bush administration’s Iraq war misinformation campaign — was a failure of civic responsibility. With that failure, the professionals forfeited their claim to special privilege or unique public role as challengers of official wrongdoing and ferreters of truth.”
Thank you. I hope you continue to hammer this point home! Admissions of culpability by mainstream media with regard to this catastrophic melt-down of responsibility are still almost entirely absent from the press.
There’s a general problem here, right? Institutions can be “captured” by senior management, who were chosen because they met yesterday’s criteria. If today’s criteria are different, management faces a choice between, in effect, ordering their troops to continue a slow suicide mission or falling on their own swords so better leadership can save the army. Typically they protect themselves from the second choice by refusing to acknowledge that exists, thereby selecting mass suicide by default.
Surely someone has written well about how to deal with this structural problem of the generic promote-from-the-ranks organizational pyramid — maybe Drucker? Christiansen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” is kind of a special case, then there’s the Peter Principle, also related … anyone have a definitive text?
“Sunday’s NY Times Business section has an essay by Randall Stross arguing that Microsoft ought to give up on the new Windows 7 and rewrite its operating system from scratch.”
If Stross is a journalist, I think your use of this example is definitely a double-edged sword. If he is not a journalist, he illustrates some of the complaints journalists like to lodge against bloggers and other non-professional sources who don’t look great against serious fact-checking.
I take your point though. Microsoft is behaving as an entrenched establishment, and we don’t know how they will fare in World 2.0. Perhaps the recovery technology giant IBM demonstrated (as another example that has played out) is perhaps just not in the DNA of the newspaper industry?
This may be way tougher than the struggle with/of the typesetters so many years ago.
“At the very historical moment that the news pros faced relentless new scrutiny from a vast army of dedicated amateur watchdogs and expert critics, they offered up a relentless sequence of missteps and disasters.”
I think it’s more likely that those kinds of sins have always been in journalism, but it wasn’t until the web leveled the playing field that we found out about them in such great number.
Just finished “Rainbow’s End” by Verner Vinge, an SF novel of the near future. Security problems (terrorists) and the complete loss of a revenue model for any digital content (movies, music, journalism) have resulted in the creation of a secure operation environment in which every packet is marked and signed. It’s certainly one possible outcome for this!
Excellent post Scott. I too missed Personal Democracy Forum but watched this video.
I think your assessment is right – “Migration is certainly still an option for many individual journalists. For institutions, I think the ships may have already sailed.”
I am a big believer that journalists will have to learn to stand-alone, like modern scribes. That’s partly why I’m creating spot.us – I think there will be more and more freelancers who will need a means to collect money from small publishers.
But – what is certainly exciting is that the future is unknown and “the tribe” is finally on the move.