At Fort Mason last night it was Yet Another Panel on the Future of Newspapers. I went because of who was on the panel: the impressive investigative reporter and former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll; Slate founder Michael Kinsley; and Phil Bronstein, my ertwhile boss at the old SF Examiner and more recently longtime editor of the SF Chronicle. NPR’s David Folkenflik moderated. I figured it might be worth listening, and a line out the door of the hall suggested plenty of other people did too.

The good news was that the event, titled “What Comes After Newspapers?,” really didn’t waste a lot of time asking, “How do we save newspapers?” but largely accepted that their day is ending. You might think this is obvious, but too many of these gatherings today are still stuck in rescue mode. The Senate hearing this week, for example, lingered far too long on plans for saving the bottom lines of newspaper publishing companies when it should have been talking about what the Fort Mason panel concentrated on: During the next period of transition, with an old business model collapsing and a new one not yet fully in sight, how do we insure the survival of the essential civic value journalists provide — keeping the public informed snd holding institutions and officials accountable?

This is where Coll started. He said he wasn’t plumping for the preservation of newspapers: “I don’t think there’s anything magical about a newsroom, or an entity that simultaneously publishes crossword puzzles and dispatches from Baghdad. I think that’s a beautiful thing, and it’s passing.” But “embedded in the newsroom is a system of independent reporting and investigation and witnessing,” and the public has an interest in seeing that surive.

He described how the “monopoly model” of newspaper ownership over the past four or five decades supported “a body of journalistic practice built up by accident,” one in which “persistent professional activity” by journalists creates a relationship between reporters and sources in which those sources are willing to “pass risky dangerous information down the pipe” because they trust it will be handled carefully and will reach the public intact. Monopoly power gave papers like the Post the resources to resist direct pressure from the government, even during Watergate. Can small web-based operations muster the same kind of backbone?

Wait a minute, Kinsley retorted: Don’t you think “bloggers in underwear” will be at least as resistant to such pressure as big corporations with profits to protect? Kinsley described the alarm over the future of news as “a large fuss over a medium-sized problem” and took a generally sanguine view of the Web as a locus for journalism. “There’s far more pressure for accuracy on the Internet than in traditional media,” he said. If “God forbid” the San Francisco Chronicle stops publishing, “some site will come up as the curator of news in San Francisco.”

Bronstein has hung up his editor’s hat to become a blogger for his paper, but he presided over its long decline, and he sounded rueful over missed opportunities and mistakes. “We were living in our own kind of bubble…There was all this possibility, and we were not really interested in it.” He spoke hopefully about new experiments online and described the value to reporters and newspapers of having comments open on their websites. But he was left without much to say when a former Chronicle copy editor stood up and asked, simply, what plans the Chronicle’s owners had for keeping journalists employed: “Where’s the conversation with the newsroom, the public articulation from Hearst?”

Coll reiterated his argument from a January blog post at the New Yorker on behalf of a “university-sized endowment” for a newsroom, to be provided by some generous benefactor to create a public-interest nonprofit entity of some kind. Of course, such nonprofit newsrooms already exist (in print, Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times, and on the web, ProPublica). If wealthy people can be persuaded to pony up for additional such enterprises, well, the more the merrier. But it seems to me that Coll’s vision is “Batten down the hatches, the dark ages are coming — let’s be sure we keep some monasteries around to hand the manuscripts and beer recipes on to future generations.” And I just don’t think things are quite that bad. There’s too much freedom to experiment on the Web, too many opportunities to make our way quickly through whatever transitions we face.

One such opportunity, personified, stepped forward during the Q&A: A young journalist who’s started up a blog that focuses on the 2010 census. Today we call this a “niche site”; but it’s also what we used to call a beat.

Some other interesting tidbits:

Coll mentioned that in the Senate hearing, Sen. Claire McCaskill had described the value to her of the two or three reporters (out of a much larger herd) who knew their stuff and paid close attention to what her office was doing: they kept her “scared” (in a good way). All of which made me think, hmmm, isn’t this exactly what’s happening to journalists themselves, as their work gets scrutinized by a crowd on the Web — many of whom don’t know what they’re talking about, but a handful of whom actually know more than the journalists, and can keep them honest — or scared?

Bronstein disagreed with David Simon’s complaint in his Washington testimony that bloggers don’t cover City Hall: they’re there, they’re “the people we used to refer to as gadflies.”

Also, sounding remarkably like a cranky blogger, he declared: “If you’ve ever been written about, there’s one thing you know — they never get it right.”

Coll, in response to a question about objectivity, described it as “a cultural artifct that is as strange as opera,” one that arose as a side-effect of the monopoly business model, in which newspapers had to aim for a broad reach and inclusive content.

In the Q&A, someone pointed out that decades ago most major U.S. cities had many newspapers. “We survived the collapse of newspaper competition in America. Is this worse?”

Here’s coverage of the event from the sponsor, and here’s video.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 10:19 am and is filed under Blogging, Business, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.