I recently spent the last two months trying to bring myself up-to-date on leading thought on the future of journalism. It was nail-bitingly frustrating, to say the least. I read thousands of pages of blog posts, institutional reports, and academic papers but simply felt more confused than when I began. Reading about the industry felt increasingly like being locked in a nursery full of toys, bananas, and unapologetic monkies.
My first instinct was to give up and resign myself to enjoying the shortbus. But then it occured to me that my confusion might be related to the miasma of the industry as a whole. So I decided to take a look at what others thought.
Alan Mutter, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley:
The Harvard conference tasked with finding new business models for journalism had the impossible mission yesterday of trying to solve a problem no one had the language to describe, the tools to measure or the skills to fix.
Instead of systematically exploring invigorating new ideas or ground-breaking paradigms, the group gravitated to the predictable yadda-yadda: foundation funding, federal subsidies, subscription schemes and a smattering of random ruminations about revenue. \…\
Bill Wyman, former arts editor of NPR and Salon.com:
But when it comes to the disaster engulfing their own profession, their analysis is less rigorous. An uncharacteristic haze characterizes a lot of the reporting and commentary on the current crisis of the industry.
It could have been brought on by delicacy, perhaps romanticism. And since it is not just any crisis, but a definitive one—one that seems to mean an end to the physical papers’ role in American life as we have come to know it—perhaps there’s a little bit of shell-shock in the mix as well. \…\
What we’re seeing is a realm without an ontology or curator: how does one systematically explore if there’s no system? No one is putting their foot down and saying “all paywall discussion line up over there, and while you’re at it, decide which two or three of you present the most credible arguments.” There is no centralized discourse: it is a cacophony of individual voices refusing to come to conclusions. This painfully mirrored my own experience: I had a hard time figuring out what to search for, let alone which articles or authors were most authoritive.
It could be that I’m part of the unpriviledged masses uninvited to secret conferences where respected academics and industry experts decide on pecking order and research priorities. If so, they’re doing a damn impressive job at the secretive part. The more likely explanation is simply that it is a hard problem: when I sat down to try to create a systematic way to approach research, I quickly realized there were many credible alternatives to choose from.
Nevertheless, two weeks and some heart-rending number of espressos later, I am satisifed enough to present a draft proposal.
First, we suggest that everyone make their assumptions explicit »