Huffington's lecture was in response to an attack by Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. on blogs that don't pay for the content they link to. (None of them do.) Her headline says it all:
Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better JournalismHuffington has an ax to grind, since she runs a popular new media aggragator site. But she's talking about trends that will shape your careers in the communications industry. Her talk, which appears on "HuffPo" (as the blog is sometimes known), is also a defense of the kind of advocacy journalism her blog - and other media like Fox News that mix reporting and advocacy - practices. She and Murdoch, whose conglomorate owns Fox, probably agree on more points than either would ever acknowledge!
Read it.
Whether you plan to cover the news, or just read the news, you owe it to yourself to be up on this trend. It's also what we're going to do in class Wednesday.
Some quotes:
That's the brave new world (to coin a phrase) we live in, and it's the world you're going to launch your careers in. How do timeless ethical standards, some of them going as far back as Aristotle 2,400 years ago, hold up in this new world?Ever since we decided to launch the Huffington Post, I've talked about how the future of journalism will be a hybrid future where traditional media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism).
And with so many traditional media companies adapting to the new realities, it was ridiculous to engage in an us vs. them, old media vs. new media argument. Either/or was the wrong way to look at things.
But playing nice has increasingly become a one-way street -- suddenly the air is filled with shrill, nonsensical, and misplaced verbal assaults on those in the new media.
* * *
So it's time for traditional media companies to stop whining and face the fact that far too many of them, lulled by a lack of competition and years of pretax profits of 20 percent or more, put cash flow above journalism and badly misread the web when it arrived on the scene. The focus was on consolidation, cost-cutting, and pleasing Wall Street -- not modernization and pleasing their readers.
They were asleep at the wheel, missed the writing on the wall, let the train leave the station, let the ship sail -- pick your metaphor -- and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruptive innovation the Internet and new media represent. And now they want to call timeout, ask for a do-over, start changing the rules, lobby the government to bail them out, and attack the new media for being... well, new. And different. And transformational. Suddenly it's all about thievery and parasites and intestines.
Get real, you guys. The world has changed. ...
* * *
Sure, free news content is not a perfect system but it's a lot like what Churchill said about democracy: it "is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." That's the reality. Free content is not without problems. But it's here to stay, and publishers need to come to terms with that and figure out how to make it work for them.
And all across the country, passionate entrepreneurs are doing just that, experimenting with new and creative revenue models. TechDirt.com is monetizing its engaged and highly informed community by turning them into focus-groups-for-hire. ProPublica is using a not-for-profit model to produce impact investigative journalism. And there are many different powerful local journalism models, including Voice of San Diego, which supports its award-winning local journalism with a combination of advertising and public radio-style contributions from foundations and users.
The new paths to success are still being charted -- and much remains uncertain. But this much is clear: we can't use an analog map and expect to find our way in a digital word.
* * *
We hear lots and lots of talk these days about saving newspapers -- Congressional anti-trust exemptions, perhaps? -- but we mustn't forget: the state of newspapers is not the same thing as the state of journalism. As much as I love newspapers -- and fully expect them to survive -- the future of journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers.
Indeed, the future of journalism is to be found, at least partly, in the rapidly growing number of people who connect with the news in a whole new way.
News is no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news. It's become something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now -- expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.
In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.
* * *
The same people who never question why consumers would sit on a couch and watch TV for 8 hours straight can't understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues -- great and small -- that interest them. For free. They don't understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who Twitter for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook page for free, who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities... for free.
At the Huffington Post, and at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, we deeply value the role of professional reporters and editors, and have dozens of them on payroll. And we think the value of editors will only increase as the constant stream of information coming at us continues to swell -- making trusted guides and curators more and more essential to keeping us from being swept away.
But there is no denying that thousands and thousands of other people want in on the process and have much to contribute to it. And that number will only continue to grow. To deride the value of their contributions is to completely misunderstand the world we live in.
And the sooner we all embrace that world, the sooner we'll be able to stop the name calling, put aside the increasingly desperate metaphors and increasingly desperate revenue models, and focus on what really matters: ensuring that in the future, journalism will not only survive, but be strengthened and thrive.
