If Newspapers are SO Over, What is the Fall Out? (Part 2 of 2)

I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to choose the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.”

OK that’s a bit overworked, but the gist is that an educated, well read populace is important to creating a functional democratic government. But the demise of newspapers, should it actually come to pass, will be felt even beyond our democracy – which given its lynch pin role is hard to imagine. Newspapers are not just the key to keeping the voting public informed, in a more fundamental way they have taken the place of story tellers in our tribes, weaving a cohesive thread of social narrative in a pluralistic country.

Clay Shirky in his recent post which was blogged and twittered about online ad nauseum (albeit completely worthy) http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/) talks about the new reality of walking in a forest of content  speaks to me a gluttony of riches, without only our personal world view for context. Newspapers as a mass media (with a flawed but necessary history and credo of being based in the pursuit of fact and truth) tell the big narrative while the Internet, more like magazines and channels on our cable, tell more niched narrative – allowing us to choose what most represents either who we are, who we want to be or what we believe.

One question has remained unanswered since I first asked it at a Screaming Content panel in 2000: Once we are all wandering in that forest of an abundance of online news, self selecting media that more than likely agrees with our individual world views, and there are no more “newspapers of record”, what will that do to our shared perspective any given day in terms of What Has Happened? What Does It Mean?  The entire forest of these web entities will each cover these events very differently, or choose to not at all. What would this have meant for Pearl Harbor, or D-Day or 9/11? What becomes of our shared societal narrative and understanding of who we are? Already, due to some erosion in journalism, every narrative is now considered questionable because every source is considered niched or written through left/right lens. In a post newspaper world, will we even be able to agree on historical record? Will all discussion of the facts be considered suspect? And what happens when our social narrative is no longer societal, but individual? What does it, will it do to what cleaves us together? More questions to which we have no answers. It may be that we may then live through even more interesting times.

This sentiment is captured best in a quote from blah from Mark Morford of the teetering San Francisco Chronicle:

“[online]…how the hell you’ll know which “truth” is actually the one you should listen to. Whom do you trust? How do you know? How the hell do you actually find anything resembling balance and context and through-line, when no one has an editor and anyone can say anything and the concept of ‘journalistic professionalism’ is nowhere to be found, because no one wants to pay for it?  This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy ‘a mature blogosphere will supplant old media’ argument. In the howling absence of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do — the fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought news brand credibility — what’s the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many followers your given source has on Twitter? Right.”

So am I anti-Internet? Absolutely not – it has its own virtues and role to play in our democracy. And it’s how I’ve made my living over the last 12 years.  No development has been so equalizing and exciting in over 150 years.

One of the most dynamic and valuable characteristics of the Internet is how diverse the content offerings are. In fact, content is no longer King; content is now Every Man. Though without newspapers to offer the universal context, it ends up being more cacophony than chorus and more diversifying than unifying.  That said, I do think the anger lobbed at the Internet (and blogs) by those in journalism is misplaced.  Neither the Web nor blogs is monolithic nor the cause.

Blogs are on their own evolutionary path. They can be a well-researched, well sourced column for a new style journalism – even breaking solid news once in a while. They can be a destination more like an ezine, and in many cases they are just the navel gazing meanderings of a guy in his dorm room. (Hey, who cares about the medium, at least he’s writing!) The fist shakers often warn that bloggers are no match and all they do is link to and comment on what’s in newspapers. Well, no they aren’t a match but they may be the mammal that’s left after the dinosaur is dead and as such they shouldn’t (and can’t) be dismissed as also rans or the cause of the extinction. The whining is symptomatic of the level of frustration and fear felt in the print business. It is sure to turn into howls of anguish as they fail in larger numbers. (Though some will successfully re-engineer themselves.) Stones will be thrown.

Make no mistake, though, we are treading on untried roads. In the past, media did not completely usurp any other – newspapers did not replace books, radio did not replace newspapers, cable did not replace radio and so on – we simply increased our capacity for information consumption. Replacement is not what’s happening now either. It’s just that after newspapers are a victim of commercial Darwinism, the Internet will simply be what’s left.

Images: HandsOn, Flickr osubeav