The MediaShift Idea Lab is a great site for the discussion on how community news could be reinvented to meet the needs of the 21st century. Paul Grabowitz, the assistant dean and director of the new media program at the UC-Berkeley j-school recently posted some thoughts I found hopeful and refreshing. Here’s an excerpt I especially liked:
It’s not the ideal of great journalism that people reject, but something about the way we produce and package it that’s broken. That’s something on which the public and now perhaps most journalists both seem to agree.
What could a new journalism product look like that might appeal to people and be true to the ideals of informing the public about important issues and nurturing democracy?
It would be a product focused on connecting, something others on this blog have mentioned.
Empty the newsrooms for a week or a month, and have reporters and editors – and even ad sales people – connect with people in the community and talk with them about their lives and what they say they want and need.
Then use all the tools of digital technology to connect people with the information that best meets those needs, whether it’s a database or a map mashup, a guide to local businesses or a space for sharing content.
Then nurture online communities and social networks to connect people to each other and to us, and uncover new connections.
And finally connect those topics and conversations with the larger public policy issues that underlie all of that, but often in subtle ways.
So great journalism wouldn’t be served up as a sermon. Instead investigative articles and in-depth contextual stories would be the end product of a new, bottom-up relationship with the public.
And that might be a product on which a new business model can be built, by selling it to advertisers who want to go where audiences go or selling it to readers who value what we are offering them. And it might be something nonprofits could support, not to preserve the past but to serve democracy and the public interest with a product in which the public is interested.
I agree with what Grabowitz has written. I hope some news entrepreneurs don’t look at the “give ‘em what they want” philosophy as an excuse for pumping bizarre, titillating news stories from far and near. These stories happen. But how we play them can say a lot about who we are. To its credit, seattletimes.com didn’t play up a story about a man who died after having sex with a horse; the blogosphere found it, however, and it became the number-one story on the entire website for 2006. (And the story has bred a movie.)
While I agree with the “give ‘em what they want” philosophy as Grabowitz has laid it out, I wonder whether it will contribute to the continued shrinking of foreign news coverage. Focus groups routinely show that Americans place a low priority on international news coverage. And yet, most of our pressing issues in the news today are tightly linked with what’s happening overseas. Americans need to know what people in the Middle East are saying about us and why. We need to know how our trade policies affect businesses here and in other countries. We can’t just rely on the Brits or the Canadians or journalists from other nations to tell us what’s going on. This is where responsible news media satisfy their obligation to be acting in the public interest and filling a need that isn’t profitable, but important to our right to know.
I suspect that we need to be doing a better job of packaging stories from abroad for our readers — and be willing to partner with other news organizations if necessary to fund compelling enterprise about issues that affect an entire region. One of the best stories I’ve ever read was part of a 1998 series in The Oregonian called “The French Fry Connection” that explained the globalization of the economy by tracing back a french fry’s journey from the potato fields. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
As always, there’s a balancing act that I think responsible news media try to maintain between the customer-service model and the public-interest model. The pendulum is swinging toward the customer-service model.
