The Modern Journalist

Sustainability: Why Social Media Doesn’t Need Journalism

My buddy Dan, who wrote a great book called We the Media, posted a blog about sustainability in citizen journalism.

His point is this: sustainability doesn’t mean that one project goes on forever; instead, it’s a series of ad-hoc projects continually spring up depending on the issues of the day. He says that traditional media is still the place where this makes the most sense.

Which is true. And it’s not true.

If the traditional media culture can shed its belief that it’s the fundamental — and definitive — source for information, it has a fighting chance of making headway in the world. That requires a leap that I don’t believe can be made any time soon.

Business by its nature is conservative. When you have people working for you, it’s difficult to radically turn the ship. Nobody wants to fire people. Nobody wants to make a disastrous change that results in the company going belly up.

I had a boss recently tell me that one of his employees said that paper was likely going to last at least another 20 years, when he’d be retiring. He has no reason to commit to a new way of doing business.

And that’s where I disagree with Dan. He believes in the utopian model of the newspaper; I believe in the cynical. I’ve yet to come across a forward-thinking editor fully willing to embrace the digerati, to elevate the digital thinkers to the level of the print editors, to commit to resources to hire the types of people who can both run and develop a digital-centric model and to throw their support behind that initiative.

There are too few people on the management side who don’t understand how online media consumption works. They refer to studies and reports (which are good) instead of turning to those who inherently understand how consumption and creation happen.

Here are a few snippets I’ve heard throughout the years in terms of digital life:

• I was in a meeting in 2005 when a senior manager told the staff that the iPod was a toy for 13-year old girls;
• Blogs are simply people talking about their cat;
• News organizations can’t make money online;
• User-created content can’t be any good; nobody will create content;
• Blogs are nothing more than glorified home pages and aren’t worth investing;
• Journalists are the experts;
• There’s no way to verify if what a blogger says is accurate, you can at a newspaper;
• Nobody reads in-depth writing online;
• The brand much be prominent online;
• We can’t figure out how much a page is worth;
• We have to make people pay for all of our content.

I could go on. The words echo through my head — and they echo through the heads of the digerati I’ve talked to on my travels.

I posted a producer job on a listserv I run for students learning how to build front-end interfaces and content. The response was universal: nobody wanted to go work for a newspaper.

It’s possible I’ve poisoned them. More likely (I hope) is they realize the coolest innovations online are happening at media companies, not Media companies. The launch of OpenSocial, the development of platforms for social media and the birth of the “me” digital culture are serious issues for traditional media companies hoping to procure talent.

So I don’t by buy Gillmor’s contention that newspapers are the best place for this media to exist. Not yet.