Report: Newspapers Likely to be Free, Opinion Filled

May 6th, 2008 | by Brad King |
The invention of the printing press made it possible for scientists and politicians to communicate their ideas with ease, leading to the Age of Enlightenment; an example of technology as a cultural force.Image via Wikipedia

The Zogby International polling group surveyed newspaper editors and found that most editors believe the newspaper of the future will have three features:

  1. they will be free
  2. they will have more opinion
  3. they will include more comments

The report goes on to say that 30 percent of those editors survey wanted to hire more journalists and 35 percent believed they could train current journalists to use new technologies.

While it’s admirable that the current employers don’t want to jettison employees and believe there will be more journalism jobs in the future, I can’t help but think there is some major disconnect between how the modern world is working and what these editors are looking at.

For instance:

If you’re truly going to move into a data-intensive world, it’s important to have the technological wherewithal to constantly move and change. That means hiring programmers and other technically savvy folks to build the tools you need.

The history of technology is one of toolmakers (programmers) building tools (software) that other people can use to maximize efficiency. For a long time, news organizations have looked to third-party companies to build them tools. The only problem: they don’t understand the culture, they don’t understand the moment-to-moment needs of a news room and they don’t understand the employees.

No matter what these vendors build, it will always be inferior to what your business needs. The nature of this type of development demands that be true.

I’m always flabbergasted when I speak with management at news organizations and, discussing online, they say the first hire they want to make is an editor. It’s ridiculous. It’s as if they believe you can get a bunch of content and then *waving hands* magically make the technology appear and run the way it should in a modern world.

Which leads to the second idea that editors believe they can hire more journalists and train the current ones they have on emerging technologies in a way that will allow them to compete with modern online companies.

It’s a fallacy. The sooner the industry realizes that what’s needed is a purging of the dead weight — and by that, I don’t mean high priced journalists. Experience and information gathering and context mean more today than ever before. However, the days of writing 2 stories a week for the paper are over. If employees believe that is what journalism is, then it’s best to bid them adieu.

What you need is a two-tiered system of reporters. Young cubs who are gathering data. The best training ground for reporting used to be the fact check desk. Today, I believe it’s going to be in data gathering. Beating the streets to find out every piece of data available and making sure that’s it’s constantly updated.

Then, as I’ve discussed in Newspaper 2.0, the technologists can create data visualizations for the public and for the office, which the veteran reporters can use as the basis for their stories (or at least better target them).

All the while, your community manager is actively recruiting people to participate in these online networks that ALSO contribute vital data and information.

The goal shouldn’t be to give up journalism, go to comments and hire a bunch of “journalists” to write short, pithy stories. If that’s the solution to the journalism problem, then I truly hope the major media institutions fail because that is a complete disservice to the Fourth Estate.

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