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editorial issues
By JR
Mar 28th 2008
at 8:56 pm EDT
I think the real factor killing print journalism is what will ultimately kill television as we understand it: people enjoy making their own editorial and programming decisions. When you aggregate your news online, you choose what articles and issues to focus on, based on your own interpretation of what's important, not someone else's. The position of News Director is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Soon, television will have to become more interactive in order to keep up with people's desire to program content themselves. TiVo is the first step towards this end. Internet television will probably provide the next few developments of note.
By the time the next decade ends, I fully expect that the majority of Americans will program their own viewing schedules in addition to selecting their own written news content.
In a seven-page story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Eric Alterman (The Nation, Media Matters) writes a riveting piece about the history, evolution, and future of newspapers.
As it has been repeatedly written about, there has been a sharp decline in paper-and-ink newspapers:
Newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years
The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004
Newspaper-wide trends of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches.
Young people are the driving force behind the change in newspaper dynamics:
Alterman reports that "thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper." (Ironically, as he points out, most newspaper Web sites just aggregate stories from their print editions.)
The original reporting, expertise, and foreign bureaus makes newspapers an indispensable source of information – most blogs wouldn’t exist without the major newspapers, just like this post wouldn't exist without The New Yorker. Some predict that in thirty years newspapers will exist solely online -- the future of print copy is another discussion. Leading blogs like The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo have democratized news and raised the level of transparency news agencies are held to, but they haven’t replaced the Times. Alterman makes the great case that whatever the medium newspapers are here to stay.
This is a must-read piece for anyone thinking about a career in print journalism.
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Soon, television will have to become more interactive in order to keep up with people's desire to program content themselves. TiVo is the first step towards this end. Internet television will probably provide the next few developments of note.
By the time the next decade ends, I fully expect that the majority of Americans will program their own viewing schedules in addition to selecting their own written news content.