thoughtsignals

Geneva Overholser says it’s time for people to stop fretting about the future of journalism and start doing something about it.

What could be worse than having journalism on iPods?  How about NOT having it there? Take a cruise through some of the Web sites that, say, give ethnic news a well-deserved wider hearing. Or that enable people to search crime news by type, time and location. Or that pay the sort of loving attention to what’s going on in a particular neighborhood that only an old-fashioned weekly once knew how to do. How wondrously they put us to shame, all of us with our endless reasons why we can’t possibly fit something in our newspaper or newscast.

There is a great deal of fretting these days in newsrooms about the future of journalism. Overholser is right, of course, that we need to do better. But I think her call for action on the part of other stakeholders — corporate shareholders, for example — is a little naive.

One of the new things that we need to invent for journalism is a new business model. Some day online advertising may provide enough revenues to support robust investigative journalism (or, maybe not, for reasons I won’t go into here). But in any case, the money’s not there yet. And that’s got to be a part of this new future — not just more and better journalism, but a business model that doesn’t rely on the near monopoly power that sustained so many news organizations for so many decades.

Link.