Dan Gillmor has added to the death of newspapers debate, with A dying craft, or a dying business? and, like Jay Rosen’s Laying the newspaper gently down to die it’s required reading.
He begins:
I now take it for granted that newspapers are trapped — highly profitable businesses that can’t or won’t take the kind of risks that will be crucial to survival.
I do not take it for granted that newspapers must die, however. And I definitely don’t believe journalism is dying. It’s changing.
Previous media forms didn’t die even though they lost hegemony to new media. Some newspapers make their way through what’s coming, because they’ll become the community square for whatever community it is that they serve, geographic, demographic or whatever. (That’s why the Wall Street Journal, for all its cluelessness about the Web in an archival sense, has a future, and why some local papers still have time to become the primary authorities in their areas before the online competition eats their lunch.)
Dan goes on to lay out a likely path for the near future for existing newspapers and looks at some of the strands being pulled together that will ensure that some newspapers survive, although in new forms.
His piece should be read in conjunction with Jay’s: between the two of them, the neatly bracket the conversation that needs to take place. With some modesty, I suggest my post adds a little to the debate.
UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis also has an interesting piece at Buzz Machine. A teaser:
Journalism is not defined by the person who does it or by the medium or the company that delivers it.
Journalism is not a thing. It is an act: The act of informing is journalism. It’s a verb, not a noun.
And no one owns journalism. It is not an official act, a certified act, an expert act, a proprietary act. Anyone can do journalism. Everyone does. Some do it better than others, of course. But everyone does it.
Realizing that — embracing that — will be the key to saving journalism: its quality and its business.
TECHNORATI TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, RETHINKING MEDIA, JOURNALISM
