Journalism's Long Irritating Whine subject logo: CULTURE
2009-11-28
Posted by: badanov

Fred over at rantburg.com posted a fisking of an opinion piece lamenting the condition of journalism.

My response:

And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting.

This is one of the sillier bit of this lament.

Way back in the early 80s I read that something like 90 percent of news published in newspapers originated in institutions, which release the news for free. Government, corporations et cetera.

Intellectual theft my ass.

Now takes very little effort to go to an institution's website to get the news and then develop a story using other sources if you want to localize. And newspapers hate that yet they refuse to admit it preferring to toss about charges of IP theft.

This idea that professional news must be published with fact checkers and layers of staff started towards the window with the advent of the Internet, and with the CRU scandal, it is trying to grab on to the ledge to keep from going down.

Allow me to step on those fingers:

Journalism is fragmented because frankly it stopped serving the people. A person now can report business news the same way with the same quality as large institutions and do so with little effort and little expense, thanks to the internet.

Newspapers suffer from an institutional malady. I don't have a term for the sickness, but someone probably does. The theory is that institutions reach the end of their usefulness when they reach a certain, larger size, and their custodians often are forced to make a decision: do we continue to grow and become even more inefficient and ineffective, or do we change, reduce our size and maintain or increase the quality of our output, and thus its value?

News organizations haven't even reach the conclusions that even news institutions no longer scale well, and whining about it in your product doesn't make the coming decisions any easier.

Some friendly advice to Mr. Gerson:

It's time to come to Jesus, way past time, in fact. I appreciate that Mommy is no longer here to daub your tears and kiss and hug you, but it is time to cowboy up, and face the facts. Change or go out of business.

If you have something to add, Fire Away!

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