Introduction

Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World

By Michael R. Fancher

Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.

— Recommendation 1, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age

Introduction

The financial plight of news media companies was alarmingly clear when the Knight Commission released its report in October 2009. Newspapers were closing or filing for bankruptcy. Print and broadcast news staffs were being cut and coverage reduced. There was growing concern that the loss of traditional media at the local level would lessen citizens’ ability to have the information they need for their personal lives and for civic engagement, as well as their ability to hold government accountable.

The Commission’s conclusion was stark: “The current financial challenges facing private news media could pose a crisis for democracy.” The Commission also made several counter-intuitive assertions:

• This is a moment of journalistic opportunity.
• From the standpoint of public need, the challenge is not to preserve any particular medium. It is to promote the traditional public service functions of journalism.
• Journalistic institutions do not need saving, they need creating. America needs “informed communities” in which journalism is abundant in many forms and accessible through many convenient platforms.
• This will require experimentation and will include for-profit, non-profit and public models. Universities, other community institutions and the public should participate in these experiments.

Starting with those assertions, this paper will offer strategies and action ideas to strengthen local journalism. The paper focuses on journalism supported by marketplace incentives, including both for-profit and not-for-profit models. (Public media is examined in a separate Aspen Institute white paper, “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive,” by Barbara Cochran.)

This paper rests on a fundamental premise: If journalism did not exist today, it would not be created in the form that it has been practiced for the past century. The values, functions and purposes of journalism are as important as ever, but journalism must be re-invented as an interactive endeavor if it is to remain relevant and accountable. Journalism education must play a key transformative role.

Technology is creating a networked world in which people have unprecedented control over their use of media. They can be their own editors; they can create and widely share their own stories. Therefore, everything about journalism should be re-examined in light of what is newly possible. Policies, structure and practices should be explored to transform traditional news organizations and to promote the creation of true journalism in non-traditional ways.

True journalists distinguish themselves most by their commitment to finding and reporting the truth as fully and fairly as possible. They dedicate themselves to serving the public, independent of commercial, political or other forces that would compromise their responsibility and accountability to the public. Knowing that truth is elusive and that they are fallible, they approach their craft with humility, open-mindedness and a ready willingness to acknowledge and correct their mistakes. They understand that their work has little meaning if it is not respected and trusted by the public it intends to serve.

The modern form of journalism in America is about 100 years old. Throughout that time there have been debates as to whether journalism truly is a profession, but its functions have been performed by a relatively small number of practitioners who have been the Fourth Estate, the gatekeepers, watchdogs for the public. Also throughout that time, journalism schools have taught the craft and standards of journalism. There have been associations of journalists and codes of ethics to guide professional conduct. There have been laws and legal rulings that codify, to some degree, the importance and standing of journalism in a democratic society.

And there was a business model that linked content, audience and advertising to financially sustain the work of journalists. The news business was based in large measure on the scarcity of information and on the cost of gathering, processing and distributing that information. While journalism itself is a consumer service, the method for processing and distributing it has been essentially industrial, with high barriers to entry for new competitors.

Of necessity, journalism through most of the past century has been a one-way communication system. The practical definition of “news” has been whatever journalists published or broadcast. There has been minimal public involvement in the functions of journalism and diminishing public trust in its performance. That is all changing profoundly and permanently.1

The Knight Commission observed that the same digital network technology that is disrupting the business model that has supported American journalism “can lead to a new ecology of journalism in which reporters and their publics intermix in new ways.”

Technology is opening amazing possibilities to give people convenient access to both civic and life-enhancing information, without regard to income or social status, the Commission said. What is needed, it added, is “fresh thinking and new approaches to the gathering and sharing of news and information.”

The question to be answered, the Commission said, is this: How can we advance quality, skilled journalism that contributes to healthy information ecologies in local communities?

The “we” in the Commission’s question is all of us—citizens, journalists, civic and government leaders, educators. Traditional and emerging media organizations obviously play lead roles, but meaningful journalism can also be produced in non-traditional organizations. A key question is how these efforts can happen in symbiotic ways to best serve the information health of local communities.

If the purpose of journalism in America is to give citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing,2 then each of us has a stake in the future of local journalism. And, with emerging communication technologies, all of us have opportunities to help create journalism that is better, more accurate, more thorough, more diverse and more trusted than ever.

Previous Page | Next Page: The Challenge