

How Would You Save Journalism? - rohin
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/49378591328/how-would-you-save-journalism

======
jonnathanson
Most of these models make a critically flawed assumption: that everyone gets
the same thing out of the content, and accordingly, that a one-size-fits-all
solution will accommodate everyone.

We need to think more deeply about the statistical distribution patterns in
consumption of journalism (or of content, period). For instance, many of the
recent experiments in selling content -- music, movies, games, etc. -- online
have resulted in an interesting dynamic, something like a power-law
distribution. Approximately 5-8% of all users will account for 80% of the
revenues generated.

Instead of trying to beef up that percentage, we should think about _tailoring
a power version of the product to that power userbase_ , then charging them
the price they're willing to pay (which may be much higher than a mass-market
price). In the meantime, everyone else gets the basic version of the content
for a more basic price.

If this sounds like freemium, that's because it basically is. Freemium is a
fancy word for what economists call price discrimination, i.e., charging
different prices to different customer bases depending on different channels
and/or needs. Saving journalism will mean getting really deep into the weeds
on nailing the power law curve for any given type of content.

~~~
chrisballinger
At OpenWatch ( <https://openwatch.net> ) we are trying to solve this very
problem from the open-source hacker perspective. Our original pitch was that
we would operate on a "freemium" model: offer our journalism tools for free to
everyone so they can contribute to the commons, but charge money if you wanted
to make your investigations "closed source", similar in a way to GitHub.

Our hypothesis / current pitch is that people will pay money (either directly,
or on a voluntary subscription basis) to support journalists and the causes
they believe in. We are also a collaborative muckraking platform that allows
people to get directly involved in the stories they care about by contributing
verifiable phone calls, emails, or other primary source material through the
platform.

We only launched the beta version about a month ago, and are changing like
crazy every day, but would love to position ourselves to become somewhat like
the GitHub for Journalism in this new age of media. Since all of our content
is CC-BY and we stress the importance of the availability of a story's "source
code" in the form of primary source documents, we are hoping that in the
future people will ask to see a journalist's "OpenWatch Profile" in the same
way they ask for a programmer's "GitHub Profile" today.

------
coopdog
The end of the article has a great idea, combining both the voluntary donation
model and adding a lean component by asking what people would want to read
about. I feel like it might not be a success though as readers want you to
just know what they want and bring them something new rather than asking you
to do research. Maybe choosing from a selection of ideas though, that could
definitely work.

I'm putting my money on tablet magazines as the future of journalism.
Technology has made it so we don't need as many journalists reporting the same
news, so it makes sense to redeploy them to niches.

On digital magazines the payments are also more frictionless as Apple/Google
have already set it up, and I have a theory that the reading style is
different too. On the internet people want quick, shallow bites of
information, but when you're holding a tablet you probably have at least ten
minutes to really get into the deep, quality articles that professional
journalists excel at.

On my project (issimomag.com) we're having to really push our journalists not
just to write but to become true digital natives by finding pictures, videos,
soundbytes, mini apps, etc if appropriate to go with all stories. At an event?
Get your phone out, or better yet have a camera. The platform can handle a
gallery of thirty pictures effortlessly whereas traditionally you'd obviously
need to find space for them. In fact the pictures could be the entire story,
no more needed. Honestly its a bit of a struggle to change the culture after
decades of stagnation sometimes but it's one that journalists need to make.

------
ejfox
I think there’s a big place for a Kickstarter for journalism- consumers pay to
get the news that they want to hear. I saw this most during the Occupy actions
last year. Livestreamers would go out and cover events in their cities, funded
through donations. People found livestreamers whose actions and viewpoints got
them their news best, and then paid them directly. I’m sure a lot of them felt
the thrill of hearing their name thanked over a livestream watched by 1000s.
But others were simply paying for journalism- and in a way big news
organizations are not prepared to replicate. These weren’t micropayments, but
(often) funding of specific things. This month’s cell phone bill, a better
camera for better video, a light to see the action better. The connection
between spending your money and the results it brings needs to be tight. Watsi
knows this about philanthropy and executes perfectly. Maybe we need something
similar to that for journalism. This doesn’t leave much room for profit, but I
often prefer news sources without profit as a primary goal (Mother Jones, NPR,
et al.)

This is similar to the change the music industry is going through. There will
always be enough money to fund the creation of good music and good journalism.
The question is how it will be distributed in the future, and whether those
industries will still generate the profit they used to.

Musicians now release their albums independently for free or cheap, and then
make their cash from live shows and selling merchandise. This directly funds
the artist, but doesn’t leave room for a record company to take it’s cut. This
freaks out the music industry exactly the way the journalism industry is
freaking out. I think we are shifting away from following organizations for
our news to following individuals and funding them directly. Talking to them
on Twitter. Impacting what they cover next. As much as big news organizations
try to imitate this, it’s never the same as talking to and donating to an
independent journalist. Like the difference between seeing your favorite band
in a tight little club and at a stadium. There might not be enough profit
around to fund big newsrooms full of reporters at desks, but I am pretty sure
there will be enough money for reporters to make a living, especially if they
can come together in collectives in coworking spaces like the leanest of
start-ups do.

------
yk
I think that journalism ( in the sense of newspapers) is largely doomed. For
the general purpose "where did a bomb go off?" news, one site per country is
enough, so the biggest site will simply win ( and can sustain itself on an ad
model). For more in depth reporting, I do not see a way to beat hobbyist or
semi-professional blogs, since there is simply no way how a journalist can
beat a specialist. Especially if the specialist is working for free. [1] Above
of this, I think there is a market for long form journalism, which can be sold
by ebooks. ( And probably these ebook sales require a quality blog as
advertisement.)

So I think that a lot of journalists will need a new job, since their old one
was generated by the trouble of moving paper around. And I think the future of
journalism will be very few news portals, who produce baseline chatter, plus a
lot of much more specialized sites in addition to a few aggregators.
Unfortunately this is a construction which is easily swamped by PR bullshit.
So an editorial board, which publishes curated links, may actually be worth
something.

[1] This does not mean that an average blog is a good source, it means that
the best blog will always beat an average newspaper article. A random tech
journalist can simply not beat Bruce Schneier in anything crypto related.

~~~
wklauss
Donation will only get you so far and sooner or later the novelty of the idea
will wear off.Ebooks seems to be working a little better now, but its still a
very niche product.

The thing with blogs/specialist is that they don't cover a big scope and they
are not consistent. The job of a journalist is not to write a masterpiece on a
subject once in a blue moon, it'ss to write information pieces everyday, on a
consistent schedule and focusing of the issues that could have an impact on
the readers life. Even if the reader has not heard of them before or care
deeply about them. And in order to do that, they usually ask -or should ask-
specialists.

------
neilk
Why is journalism necessary?

The premise of journalism is that society is made better by masses of people
reading entertaining narrative stories about public figures. The stories don't
have to be true. You just have to be (a) insulated from adverse legal
outcomes, and (b) the story shouldn't bring the newspaper into disrepute among
the people who read it or the people who pay the bills.

In other areas of life, when we need information disseminated to people who
need to know, we don't immediately reach out to talented and entertaining
writers. We might create data collection system, reporting systems, alert
systems, computerized dashboards, systems of peer review, systems to identify
people who provide reliable information, that sort of thing. We may sometimes
want stories about daily life, but for that you might call on the services of
an anthropologist, not a poet.

So why, when it comes to public affairs, do we think we need the ink-stained
wretch? Perhaps because that's how it's been done for the past few centuries.
Enfranchisement reached the common person slowly, and information reached the
masses via printed documents, which were a mix of necessary daily information
and entertainment. For most of that time, the press was as ridiculous as it is
now, and usually far more partisan. The period in the middle of the 20th
century, when it at least aspired to civic-mindedness, was the anomaly.

Let us not take for granted that an informed public and the institution of
journalism are synonymous.

Disclaimer: ex-journalism student

~~~
asperous
We need journalism because we don't all have the time and resources to track a
story or investigate upcoming trends, cultures, or ideas.

If you aren't interested in what is going on around you, or you just prefer to
just "read the data" from public, government, or non-profit outlets then you
might not see a need for journalism.

"Community-curated" journalism seems to have replaced much of the "low hanging
fruit" that magazines and newspapers used to print.

~~~
neilk
There is a need for people to propose hypotheses about the data that's out
there. And to propose plans of action. And this information needs to reach
people who can do something with it.

Does it immediately follow that we need someone writing inverted-pyramid wire
service copy?

All I'm saying is, journalism is not an end in itself. It is at best, a means
to an end. We want a prosperous and just society where everyone is empowered,
and part of that is wide information distribution. But there could be many
roads to get there.

------
aero142
I think one interesting model missing is the cross publisher subscription
model. Think Netflix for Journalism. I send in 10 dollars a month for access
to a bunch of different Journalism sites. The publishers get paid a bulk rate
for access for the subscriber base. If you're not a member, you get more adds
of hit the paywall on those sites.

The problem is that it's a very difficult business to start and run and has
less money in it than the Movie and TV industry.

~~~
Perceval
Apple could do this. They already have 400 million credit cards linked to
iTunes accounts. Instead of subscribing to an individual newspaper/magazine in
their shitty Newsstand app, you could instead subscribe to the news and have
access to all of the news. You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes
micropayments to publishers based on pageviews or whatever. They could have a
premium section - kinda like cable companies offer high end channels
separately (e.g. HBO) – where you could subscribe to specialized
market/business news (e.g. market portions of WSJ and FT and Bloomberg, etc).

The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be
firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead. And also
to get basically all the major newspapers and magazines to sign on to the
scheme. It would probably be more difficult to achieve than negotiating with
the music labels for their catalogs. But the longer they keep bleeding cash,
the easier the negotiations will get.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _You pay Apple a monthly fee, and Apple distributes micropayments to
> publishers based on pageviews or whatever._

This is the model Kachingle have tried and Contenture tried. And a few others,
actually. Nobody's made it stick yet. Apart from Apple I could see PayPal,
Google and Facebook trying to make it work.

The problem is that no major media source is going to trust a different major
corporaton with their livelihoods in any all-or-nothing scheme. So there's
room for a smaller player to grow into the role. Which is what I've been
working on.

> _The only way to make it work would be for all their web content to be
> firewalled, and force people to get it through iTunes Store instead._

Actually, no it's not. It's possible to do this reliably without forcing
everyone through a paywall.

I know, because I developed a technology to do exactly this.

It allows publishers to selectively allow users through based on a general
aggregate scheme alongside their own paywall schemes. Or they can be open to
the web and collect from members only.

------
wklauss
>"The journalism industry seems to be in trouble. Newspaper revenue has shrunk
from $57.4 billion in 2003 to $38.6 billion in 2012."

I think what the article is trying to say is that the _printed_ journalism is
in trouble. And it might well be, but there are a lot of other forms of
journalism that are rising up.

We might not see something homogeneous resulting from it or a direct
substitute/evolution of these printed media formats. Maybe one of the
consequences of living on a permanently connected society is that we no longer
need a periodical summarization on whats going on in the world.

But as a journalist myself, theres a couple of things I'd like to see, even if
they might not be profitable or practical:

1\. A big daily newspaper shifting the news producing cycle. Devote the web to
last minute, daily news. Create a weekly focused on analysis and long
features.

2\. A tool to reach different groups of readers with different ages and ways
of consuming news pieces.

    
    
       2.1 How are teenagers discovering these days whats going on in the world? Through links in 4chan? ok, lets put links in 4chan then.
    
       2.2 How are 60-somethings engaging with important issues? through long forwarded mail chains with powerpoints attached? Great, lets do that!
    

3\. A way to effectively measure audience, something more useful than
pageviews and time spent on a page.

4\. An advertising platform that doesn't consider ads something to sell for
cents on the click. This has been one of the major disrupting elements in the
printed journalism world. We used to sell ads for A LOT of money, even when
(or maybe because) there was no way to effectively measure the reaction of the
reader.

But mostly what we are seeing is a total transformation of a business and I
don't think theres a way to change that or "save" anything. It's similar, in a
sense, to what happen to music labels a decade ago.

A. The business structure cannot sustain the current way the people are using
the product.

B. People in charge are worried of making big changes that might render them
obsolete, therefore they try to maintain the statu quo.

C. Most of the income is gone. Ads are cheaper and people buy less newspapers.

~~~
Shivetya
based on the AJC here in Atlanta, don't forget half your audience. Failure to
keep their editorial slant out of their everyday reporting clobbered this
paper.

After a few attempts to reinvent themselves, they tried to prop up their
numbers with web content. The sad part, far too many printed stories sent you
to the web to get the complete story which basically told readers, why bother
with print!

Another area people overlook, the for sale pages of papers took a direct hit
from ebay and craigslist. I remember buying papers just for the wanted ads,
but vehicles ended up on dedicated sites, cars.com / autotrader.com and such.

~~~
danso
Editorial slant has long been a characteristic of the most successful
newspapers, both in the Yellow Age and the Golden Age. The "golden age" was
golden, not because media achieved that perfect state of neutrality, but
because it was a time when newspapers merged and monopolized the print ad
industry. The slant of a newspaper is very likely a minor factor compared to
the major shift in advertising and information distribution caused by tech.
But to think that media is reaping what they sowed for disagreeing with one's
political beliefs is a more comforting, digestible explanation, like when a
adulterer gets hit by a car as a purported act of God.

------
idw
I get to take part in a lot of these discussions and find the following
response handy (via [http://newsmary.tumblr.com/post/32264906546/your-
approach-to...](http://newsmary.tumblr.com/post/32264906546/your-approach-to-
saving-british-newspapers-will-not)):

    
    
        Your post advocates a
    
        ( ) technical (X) legislative () market-based ( ) crowd-sourced
    
        approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the rapaciousness of modern publishers.)
    
        ( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
        ( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
        ( ) No one will be able to find the guy
        ( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
        (X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model
        (X) Users of the web will not put up with it
        ( ) Print readers will not put up with it
        ( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
        ( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
        ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
        ( ) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
        ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
        ( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt
        (X) It will destroy the competition that makes journalism great
    
        Specifically, your plan fails to account for
    
        ( ) Readers’ unwillingness to pay for just news
        ( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
        ( ) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
        ( ) Sources’ proven unwillingness to “go direct”
        ( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
        ( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
        ( ) The high cost of investigative journalism
        (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
        ( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
        ( ) Legal liability of “citizen journalism”
        ( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
        (X) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
        ( ) The necessity of the editing process
        (X) Americans’ huge distrust of professional journalism
        ( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
        ( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
        ( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
        (X) Rupert Murdoch
        (X) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
        ( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
        ( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
        (X) Technically illiterate politicians
        ( ) The tragedy of the commons
        ( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
        ( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites
    
        and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
    
        (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
        ( ) That the US press dropped the ball on Iraq is a symptom, not a cause
        ( ) Print advertising pays so well because advertisers *can’t* work out the return they’re getting.
        ( ) Information does not want to be free
        ( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few readers are actually all that interested in, quite honestly
        ( ) That your friend was misquoted once in a paper does not mean journalism is bunk
        ( ) Everybody reading the same story is a feature, not a bug
        ( ) Having a free online “printing press” doesn’t turn you into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
        (X) Wall Street won’t allow newspaper groups to back off from 20% profit margins
        (X) Newspaper executives are second only to record industry executives for short-sighted idiocy
        ( ) E-paper still doesn’t give publishers back their ad monopoly and hence its revenue
        ( ) You can’t charge for online content unless all your competitors do it too, all at once.
        ( ) Ethics are hard to hold up when your bills are due
        ( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
        ( ) “Gatekeepers” can help keep out undesirable things
        ( ) Publishing less often makes you even less relevant
        ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
        ( ) Free society depends upon a free press
        ( ) Democracy is bad enough with the press we’ve already got
        ( ) You think print is bad? Imagine Fox News, as a blog. That’s what your idea will turn into.
        ( ) Reader-generated content is to professional news what YouTube is to big-studio movies.
        ( ) Have you read the comments on news websites? They make YouTubers look like geniuses.
        ( ) You are Jeff Jarvis
        ( ) Or Dave Winer
    
        Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
    
        (X) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
        ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
        ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

------
fallous
I worked for a newspaper group from 2001-2008 trying to convince them to
reinvent themselves and veer off the suicide course they had chosen.

They have to stop trying to be "portals" in the crap late-90s meaning (which
reflects their legacy model, especially AP-affiliated era) and start
differentiating.

If you're a local paper, stop wasting newsprint on regurgitating what everyone
already saw on a website, television, or heard on a radio while you were still
busy laying the pages out. Stop stroking your vanity opining in editorials
about things for which you have no special knowledge and demonstrate that the
only reason your opinion is more "valuable" than the reader's is that you buy
ink in barrels.

If your content is valuable to readers and actually has lasting value, they'll
still buy it in print. They'll also buy it as a pushed product to whatever
device they prefer. If it's valuable to other content outlets, they'll pay for
it as well. Drop your AP affiliation (a rent-seeker that makes government look
amateur in comparison) and actually sell to aggregation or re-print customers
instead of paying AP for the privilege of sniping your content for resharing
and offering you nothing of significance to your readership.

Unfortunately every news group I encountered in those 7 years were too hide-
bound to "how we used to make money", and the vast majority were inbred from
top to bottom. Run a multi-million dollar news group? Well obviously you
started as a cub reporter and have a journalism degree, which of course makes
you imminently more qualified to see into future markets than some outsider
who isn't a journalist.

The industry has signed up for a suicide pact, and only after they succeed in
that will new and viable players rise up to fill the real demand for relevant
news.

------
rmason
Most of my friends under forty don't read a daily newspaper. Yet as they
marry, buy a house and have kids a curious thing happens - they develop an
avid interest in local news.

Newspapers should refocus solely on local and state news. They should deliver
it digitally on smart phones. The revenue model is the hard part, but I'd
probably go the subscription route.

But your local newspaper is never going to evolve gracefully. They will keep
publishing the old way until their current subscribers die off and then will
slowly go out of business.

But there is a huge opportunity out there for the entrepreneur who gets it
right.

~~~
prawn
The advantage of local news is that you're hitting long tail content and
avoiding the brutal competition you'd otherwise face for things like world and
celebrity news.

------
mynameishere
They left out the Carlos Slim model: Some rich guy with an agenda keeps the
paper alive by giving it money, giving it cheap loans, or just buying it. A
lot of small, political magazines operate this way.

~~~
integraton
Much of journalism has always been subsidized by wealthy individuals.

------
jgamman
no-one has mentioned the obvious - tax. the UK gives cash to the BBC via a
compulsory television licence fee. say what you will about the beeb, it comes
up with some excellent stuff. someone more eloquent than me could surely make
the argument that a functioning democracy needs an accurate and neutral
repository of history as it happens. think of it as a news API and let others
figure out how to make it local etc. tax in the US? YMMV...

------
sxcurry
Another option is to make the content more compelling. Let's face it - even
the NYTimes (which I pay for) has a lot of really poorly written articles,
especially in the Tech and Business arenas. It takes a lot of my time to sort
through the mess of factually incorrect stuff in order to get good
information. In fact, a lot of the reason I pay for the Times is for the
commentary - Krugman, Friedman, etc. I would pay more for better journalism.

~~~
wklauss
Before jumping the fence and start writing for a newspaper I used to believe
tech and business information was really bad in newspapers and magazines. Then
I became one of the "bad writers". Truth is those articles are not "bad", they
are just not written for you. Someone with a deep knowledge of the insides of
Washington, or fashion, or the restaurant business will think the same about
the politics, lifestyle and dining sections. I read the NYT daily and,
honestly, its hard to find a better example of good journalism these days.
Yes, of course not everything is Pulitzer-worthy but journalism is not
different that any other endeavor. Your average is far from your best.

------
stretchwithme
Create a group of highly respected editors coming from a wide variety of
perspectives that are salaried (no bonuses) and appointed for a single fixed
period, and that can present stories from a wide variety of sources. These
editors are to agree not to work for another news organization for at least a
year after serving.

It would have no writers or television crews of its own, but would pick the
best stories from organizations that do.

Any member of this board could pick a topic to cover. And a majority of the
board could shoot down a particular piece for failing to conform to its
standard.

One half hour broadcast a day I can watch any time would be nice and a web
site. I don't care if its ad-supported but advertisers are to have no say on
content. Some independent funding will probably be necessary. Make it a
kickstarter project.

------
sts2055
It could be solved by going the infrastructure route. I'm thinking a free ISP
with ads instead of monthly payments as a source of revenue. The ISP would
have a whitelist of websites that are available, everything else is blocked.
Businesses would pay a monthly fee to the ISP to be added to its whitelist. In
return, ads would be displayed after users spend a certain amount of time on
their website, with ad revenues going directly to the website.

The free, ad-driven ISP would start out as an experiment in a small area. It
would be available via public WIFI to primarily serve mobile devices without
cellular data plans.

------
pippy
Social media and on-line communities are more democratic than traditional
journalism, however we miss out on an important form of journalism:
investigative journalism.

Wikileaks fills a void, but is dependent on security exploitation.

In the future we will potentially miss out on a valuable occupation. Perhaps
corporate/government sponsorship for investigative journalism is the way
forward.

~~~
wklauss
>Social media and on-line communities are more democratic than traditional
journalism

Democracy has nothing to do with the editorial process.

------
funtober
Imagine a world where Best Buy hired tech reporters to cover tech news and
also sold the technology products to their readers.

Or where fashion magazines sell the products they cover on their website
rather than advertising.

Why haven't they moved toward this? Journalistic integrity?

~~~
wklauss
Because that's not journalism. You already have that. They are product
catalogues. Even if you somehow manage to keep some kind of integrity in the
process, that only covers a fraction of the content that a newspaper /
magazine generates. What would be the interest of Best Buy in writing about,
say, CISPA if theres no related product they can sell to you?

------
adregan
I don't know about everyone else, but I wish I could read less news of higher
quality. I would subscribe to a news service that only gave me a handful of
news articles at the end of the week—well researched and written by people who
know what they are talking about.

------
wpnx
I would argue that the internet's erosion of our attention span is making
'journalism' type articles less and less appealing to users.

I really hope, as @pippy remarks, that investigative journalism finds a place.

------
im3w1l
I think dig jobs should be considered Intellectual Property and be protected
for some short ~day-week time period.

------
AnthonBerg
Pay what you want. 50% goes to taxes.

------
vacri
They point to HumbleBundle as a potential replacement model, but that one has
already stagnated. So many repeated games in the humblebundle offerings makes
each new one less desirable. Recently they started with 'humble-bundle-of-the-
week'... which gave me two weeks of things they'd already offered... which
means that they've effectively turned into a traditional online retailer:
"Hello, here's our inventory".

The uniqueness and freshness was lost and the unsubscribe button was struck -
without that _je ne sais quoi_ , there is less forgiveness when regarding
their foibles - the spammy emails of the same content, the "Every game has a
linux version (but actually may not!)", the lack of a mechanism for patches
and updates, some games shipping in a broken state. It was fun while it
lasted, but as they transition to a quirky-but-regular online retailer, their
original business model is not proved robust.

------
lifeisstillgood
I recently had a discussion here about Nazis rounding up people for
concentration camps and why the right to bear arms does not help much. IMO the
first amendment is a better defence than the second.

In the end that's what journalism is for - telling us when and where democracy
and our rule of law is failing. Doing so clearly, authoritatively and with
impact.

Wikileaks is in that definition journalism - as was watergate. We will all be
much much poorer if we cannot ensure the survival of that journalism.

I think the secret lies in the fact I cannot tell between a blog post about a
conspiracy nut in a parking garage and a blog post about the deputy director
of the FBI in a parking garage.

Ben Bradlee could. We need editors if we are going to keep journalism.

~~~
nwzpaperman
The problem you are talking about isn't editor vs. no editor, it's
accountability.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Do you mean how do we ensure government is conducted transparently, openly and
accountably to the people under that government?

Yeah, the reaction to wiki leaks clearly shows the greatest democracy on earth
is down with transparent accountability

~~~
nwzpaperman
Herbert Spencer: <http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Spencer/spnMvS9.html>

"Yet that societies are not artificially put together, is a truth so manifest,
that it seems wonderful men should ever have overlooked it. Perhaps nothing
more clearly shows the small value of historical studies, as they have been
commonly pursued. You need but to look at the changes going on around, or
observe social organization in its leading traits, to see that these are
neither supernatural, nor are determined by the wills of individual men, as by
implication the older historians teach; but are consequent on general natural
causes."

Democracy is an effect, not a cause. Don't conflate the two or project values
on to me to which I have not espoused.

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Kudzu_Bob
A much more interesting subject than how we can save journalism is whether
journalism can save us.

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nwzpaperman
First off, journalism is a multi-faceted problem that insiders think about in
terms of their past relationship and outsiders think of with contempt. The
above dynamics make it a very challenging problem to move from here to there.

The failure of legacy print publishing isn't about advertising. The failure of
legacy digital publishing isn't about advertising. Information needs to be
treated as you would any physical asset. The primary difference is that
information is the most liquid asset in the world. Information has very few
barriers to transmission, supply is almost entirely an artificial constraint
and only a question of time and demand before a market for information is
satisfied.

What that means is that print papers are slow transmission conduits with a
relatively high artificial barrier on supply. Information follows diffusion
principles in that it naturally wants to move from high to low states. Got
secrets? ;)

Snazzy UIs, native readers and whatever kind of third-party aggregator
everyone wants to build will be a failure. I know for fact that if I paid
journalists anything, they would write on nwzPaper; no questions asked.

At a 13% proficient literacy rate in the US, and worse in most of the world,
it's a challenge to cultivate a new journalism environment online, but it is
absolutely a solvable problem.

Patch.com, Examiner.com and Yahoo's associated content have all but thrown in
the towel. AOL has bet big on Armstrong and Patch and per their February job
req, it looks like they want to double down!

The new journalism content and revenue model can only develop on top of the
right platform. The stakes are quite high as the first winner will also win
many adjacent markets as well!

I am biased, but I've got years of thinking and development into developing an
actual platform solution that can efficiently scale global. Six months of beta
knowledge and data and the next iteration coming soon.

