Doing journalism the right way
The most future-proof Business School teachers once suggested to his students that they should start a business by looking at local activity reviews on Yelp, then take the three major problems reported by clients, and found their business on doing exactly the opposite in all three instances.
Words aren’t enough to describe the troubles of the publishing industry; at least I can find no better words than those posted by Jeff Jarvis, yesterday, on the subject of media and news.
That said, I worry about journalists who spend one day writing to serve the public and the next writing to serve sponsors. News organizations should never do that with staff, but I’m sorry to say that today, a few do. Freelance journalists are also turning to making sponsored content to pay the bills. - Jeff Jarvis
A fierce battle is being fought: there is the struggle to sustain information and journalism on one side; on the other, stand legions of publishers trying to understand how to prevent their circulation and advertisement revenue from sinking even lower. Both sides are faced with the same problem and, frankly, neither is to blame.
For once in my life, I want to stop thinking of the media as a business.
I believe in the freedom of information, and view journalistic ethics as a means of benefitting the readers. The purpose of the freedom, and the ethics, is to provide added value through in-depth analysis and research, by quoting sources and putting facts and data together to attain a broader perspective.
You can’t simply stop providing a service and still expect to be paid. Most publishing outlets today are struggling to make a living out of a business model which is no longer existent. Most of them earned money once, on the assumption that no-one could do better than them at news. As it turned out, they were wrong.
Reporting is no longer an organized business: it is a two-way conversation between storytellers and readers, with both sides being enriched by narrating and listening. There is already a community of storytellers out there: it was formed years ago, as they jumped on the blogging bandwagon. As usually happens, they disrupted the established model.
It takes vision and understanding to go through the battle unharmed. Not having to protect a pre-existing condition also helps.
