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1.1: The future is now

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    There’s never been a better time to be a journalist. That might sound odd considering how many newspaper journalists lost their jobs since 2000 (3,000),1 but there has never been a time that offered so many powerful ways to tell stories and serve readers with information. If you love journalism, you have to love having more tools at your disposal, more interaction with your audience and the near disappearance of traditional constraints of time and space.

    Sure, times are tough on the business side. If you think about print news products — daily and weekly newspapers and magazines — in marketing terms, everyone knows about these products and knows how to use them. As a marketer, that’s an enviable position to be in when trying to sell something. Yet sales are declining every year (or every month at some publications). Why? One reason is that the digital economy has transformed that marketplace for news and information from one of scarcity to one of abundance (see Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”2). In today’s landscape many people don’t want to pay a few pennies every day for a product they may not use every day and they have to dispose of every day.

    But this product in all its forms — journalism — is worth saving. It creates community on so many levels. And it creates marketplaces that are essential to the continuing viability of entire companies. Newspapers had a virtual monopoly on their marketplaces for decades. That’s ending now so the trick is to create new marketplaces before old ones completely disappear. Not necessarily to replace them right away, but to complement and support them.

    “No longer are we purely media companies; we must become technology companies, too, and that means we must raise our technology IQ to compete in a digitally transformed world,” Michael Riley, former editor of The Roanoke (Va.) Times, wrote in the December 2006 issue of Nieman Reports. “A big part of our success will be tied into rethinking what type of people we hire. The premium, moving forward, will rest on attracting more innovators into our midst and finding ways to give them the freedom and the backing they need to experiment and help move us into a new realm in which we can preserve the journalism and make a robust business model work.”

    He’s right. We need new and different thinking in news organizations to survive and thrive in this new media landscape. But that doesn’t have to mean new and different people. This innovative thinking could come from the same smart and dedicated people who have thrived practicing journalism since before the Internet changed the game.

    You just need to know the rules, the terms and the motivation.

    References

    1. American Society of Newspaper Editors, Newsroom Employment Census, 2006. Numbers are for paid circulation newspapers.
    2. The Long Tail, Hyperion, July 2005. Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine.

    This page titled 1.1: The future is now is shared under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Mark Briggs via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.