When I was young, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I was excited about the potential to make great ideas a reality.
I had lots of ideas. Sketched out in notebooks now collecting dust in my parents’ house, I invented a football league. It has teams, logos, schedules and its own version of the Super Bowl. There’s also a TV network and sports program that analyzed the league, and the former stars who anchored the show.
I drew out the possibilities for new controller designs and consoles, and walked around my yard thinking about the possibility of a real-life, realtime 3D simulation game. At my grandmother’s house, I spent afternoons in her sunroom, my hands dusty with chalk, crafting the optimal solution to the Throop Dunmore Interchange near Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Thinking back to those times, I could have been anything — a graphic designer, a computer engineer, a transportation planner. But when I created my first newspaper, I felt this was the right career.
My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Willis, gave me free rein to use the school’s computer lab, where I created the Classroom Internet. Pardon the grammatical error, but I love the prescience of that name.
I was determined to make a great newspaper that best covered the community. I spent time working on articles, producing the layouts, and checking the proofs, from Apple IIs to a form-fed dot matrix printer. I even had a mini-newspaper war with my brother, who beat my coverage of the blizzard of ‘96.
But what about the future of journalism?
Let’s not misunderstand the true premise behind this question. It’s not about how journalism will look in another decade or two; we’re supposed to be looking for the salvation of journalism. People want a silver bullet, and they’re desperate enough to consider anything.
Take the iPad as an example. Apple’s product wasn’t hyped because anyone was excited about a new tablet — tablet computers have been around for a decade and have historically sucked. Rather, the media breathlessly believed this magic device will fix drying revenue streams and provide stability to the industry.
The iPad isn’t a savior to anybody except maybe my parents, whose tepid reaction to computer use could be solved by something so gobsmackingly obvious and intuitive. It ends up we’re barking up the wrong tree.
Nobody should see technology as a panacea nor a scapegoat. Journalism has never been exclusively about technology, although technology has always been important to help better tell stories. But technology is only a tool, and regardless of the medium — newspapers, Twitter, TV, YouTube — it’s a means to an end, where the end is connecting with your community.
Now, more than ever, Journalism is all about community — and it’s what scares media executives and high-and-mighty journalists alike. So let’s clear the prompt. It’s not fixing journalism; we’re being asked to prop up monolithic organizations who have largely forgotten their communities.
Pack up the conferences. Journalism doesn’t need fixing.
For the truly devoted journalist, it’s always felt more like a calling than a simple profession. For me, it was strong enough that I worked in deplorable conditions, like a high school bathroom-cum-office, and felt important enough that I fought off sleep or a drunken stupor to get the website right in college.
Places like Gannett or Tribune aren’t failing because they haven’t kept up with technology, though they haven’t. Their mediocre mid-market newspapers and TV stations are rightly suffering from an intense disconnect between their journalism and the communities they serve.
Journalism is storytelling, and inherently more personal and passionate than the executives of the Fourth Estate can comprehend. Objectivity, while important, doesn’t excuse dispassionate, disconnected journalists.
We don’t need to prop up these organizations if they don’t serve the public interest, or don’t try. New forms need to be made that fill that role. Fortunately that’s already started, like today’s social media.
The future is more of what you’re already seeing. It’s a more distributed network of resources and data points. It’ll be more blogs, even if we don’t call them blogs. Will there be newspapers? Probably, even if they look less like today’s daily newspaper and more like the Newspaper Club’s offerings.
People still want tastemakers and editors. In fact, they’re more necessary than ever with such an explosion of information.
A lot of what’s to come won’t be recognized as journalism by those trying to preserve the institutions that make journalism today. So what do future upstarts look like?
Probably a lot like the Classroom Internet.
