News Isn't Always Journalism - July/August 2000

July/August 2000 | Contents

NEWS ISN'T ALWAYS JOURNALISM

BY KATHERINE FULTON

The main event isn't technology. It's economic and social change. The Internet is not just another media delivery system, like television and radio before it. It's the catalyst for a historic transition from one era to another. As Peter Drucker wrote recently, it took about fifty years to get from the invention of the steam engine to the innovation of the train, which then accelerated the shift to an industrial age and abolished old notions of time and space. A similar process is under way with the Internet and e-commerce, which began to take off forty to fifty years into the computer age and accelerated the shift into a networked knowledge economy. The Internet (or what we now call the Internet) will slowly absorb every other communications medium over the next few decades, and abolish old notions of time and space yet again.

Already, the Internet is fueling what some call a Cambrian explosion of innovation. Some of these new species will simply add on functions (as the pager did to the telephone). Some will substitute functions (as television did to newspapers for breaking news). Others will completely transform the possibilities (as the telephone did when it replaced the telegraph). Every industry is changing, not just media; all are being reconfigured in ways indifferent to old boundaries of industry or nation.

As a consequence, journalism will become a smaller and smaller part of an ever-expanding global media and communications system. That system in turn will become the infosphere in which we live, play, and work. "Media" will be where we get news, get entertained, get educated, and get money. What used to be separate and distinct -- the elements of a package called a newspaper or a television network or a university education -- will be unbundled and seamlessly interwoven into the texture of our lives.

Though we're still in the embryonic stages of this shift, we can already get a sense of what it will mean for our old notions of news and news businesses. Take a look at MySchwab (http://myschwab.excite.com), for example. Here we have a money management company, in partnership with a new media player, Excite, giving me a place to integrate various kinds of information: "My Watch List" (for stocks I own), "My News," "My Weather," "My Sports," and "My Reminders" (for to-dos and birthdays). Soon to come might be displays of my routine bills and transactions, my medical records, my entire calendar, my favorite music, the latest photographs e-mailed from my niece and nephew, my journal, and live video of the traffic at key interchanges on my route to work.

In this environment, what matters is what my needs are and how well they are met -- not necessarily who meets them. People need banking, but they don't necessarily need banks. People need news and information of all kinds, but they don't necessarily need newspapers or TV as we have known them.

News is not the same as journalism, certainly. It never has been. Newspapers and news broadcasts have always been full of plenty of nonjournalistic information, ads, and amusements that have nothing to do with original reporting or seasoned news judgment. But the journalists were used to working for institutions where it was easy to assume that news as they defined it was the main event.

In the new habitat, what we used to think of as "news," the kind journalists packaged, is inexorably becoming a mere add-on to the services offered by other businesses, such as Schwab or Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The next step, I fear, is that many local news outlets will eventually become either smaller businesses, or essentially disappear, as they become features of national and international information businesses. For this reason, I have come to support what I would once have considered heresy: the relaxation of cross-ownership barriers in local media markets. Concentration of power in too few hands is a big worry. But the great monoliths of local journalism sit on eroding foundations. Profits will be driven down. Why? Basic headline news, provided by many players, has become ubiquitous, a commodity; the Net has trained people to expect things for free; competition from new players will increase. Good reporting is expensive. Good multimedia reporting, distributed in many different ways for many different purposes, will be even more expensive. Only healthy businesses will be able to pay for it. That means two types of winners: small and very focused, or large. Medium-sized players need not apply. Consolidation among general interest local news players is inevitable, and if it happens cross media, strong local media institutions may endure.

Journalism and journalists won't disappear. As purveyors of meaning and context amidst all the noise, they could become more essential than ever. Just because I can have a personalized, integrated interface to organize the information and communication I care about doesn't mean I won't also subscribe to a package of original reporting and analysis. Perhaps a traditional media organization, such as The New York Times Company, will supply it. Or perhaps not. There is nothing sacred about today's journalism institutions.

Smart journalists will support new forms of journalism (multimedia storytelling? interactive video shorts? more focus on breaking news on the Web?). They'll embrace new functions, such as facilitating good online conversations, organizing archival resources, and aggregating and repackaging reporting from many sources.

But look at journalism's older assets. Original reporting, vetted by great editors to meet standards of credibility and accuracy, is different from other breeds of information. "Information is anything that can be copied, and the Internet is the world's largest copy machine," digital commentator Kevin Kelly said in a session I attended not long ago. "What becomes valuable is what can't be copied -- trust, attention, integrity, relationship, brand." Wise journalists will find ways to explain and market such assets, both inside their institutions and outside, to the public they serve. They'll also work to reinterpret those old values for a new era, to find new ways of winning trust, maintaining integrity, attracting attention. That's the tricky part: knowing what to hold onto and what to let go. *

Katherine Fulton (fulton@gbn.org), the founding editor of North Carolina's alternative weekly, The Independent, has written twice for cjr about the impact of technology on journalism, in 1993 ("Future Tense,") and 1996 ("Journalism.now"). She now works for Global Business Network in California, helping clients figure strategies for the future.