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Won't there always be a market for journalism?
To answer this question, you have to decide what you mean by the word "journalism." The term refers to many things, from the most honored traditions of reporting to live cable coverage of events to all the varied activities that happen under the banners of journalistic institutions.
Most reporters and editors think journalism means covering and uncovering news and telling people what they've learned. Their calling is to test hunches and hypotheses, gossip and conflicting accounts against the evidence, to organize and analyze and sometimes synthesize information into compelling stories.
What inspires journalists, however, is neither what pays the bills nor necessarily what draws audiences. The reporters' and editors' definition doesn't describe the business of most commercial American journalism, which is selling advertising. And it doesn't incorporate all the things the average American newspaper and some of its broadcast counterparts provide -- commodity information (weather reports, sports statistics, stock tables, television listings), community bulletin boards (calendars, obituaries), community forums (letters to the editor, op- ed pages, call-in shows), entertainment (features, comics, trivia, crossword puzzles, people gossip).
Strip away some of the more profitable or popular items under this current umbrella, and you could strip away the means of paying for serious reporting aimed at mass audiences. One very important thing to understand about the new media world is just how easy such unbundling becomes.
Classified ads, that huge profit center for every newspaper, are particularly vulnerable. Job listings services have been among the first types of ads on-line, and newspapers have finally formed a CareerPath consortium to compete. It doesn't take much imagination to see how phone companies, already in the yellow-pages business, could move on-line and take away just enough newspaper classifieds business to seriously threaten the newsroom budget. (The major phone companies are already moving aggressively to sell mass Internet access.)
The on-line environment provides retail advertising, too, with a new possibility -- speaking directly with potential clients. Reebok and Southwest Airlines are but two examples among hundreds of serious experiments under way. "Planetreebok" is a full-fledged magazine, featuring tips about sports and recreation, information about the Olympics, and a bulletin board that includes complaints about the firm's products. Southwest's "home gate" on the Internet includes schedules, fares, tips on packing, and links to information about cities the airline serves.
On the editorial side, private, and public- sector entrepreneurs are nibbling away as well. ESPNET SportsZone -- widely considered one of the best on-line publications -- provides in-depth features and interactive games as well as up- to-the-minute scores. Intellicast offers extensive current weather satellite maps and forecasts for every major city in the world. If you want to see what the President said last week, or last year, you can go directly to the White House. If you want to check out the tour schedule for your favorite band, you can turn to Ticketmaster -- which one day could be the dominant events-listing service on the Internet.
The point is that journalists and journalistic institutions are not necessarily better qualified or better positioned to provide these and other basic services than a host of potential competitors.
Even some things closer to the the heart of serious journalism can be provided by others. For the past year, the Benton Foundation's Communications Policy Project has been online demonstrating how non-profit organizations can become more active players in the information marketplace, especially for complicated policy issues that most mainstream media organizations treat superficially, if at all. And the university- based Civic Practices Network is busy creating a place to find out how citizens nationwide are addressing local problems; citizens and community organizations are invited to tell their own stories, which others can locate, depending on what issue and geographical region interests them.
The electronic environment flattens everything -- making a talented college sophomore's home page, say, seem equivalent to CNN's -- and this raises obvious questions about credibility of information. Still, people will have many more choices. There will surely be a strong market for much of what now falls under journalism's umbrella. But the playing field is wide open for new competitors.
