Only journalists can save newspapers
It is journalists and quality journalism that will save newspapers — not some mythical device or some new technology in the future.
That’s the reality on the ground. Howard Owens has an excellent post about how there is no magic technology that will save newspapers, and he is right.
Owens first starts by dispelling two myths:
- First, we don’t need technology to save us. There’s no reason we can’t succeed on the web; in fact, we’re doing far better on the Web than many “the sky is falling” types in newsrooms give us credit for.
- Second, technology won’t save us. If we can’t succeed on the Web, we certainly won’t be able to succeed with the Kindle or e-ink, because each of those new technologies will bring their own challenges to the traditional way of doing things. Consumers will decide how to best use these devices, not publishers, or they won’t use them. That’s the rock-hard truth of digital technology — users are in charge, not publishers.
He argues that no magic iPod or Kindle-like device is going to save journalism, and he is right. It’s not the delivery method or the medium. It’s us. It’s our colleagues.
It’s our inability to give consumers what they want.
We’re not creating compelling enough content. Most of our operations are still print first, Web second. Most of our employees still think online journalism isn’t real journalism.
How is technology going to solve those issues? It’s not. But we can save newspapers by doing one thing and doing one thing really well: telling great stories.
Chicagocrime.org tells the story of Chicago crime and how it affects people on a personal level better than any newspaper article ever could. It’s a piece of journalism that touches every person in Chicago. It doesn’t rely on sensationalism or scare tactics, just cold hard facts.
MediaStorm tells incredible stories using multimedia packages. This story about the “Marlboro Man,” a famous/infamous Iraq War veteran, uses powerful audio and images to tell a story that a newspaper never could. It uses his own voice and words to tell you how his life has drastically changed since his last tour of duty.
PolitiFact takes the basic political story about the truthfulness of a candidate’s claim or a group’s claim about a candidate and completely reinvents that journalism concept. It’s a database driven site where you can track individual candidates, political parties and issues. It presents everything in a lightning-fast graphical style that is infinitely easier to digest than the standard inverted pyramid story. Plus, it’s much easier and faster to update, because the writers and editors for the site don’t have to have enough content for a full-fledged story to update the site — just enough to analyze another claim.
The New York Times tells the tragic story of a man wrongly convicted of rape and murder. He was exonerated by DNA evidence, but only after spending 16 years in prison. The Times uses a multimedia package to tell the story of a lost man that was forsaken by our judicial system. Could the written word touch the power of this feature? Not in a million years.
It’s not the technology that these people are using that is so incredible, but rather it’s how journalists are thinking beyond the printed page. They are using existing technology to tell stories in new ways, instead of waiting for something mythical to come along and save them. They are being proactive and embracing Web 2.0, not fearing it.
Trying is half the battle.
So, when someone tells you that the Web is killing newspapers or that we need an iPod to save the industry, tell them this: The Web is the greatest thing that ever happened to journalism, and we don’t need some mythical device to save newspapers — just ourselves.