Journalism’s Big Move: "What to Discard, Keep, and Acquire in Moving from Print to Web Digital"

[KoKo]

Executive Editor of The Washington Post, delivered the 2015 Hays Press-Enterprise lecture at the University of California, Riverside Tuesday night. His speech titled “Journalism’s Big Move: What to Discard, Keep, and Acquire in Moving From Print to Web” is available below.

By WashPostPR April 8



So much has happened in this field since Tim ran the Press-Enterprise. This has been my profession for 39 years, and never have I seen a moment of so much excitement and yet so much anxiety.

Excitement because journalism is being thoroughly reimagined. Anxiety because … journalism is being thoroughly reimagined — because our traditional economic model is disintegrating.

Let me give you an example that captures the thrill and the threat. It dates to my days at The Boston Globe and the investigation we launched that in 2002 exposed a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston and the Catholic Church.

-------snip

“The irony is that it is coming at a time when the very medium that enables this kind of subsequent super-distribution and coordination of social value is also destroying the economic model that the Globe used to support the work in the first place … It is wrecking the advertising side of the house even as it makes good investigative journalism much more resonant much more quickly to many more people on a global scale.”

Shirky was right, of course. And we’re dealing here with nothing less than forces of nature in a modern economy.
Waves of technology are eroding our foundation. They threaten our traditional journalistic home. Survival dictates we move. And we have to move quickly.

This is what I’ll call the Big Move. As we make this move, the first casualty is sentiment.

The forces at work don’t care about how we prefer to do our jobs, how easily we adjust to change, how much we have to learn. They don’t care about any extra workload.

This transformation is going to happen no matter what. And there is only one realistic choice available: We can do what we must to adapt and – ideally – thrive. Or not — in which case we are choosing to fail.

I like to remind people what has happened in only the last decade because it’s easy to forget:

• High-speed broadband became pervasive only in 2004, 2005, making possible the communications we take for granted today. It allowed photos to load fast and instant viewing of videos — and it allows mobile connection to the web.
• Google didn’t go public until 2004. Today, there are more than 3 billion searches a day on Google.
• Facebook was founded in 2004. Now it has more than 1.3 billion monthly active users.
• YouTube was founded in 2005. More than 1 billion people now visit YouTube each month.
• Twitter was founded in 2006. A half-billion tweets are sent every day.
• Kindle was introduced in 2007. Three in 10 Americans now read an e-book.
• Apple introduced the iPhone in June, 2007. Today 2 billion people worldwide use smartphones.
• Instagram was founded in 2009.
• Whatsapp was founded in 2009 and last year was sold for $19 billion to Facebook.
• The iPad was introduced in January, 2010.
• Snapchat wasn’t launched until 2011. It’s now valued at $10 billion or more.

If this pace of change unnerves you, there is no consolation. Things will only get faster. And for those who resist the change rather than embrace it, there will be no forbearance or forgiveness. Their destiny is to be pushed aside and forgotten. That is the brutal truth.

So journalism’s Big Move from print to digital comes with discomfort for those, like me, who grew up in this field well before the 21st Century. We just have to get over it.

We are moving from one habitat to another, from one world to another. We are leaving a home where we felt settled. Now we encounter behaviors that are unfamiliar. Our new neighbors are younger, more agile. They suffer none of our anxieties. They often speak a different language. They regard with disinterest, or disdain, where we came from, what we did before. We’re the immigrants. They’re the natives. They know this new place of ours well. We’re just learning it.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

As we make this move, the question is the same as we confront in any other move. What do we discard? What will we have to acquire and learn? What do we keep?

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Interesting Read about Boston Globe's investigation of Pedophile Priests, how important Snowden's revelations were for investigative journalism and other insights about how media is going through a drastic change with the realities of financing and reporting facing dramatic changes and challenges going forward:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2015/04/08/washington-post-executive-editor-martin-baron-on-journalisms-transition-from-print-to-digital/

[Blue_Tires]

1. Not quite sure what Snowden 'changed'

since investigative journalism was around long before he ever appeared (yes, even NSA reporting)...Getting people to read it was another matter entirely, but it *was* out there...

[KoKo]

2. He explains very well how important Snowden's revelations were to investigative journalism

in the article. Unless you are a "speed reader" I don't think you'd have had time to have read the whole piece.

[Blue_Tires]

3. I just jumped to the Snowden part and read that...

Yes, there was a debate over whether to print this or that slide, but the WaPo has been doing this for a very, very long time...

I will concede that Snowden's celebrity and spectacle (with a little help from ringleaders Greenwald, Poitras and Assange) were a game-changer and got millions more people paying attention to the story than would have had he stayed in the shadows...But that's the only real difference from decades of other investigative/whistleblower pieces, and Snowden's celebrity wouldn't have made any difference to the WaPo

[KoKo]

5. Did you read the whole article for the context? What does Journalism Mean...to you?

This is a talk given by someone who has decades of experience with the comfortable "Old Media" most of us grew up with ...talking about how to deal with the "New Media" and "Investigative Journalism."

You can't pull out one paragraph and make a comment unless you can weave it into what the whole article is about just because you have a problem with Edward Snowden. Yet you said you read and want to put this on Celebrity and Snowden and don't address the issues discussed or the main focus of the article.

It's hard to take what you said seriously when you admit to just going to the article to single out Snowden and then start talking about "Greenwald, Poitras and Assange who are not even mentioned in the article.

It's one thing to have an opinion one can discuss and another to have what appears to be an AGENDA. And the AGENDA isn't coming from this speech by WaPo Executive talking about Challenges facing Newspapers but the distraction and distortion you seemed to wish to focus on by doing the usual Snowden Trash you seem not to be able to get past whenever his name is mentioned.

Whatever. The article is about the Newspaper Business and the Challenges faced in the Internet World.

[cascadiance]

4. I personally think that the newspaper/periodical industry needs a newer online "Reader's Guide"...

Prior to the internet, every library had the Reader's Guide which aided so many people in putting together studies, papers, and many other works based on past news articles and literary work, and did so in an unbiased fashion that helped them provide complete information together for what was published about certain topics and at certain periods of time. Libraries thrived on providing this that was hard to find anywhere else, unless you were some other large entity that could afford to subscribe to such guides.

Today, many newspapers and publications try to appeal to people buying "subscriptions" or "memberships" to get access to archives of article of a given publication. Unfortunately, when people are looking for this information, they are more interested in "topical relevance" with what they might want to spend money on to get access to and not just brand loyalty. And there's very limited money for most people to spend in a blanket fashion on all of the different publications, where they still might miss out on some important article they want access to not available in the document stores they've subscribed to.

If you have some service that basically has all of the different publications submit their archives to be a part of the service as they might a Reader's Guide, and provide some of the more modern methodologies of searching such content, etc. as well, and do so where no entities are rejected based on their corporate affiliations, or on their political/philosophical stances, etc.

You could then also tailor your subscription rates too, as to how much you use the service, so that casual users wouldn't pay as much, and that perhaps other people like journalists or writers, and their organizations might pay more for increased access to this service based on the quantity they use.

And perhaps in libraries some of these level of services could be provided for free that one might otherwise have to pay for from one's home, to provide more access to those with less resources, and restore the value of libraries to what they've traditionally provided for to the public at large.

And publications that get more hits on their archives, would perhaps get breaks on what they pay for to put their documents in the collection if they get more hits per the amount they store than other publications, so that popularity of good workmanship is also rewarded, and hopefully we get more quality journalism serving the public that way too, and the journalists that do better jobs get more rewards as well. I would like to see good journalists still stay in this business. We need them now more than ever!

Just an idea I've had for many years when seeing this sort of business working for people and obvious frustration of the older newspapers on how to fit in to today's environment.

[KoKo]

6. Interesting points.

I felt, in a way the article was a bit defeatist, in that he was writing from a defeatist position rather than looking for innovative ways to deal with the changes. He was overwhelmed with the view that the Internet was the biggest threat to Newspapers.

I think he underestimates the long term possibility that Internet may be a passing explosion and, that when it gets past the novelty and fascination of all of our new devices and ways to access information, photos, music, media and news that the intrusion and restrictions of the internet media (batteries running low on your I-Pad, Kindle, Nook always needing recharge along with your Laptop, I-Phone, Android, etc.) is going to start to wear on people. It's all fun now....but, in a way it is becoming a nuisance always needing to recharge batteries to be connected and feeling abandoned and cut off when you are in a situation where that isn't possible.

It's all expensive and the cost of replacement if you have children who have accidents plus the constant upkeep of downloading updates and more and more APs and now putting in security to protect yourself is becoming Less Fun and more Time Consuming.

But, then...I may have Luddite Tendencies...