February 12, 2009

Future of Journalism? Newspapers?

I heard a neat interview on Radio Times today about the future of journalism & news.  It was surprisingly, and happily, upbeat (or maybe it was just my mood).  Listening to the conversation, I felt optimistic that while news gathering as we know it may change, but that reporting and writing will not change so much as to be unrecognizable.  I even felt optimistic that some kind of revenue stream could perhaps be worked out so that in-depth reporting (ie, what we think of now as print journalism) could continue.  Probably it won't look the same, but maybe it will continue to exist.  

One surprising bit of information that one of the guests mentioned (and I forget which; I was driving and didn't take notes) is that actual readership of content-formerly-known-as-print- journalism is UP, after a slide that started in the 1940s.

Here's what Radio Times says about the show:  "We talk about the challenges facing the profession of journalism and consumers of the news. How will we fund news-gathering operations, what will they look like how will we access the news and how we will ensure quality journalism? Our guests are ROBERT NILES of Online Journalism Review and TOM ROSENSTIEL of The Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism."

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm not all that up on all the talk associated with this, but there is something about the changing news industry that I've been wondering about. Big newspapers have been taking a huge hit because people can get their content in other places. It's hard to find local news, though, or at least I think it is. I wonder if we'll see the decline of huge regional, national, international papers and a rise in smaller local papers that carry the news that doesn't make it into the larger stream. Isn't this kind of how it used to be a long time ago before so many papers merged?