I loved hearing Monica Guzman in today’s hour on the future of news, especially local news. She’s a young reporter at SeattlePI.com, and was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s first online reporter. She’s now one of the 20 remaining staffers who will define what the online-only reincarnation of that newspaper will be. A lot is riding on what they come up with — and a lot of eyes are watching. If the other 19 have Monica’s smarts and energy, it sounds like they’ve got a fighting chance.
Another reason I loved hearing her voice along with Steven Johnson’s and David Carr’s was that it reminded me what it felt like to be on the digital front lines in the midst of a new-media revolution. The headiness of it, along with the daunting realities, the long odds. At the same time Steven was launching FEED, his pioneering and hugely influential webzine, in 1995, I was one of several young editors at The Atlantic Monthly dreaming up a digital strategy for a 140-year-old magazine. And I’ll never forget my first look at FEED, in June ‘95, via a 28.8k modem in The Atlantic’s old office in Boston’s Back Bay. It was a revelation. That was the moment I knew that you could do a real magazine, do real journalism, on the web. And when we launched TheAtlantic.com that November, with the ambition of creating an original web-only publication alongside the print magazine, we stole a few good ideas from Steven and his colleagues. Those ideas are still there, embedded deep in the DNA of countless sites today. (Steven and I went on to be friendly competitors, and sometime contributors to each other’s sites, for the next six years.)
That was then. It’s a new, much scarier ballgame now. And yet, while it may be too early to tell which news site out there is this moment’s FEED, if it’s even been born, hearing Monica today — and hearing Voice of San Diego’s Andrew Donohue on our show in February — I can’t help feeling just a little hope. Maybe it’s unfounded, maybe it’s naive, but for all the painful, frightening aspects of the current upheaval in the newspaper business, there’s something really heartening about Monica’s spirit of experimentation, her try-try-again optimism. Let’s hope her employer shares it. If the news business, like the country as a whole, is going to innovate its way out of this crisis, we all need to find our Monicas.
If you haven’t already read Steven’s thought-provoking essay “Old Growth Media and the Future of News,” I highly recommend it.
p.s. There’s a pretty intense response to our hour with Johnson, Carr, and Guzman over in the show’s comments section, including one listener who wrote: “Monica Guzman sounded so chipper and optimistic! Such a brave new world! If I was one of her ex-fellow workers I would be outraged by her comments.” There’s certainly no denying the pain of lost jobs. But I’m still pulling for Monica and her colleagues to succeed.
Thanks for the segment on the future of newspapers.
I hope someone questioned that dubious Time magazine report about the 10 endangered newspapers.
Their editors stood feebly by the reporting after Richard Prince ['Journal-isms,' mije.org] quizzed them this week.
The Philadelphia Inquirer is supposed to stop bleeding this year. The PDN has been an endangered newspaper since the 1980s when I worked in that market.
Street-sale papers like the PDN and NY Daily News [which has had a handful of near-death experiences since the '80s] should hold on.
Johnson’s most memorable and chilling statement was the newspaper transformation from paper to digital was to take 10 years, but with the tanked economy, it’s been compressed into a year.
No wonder American Society of Newspaper Editors members canceled their spring convention for the first time since the closing months of World War II. They have to stay home and fight a different war for survival.
Posted by Wayne Dawkins, on March 20th, 2009 at 4:24 am EDTFound this article on Twitter, thanks to @WBUR, and really enjoyed it!
I work with a team of former TV journalists, now working to promote POSITIVE images of aging, using the Web as a platform. We also have a TV Show (on WMFE-TV PBS in Orlando!) and a Radio Show.
We’re all big-J journalists who got sick of covering drug deals, fires and crime, and decided to take our skills and tell the stories of people who really deserve the attention — cancer survivors, masters athletes and more.
Thanks for your thought-provoking blog!
Katy Widrick
Posted by Katy Widrick, on March 20th, 2009 at 2:01 pm EDTExecutive Producer, GrowingBolder.com
It is probably telling that I found this article because of a twitter feed. I definitely think that media in general is at a turning point right now – the availability of digital media poses an enormous opportunity as well as a great deal of risk for outlets and providers who cling to outmoded expectations and practices (case in point, RIAA)
Posted by Charles Bandes, on March 20th, 2009 at 2:03 pm EDTMust be a heady time to be a journalist! Great coverage on NPR of the new PI.
I came across this article via Twitter — probably wouldn’t have found my way here otherwise.
Posted by Cammy Bean, on March 20th, 2009 at 2:05 pm EDTHi! Caught your update on Twitter and surfed on in. It’s not too surprising that Seattle P-I is making like Spiderman and going web-only. But it’s a little scary that they slashed their editorial staff from 150 to 20. Presumably, the focus of their coverage will narrow as a result. So many newspapers have reigned in their foreign bureaus, cut correspondents, and trimmed coverage. As a result, American newspaper readers are offered an ever more myopic focus, absent meaningful context and critiques of international perspectives. McClatchy Newspapers is a rare exception that continues to offer high-quality, in-depth investigative reporting from around the globe. But for how long can McClatchy hold out? Their flagship Miami Herald is for sale. From here out, I’m gathering most of my news through social networks, blogs, and Google News. News travels fast across the Internet but the quality of the information and analysis varies widely. Let’s hope some of those out-of-work journalists find new day jobs, while blogging with the rest of us at night.
Posted by Jonathan Hutson, on March 20th, 2009 at 2:09 pm EDTI was just directed to this thoughtful commentary by your WBUR twitter handle. We are consuming information in different ways as I think we’ve just illustrated. On Point digs deeper than most (why I am such a fan) and like many I fear that the future of the quality of media as a whole is threatened. In the immediacy of our communication exchanges I think it leaves little time to vet the information being disseminated. By supporting radio programming, newspapers, magazines, online subscriptions, etc. that are of higher quality we can maintain a better standard that will result in a more informed citizenship- we can ALL benefit from that.
Posted by Ruth Bazinet, on March 20th, 2009 at 2:16 pm EDTAdd me to the list of those who read this commentary because I saw it on Twitter. I’ll probably catch the re-run of the episode tonight as I make dinner.
My mom used to work in journalism. I share her concern that with the demise of traditional journalism, our primary source news will weaken significantly. Bloggers love to pontificate, ordinary Joes will continue to post photos of accidents/events they just happened to see, but who will do all the legwork to collect all the information, verify it, and then provide thoughtful analysis? Hopefully the new online model of journalism will prove profitable. It’s hard to convince people to pay for things online… and advertising only pays so much…
Posted by Casey, on March 20th, 2009 at 2:50 pm EDTI was directed to this article from a WBUR tweet on Twitter. Interesting stuff…
Posted by Ben, on March 20th, 2009 at 3:07 pm EDTThanks for all the feedback. Good to see the Twitter traffic!
Posted by Wen Stephenson, on March 20th, 2009 at 8:14 pm EDT[...] read his response to On Point’s hour on the future of news. Wen’s post is yet more affirmation of the [...]
Posted by We all need to find our Monicas…and Wens « The ConverStation, on March 23rd, 2009 at 3:56 pm EDT[...] experimentation, her try-try-again optimism” inspired Senior Producer Wen Stephenson’s post here (which in turn sparked my post [...]
Posted by Globe Daze « The ConverStation, on April 8th, 2009 at 4:12 pm EDT