Michael Skoler and the evolving newsroom

A video link is mak­ing its way around the blogs book­marked in my RSS reader. Generally, when you see the same video linked on dif­fer­ent journalism/new media blogs, you know it’s time to start pay­ing atten­tion. And pay I did.

The video is a 12-minute speech by Michael Skoler, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Center for Innovation in Journalism. He was speak­ing at a recent Neiman Foundation panel on the future of jour­nal­ism. (Link) In the talk, Skoler describes three fac­tors that news­rooms will have to con­tent with in order to adapt to the “change.”

Skoler describes the sit­u­a­tion in news­rooms around the world as they come face-to-face with the new forms of media and infor­ma­tion dis­sem­i­na­tion. When Web tech­nol­ogy began get­ting pop­u­lar, he says, and peo­ple began get­ting their news from places that weren’t tele­vi­sion and news­pa­pers, media ana­lysts and edi­tors and pub­lish­ers across the coun­try decided that the news­room had to change to reflect those new media.

But rather than decide how best to bring the con­tent, qual­ity con­tent, to the masses with those new media, many news­rooms began adopt­ing things like video seg­ments, pod­casts and blogs for no other rea­son than to have them. New media for new media’s sake, not for the reader’s sake.

New meth­ods for dis­sem­i­nat­ing news weren’t the prob­lem fac­ing news­rooms, Skoler said. The prob­lem was that jour­nal­ism in gen­eral was lost. “I think we still have a role in soci­ety,” he said in his speech. “But the bad news, the tough news, is that we don’t know what that role is.”

New media tech­nolo­gies exposed the deeper prob­lem with mod­ern jour­nal­ism: a lack of trust. Journalists are no longer the social activists, seek­ers of jus­tice, righters of wrongs and voices of the voice­less they used to be. More often than not, peo­ple see jour­nal­ism as hav­ing an inter­est in telling lies and other harm­ful falsehoods.

People fled to non-mainstream news sources not sim­ply because they were there — a sort of information/attention vac­cuum effect — but because they wanted some­thing they weren’t get­ting at home. Now, Skoler said, peo­ple tend to get their news relayed to them through social net­works, linked to the good stuff by the peo­ple they talk with and inter­act with every day. The news comes from the peo­ple they trust.

Skoler’s sec­ond and third points came in shorter order. He asserts that read­ers want to be part of the “con­ver­sa­tion” in some way because America (and maybe the world) is no longer an information-as-commodity cul­ture. We have become, he says, an information-sharing cul­ture. “Knowledge is no longer viewed as con­gre­gated and only acces­si­ble to an elite,” he said. “Knowledge is open on the Internet and avail­able to everyone.”

His final point was to men­tion the shift in influ­ence on the Web. “Sharing is power on the Web,” he said, mean­ing that news sites that do their best to keep read­ers inside their walled cyber-gardens aren’t far­ing well. That’s because the old model, the idea that infor­ma­tion is some­thing to be owned and con­trolled, doesn’t work well online.

From my own expe­ri­ence in read­ing news online, I have to give the oblig­a­tory shout-out to the New York Times here. I refer specif­i­cally to two big steps they have taken (in addi­tion to all the RSS feeds and wid­gets the Grey Lady uses to get its news out the door). First, the Times opened up its archives and tore down the pay wall. Second, the Times, just last week, began giv­ing read­ers the option of see­ing links to out­side sites right on the Times homepage.

I sup­pose the old say­ing about love is ger­mane here: “If you love some­one, let it go. If that some­one comes back, then you know it’s for real.” Letting the read­ers leave nytimes.com for other sites makes the Times look like more of an author­ity, a por­tal where peo­ple will go to find the best con­tent, not just writ­ten by the Times, but the best con­tent any­where.

“We need to get closer to the audi­ence,” Skoler said, wind­ing down his talk by address­ing a lin­ger­ing jour­nal­is­tic belief. “But deep in our souls, we feel that’s dumb­ing down our jour­nal­ism.” But that’s sim­ply not true, he said. Connecting with read­ers, mak­ing your mate­r­ial eas­ier to access and under­stand, thereby get­ting the news out to more peo­ple, that’s actu­ally smarter in the long run.

I’m torn over Skoler’s advice. Yes, it makes the best sense to adapt to the new things that are chang­ing your busi­ness. If you don’t adapt, you face extinc­tion. That is abun­dantly clear and gets clearer every day thanks to news of news­pa­pers reduc­ing their pub­li­ca­tion or shut­ting down entirely. But...

Journalism is about giv­ing peo­ple the news, whether they like that news or not. Skoler is ask­ing us to walk a fine line between jour­nal­is­tic ethics (which I think I just described) and meet­ing the audience’s demands (in real­ity, pan­der­ing, but that word has such neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions). In the new media world, we’re going to have to sac­ri­fice some of journalism’s egal­i­tar­ian prescriptivism.

Whether that is a good thing or not, I don’t know.