Mass media no more

Gina Chen recently gave us this nugget:

To me, one of the biggest prob­lems with the news busi­ness today is it still thinks of itself as a mass medium. Sorry, those days are gone. Abandon the old-time notion of try­ing to make every story rel­e­vant to every reader; you can’t.

Isn’t part of the mis­sion of jour­nal­ism, in the philo­soph­i­cal sense, to tell peo­ple what they need to know to be func­tion­ing cit­i­zens in a democ­racy where their vote mat­ters? I worry that in a com­pletely niche-ified world of jour­nal­ism, peo­ple will only read what they want to read. Opinions and minds will nar­row, and deeper rifts will form between peo­ple who believe dif­fer­ently from each and, there­fore, don’t read the same news.

I think ide­al­ized jour­nal­ism, the jour­nal­ism that has a pub­lic mis­sion to accom­plish, needs to be at least some­what cross-cutting. Journalism needs to pro­vide the con­text for a com­pli­cated soci­ety so that peo­ple can begin to under­stand the big­ger issues from a wider per­spec­tive than their own. After all, it’s only by try­ing to see the other person’s side that oppo­nents move toward compromise.

Niche-ification seems like a good busi­ness idea. No doubt it will draw more read­ers (and return read­ers) to news sites, but it seems dan­ger­ous in the long run. Plus, how many news­rooms now have the peo­ple avail­able to invest time and effort in to niche blogs? Hard to say.

Related posts:

1. Dabblers go home; jour­nal­ists need to be social media leaders
2. Social media as jour­nal­ism in a small city
3. Will new media help Iraq rebuild?
4. Set the good stuff free and charge for the peas
5. Have a rea­son for using social media techs