On the other hand….
In 1983 I graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The emphasis was on the journalism.
With a capital J.
Any discussion of ‘business’ was deemed a dirty word, somehow infecting the ‘purity’ of the ‘journalism’.
The school was a sort of Jesuit finishing academy for professional journalists. We were pure.
This, in retrospect, turned out to be a tragedy.
It was a tragedy because the profession into which we were entering was hardly pure, though we were all conditioned to see it that way. Newspapers and television news were and remain a business, albeit a business in trouble.
We were all required to take a course in the First Amendment, taught jointly by Fred Friendly and then Dean of the Law School, Benno Schmidt. We graduated very well versed in our First Amendment rights.
Had we only been required to take a course in business, with the Dean of the Business School as well….
My classmates, and fellow alumni went on to work for, and in some cases run, (at least editorially) some of the largest and most powerful icons of news and journalism in the country – all of whom are in serious trouble now; largely because they did not pay enough attention to the business, as opposed to the journalism.
People buy newspapers, it turns out, not just for the journalism, but also because, at least until the web, they were the closest we could come to some kind of social networking nexus for communities. The paper not only covered the local fire or community board meeting, but it also listed the local movies, showed you which stores were having the sales, told you the current price of eggs and milk at the local market, listed cars for sale, rooms for rent and much much more.
As it turns out the ‘journalism’ represented only a tiny fraction of the reason that people bought and read papers.
This was something we all missed at Columbia. We were too busy concentrating 100% of our efforts on what in the end probably represented 20% of what a newspaper is really all about.
Now, newpapers are scrambling to survive. It’s the last moments on board the Titanic and all hands are wondering what the hell they can do to keep the ship afloat. And what is happening to newspapers today is going to happen to local TV news tomorrow.
The web has come along and grabbed all the reasons people read the local paper or watched local news.
It wasn’t about the community board hearings, it was about the classifieds (Craigslist), the movie listings (Moviephone), the want ads (Monster) and what was for sale at the supermarket (still up for grabs, as far as I know). Television it will turn out, is not about the personality of the Anchor, the color of the set or the graphics.
Can newspapers and local news re-invent themselves for webworld and screenworld?
Probably.
Maybe.
But first they have to forget the first lesson that was drilled into us at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism – the ‘wall’ between the ‘journalism’ and the ‘business’.
This is a business.
If you want to survive, you have to embrace the business, respond immediately to the demands and wants of the viewers and readers, instead of simply trying to shove stuff down their throats.
Newspapers and local TV news operations are fantastic machines designed to gather and process information and return it in some kind of compelling and comprehensible order.
The ‘information’ has to transcend the community board meeting.
And the way in which that information is transmitted has to transcend the printed page, the web page or the news at 6.
