Who Is Going To Cover The News?

Wikileaks breaks a story on Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) censorship.

NYU prof Clay Shirky does not blog often, but when he does it is required reading.

Shirky makes the point that the Gutenberg analogy is easy.  It’s what came after the printing press that was messy.

We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

By ‘1500’ Shirky means 1500 AD. And it was a messy time, with lots of upheaval to what had long been seen as very very stable institutions, all driven by the introduction of a new technology. Just like today.

Shirky raises the question that many people are now asking: If the newspaper business model is gone, who is going to cover the news?

What destroyed the paper was the shattering of the relationship between Walmart who bought the ads and the papers who gave Walmart the access to the public but took their money to fund the bureaus in Iraq.  Walmart had no interest in covering Iraq, and as soon as Walmart could go directly to the public, they no longer needed the papers and ditched them.

So now, who is going to fund the Iraq bureau?

Ironically, I think the answer (or part of it) is in a newspaper this morning, without realizing it, perhaps.

Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times writes about EndoStim, a medical start up company that has developed a new treatment for acid reflux. (As a long-time acid reflux sufferer I can’t wait).  Friedman makes the point that this start up is a model of a new kind of corporation in America,

‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup,’ ” he wrote. “Now it describes a hardware company, too” thanks to “the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution. … Global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony.”

Well, if you can do it for Sony you can do it for journalism as well.

Back to 1500, or rather, 1517.

Martin Luther, a completely unknown monk from a tiny village in Germany had a piece of news:  The Church is corrupt. There is another way.

This, at least, was ‘journalism’ or ‘innovation’ in the 16th Century.

One guy with a printing press and he set the established order on fire (and pretty much burned it to the ground).

Like Tom Friedman’s ‘3 guys with laptops’, Martin Luther was ‘one guy with a printing press’.

He didn’t need the Vatican to get out his doctrinal opinions.  And the Vatican was an expensive institution to run.  His printing press was less so.

As I look out my window, I see 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the headquarter for NBC.  The Vatican of our own era.

Yet here is Wikileaks.com, the ‘Martin Luther’ of journalism? Could be.

Wikileaks breaks story after story.  Last week they broke the story of how the US military murdered dozens of people and then covered up the atrocity:

Collateral Murder

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. For further information please visit the special project website www.collateralmurder.com.

Pretty good journalism?

I think so.

And did CBS News do this? Did you see this on 60 Minutes? Did NBC News do this?

Do you know what the total (total!) budget for Wikileaks is?

$600,000 a year

That is 3% of Katie Couric’s salary for a year.

That’s it.

Good journalism can still be done.

But probably not by the ‘old’ institutions.

They have lots of money, but no idea of how to spend it.