Howard Owens wrote a blog post -- Newspapers started small, cheap and with different standards -- and I get a mention in passing!
There are those in our industry who seem to assume that newspapers emerged in 1835 in full flower, that many of the elements of the newspaper world that were until recently taken for granted were all part of world of James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley.
An example of such thinking might be found in this post by Bill Doskoch.
The assumption, in my perception, is pervasive, and it colors the view of today's journalist toward development of online news; in fact, the assumption may have blinded many executives (including online executives, including myself for a time) in their expectations how to build an online news business.
For more than a decade, we expected to build online news organizations that could support a super structure of the modern newspaper newsroom -- with the all the reporters and editors and big story packages (look at all the emphasis we put on big Flash multimedia productions) and that we could keep doing journalism just the way we always did it. ...
From the in-the-trenches newspaper journalist perspective, today's surviving reporters and editors keep looking to paid content as some sort of savior, ill-equipment mentally to understand why it simply won't work, and unwilling to accept any online news model that looks different from the print world they've loved.
The seeming fact that no online news model has yet emerged to support their paradigm of journalism -- the large staffs, the watchdog journalism (at least to the level they expect), and the comfortable 9-to-5 work shifts -- is proof to them that online can't or won't work they way they expect.
Any experiment in online journalism that doesn't fit their paradigm is just folly.
Keep in mind I castigated Owens -- who is very dismissive of anyone who thinks that readers should pay anything directly for news content; I think it's exceedingly difficult to get them to do so -- for using his editorial space to help flog spider lamps in his online publication The Batavian, which may have been an acceptable j-business practice in 1835, but I thought we got past that.*
* Scroll through his site right now, and you'll see the spider lamp thing wasn't a one-off
If I'm reading Owens correctly, the technological breakthrough of the Internet will have the effect of pushing the U.S. journalism industry back to where it was, standards-wise, almost 175 years.
That would seem to be the very antithesis of progress.
Owens closed with this (but please read the whole piece)
It took a long time for newspapers to build the cash flow to afford big time, expensive investigative journalism, and for publishers to recognize its value (and some of them still aren't convinced) in helping to retain readers.
So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?
There are a number of worthy experiments in online publishing going on out there. Maybe rather than scoff, some of these skeptics should stop yapping and try an experiment or two of their own. Maybe one of them will find the model that will one day employ a legion of highly paid investigators, at least until the next disruption comes along.
In a comment replying to a comment from Owens, I wrote the following last night:
I suspect we both agree the traditional print model* is on the way out -- and has in fact been eroding for some time.
* Where the business got revenue from circulation, display and classified ads and other sources -- but also enjoyed a quasi-monopolyUnfortunately, I don't immediately see a new model that will preserve the best of what the old model could deliver, given the realities of the new world.
If you're going to offer a 'free' product supported totally by advertising, it will have to be very cheap to produce.
That's going to be limiting in the types of journalism that can be supported. That will hurt communities. That is a real cost -- one that from where I sit, is blithely ignored by the 'news should be free' crowd.
But at least in Owens' post, he acknowledges that the disruption to U.S.journalism caused by the Internet has not only been disruptive but destructive. That's a start towards a more honest debate.