At LR, we don’t actually believe journalism is dying. However, the numbers don’t lie — demand for newspapers and TV newscasts is dwindling. We want our news unbundled. Some surprising sources agree that there is a healthy future in paid, professional journalism. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, speaking at the All Things Digital conference Tuesday, gave his prescription:
“One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press,” he said. “Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.” And he offered publishers advice: “The biggest lesson Apple has learned is: Price it aggressively and go for volume. And anytime we haven’t done that, we’ve had more attenuated success.” He continued: “I believe people are willing to pay for content. I believe in media, and in news content.
The excellent article in this week’s Atlantic, “How To Save The News,” goes inside Google to find out about a little-publicized project that Google is undertaking to help news move forward. Reporter James Fallows writes a credible, balanced, non-hysterical take on the state of journalism. He also had access to Google staffers working on the “problem” of journalism: just exactly how do we afford it? Says Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
“It’s obvious that in five or 10 years, most news will be consumed on an electronic device of some sort. Something that is mobile and personal, with a nice color screen. Imagine an iPod or Kindle smart enough to show you stories that are incremental to a story it showed you yesterday, rather than just repetitive. And it knows who your friends are and what they’re reading and think is hot. And it has display advertising with lots of nice color, and more personal and targeted, within the limits of creepiness. And it has a GPS and a radio network and knows what is going on around you. If you think about that, you get to an interesting answer very quickly, involving both subscriptions and ads.”
There are a lot of great nuggets in this Atlantic article, and I strongly recommend you read it. It’s not the usual doom-and-gloom stuff. It starts from a position of what journalism does best, then asks “how would you turn this into a business if you were to start today, from scratch?”