Destructive Creation: Journalism and the Internet

The day that I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we have reached some sort of equilibrium. -- David Simon

Information wants to be free. This is the promise that the Internet, through its unique and costless distribution mechanism, holds. Traditional pay models of information production are almost laughably anachronistic, but that isn’t stopping the entrenched news industry from fighting to impose these outmoded business models on the public. News has a fixed cost problem, much like its sister industry, the expression industry (i.e., music, film, and television); however, unlike its sister, the transition from priced print to free digital brings with it two tremendous costs: investigative reporting and localism. A May 2009 Senate Hearing on The Future of Journalism contemplated just these costs and benefits. The question though, as Arianna Huffington put it, “is not how do we save newspapers, but how do we strengthen journalism?”

The Destruction

The allure of The Newspaper is at least partially an ideal: The image of a diligent, hard-nosed beat reporter hitting the streets each day, exposing corruption and inequality in our society is powerful one, proudly rooted in the bedrock of our nation. In truth, newspapers are businesses like any other, with boards and profit margins. Like any other business that finds itself at the losing end of creative destruction, it cuts off its metastasized branches. It shrinks its personnel; it shifts its focus from delayed reward news (e.g., social problems) to immediate reward news (e.g., scandal); it closes its doors. When it works effectively, creative destruction fulfills the same need but in a different way. In this case, in the process of opening entry to entrepreneurial citizen journalists, bloggers, and aggregators, it leaves two empty holes.

(1) Investigative Journalism. There are costs of producing investigative stories that digital journalism has not yet figured out how to effectively and realistically subsidize. This is likely a temporary problem but a pressing one nonetheless. Citizen journalists simply do not have the resources to spend the hours extensively gathering resources, developing sources, and traveling to distant locations. At present, they depend on professional reporters to do this work and then they aggregate, comment, and redistribute the story. Eventually, there will be no one left to depend on beyond the few who survive and the even fewer who do investigative journalism. Few is not nearly enough for an institution that depends on the voices being many.

(2) Localism. Digital journalism is mostly national. The information is easier to find and the story is more likely to attract a large audience. To the former point, state institutions have not yet accepted citizen journalists as "legitimate." They are unlikely to be welcomed at the police station or at the local chemical plant in the same way a "professional" would be. As reprehensible as this de facto "licensed" freedom of the press is, to ignore this reality is to ignore the lag time accompanying the institutional transition to a system of citizen journalism; unfortunately, local state and corporate actors still need to be held accountable during this lag time. To the latter point, even if these stories do not attract a large audience, they are a public necessity. Though often unnoticed, this coverage is essential to the functioning of civic society at the local level.

The Creation

-- StacyAdelman - 02 Dec 2011

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