Can you future-proof newspapers? Rupert Murdoch says his NewsCorp will soon start charging for news. Perhaps it might work – he does have some good papers amid the dross – but it would go against the Internet’s dictum of being free and ungovernable. There have been many site wrecks where charging has been attempted and failed. It may work on tightly focused interests such as financial information but there is an public expectation that news should be free.
The expanding power of the blogsphere will meet some of the gap as newspapers wither. Sites including this one do provide some good information. But citizen journalism is not the same as independent journalism. At the 25th anniversary forum of the CPIT Broadcasting School, the academic blogger Radical Martini acknowledged the volume of cell phone images out of the Iran protests but said it was impossible to ascertain their authenticity, location and write a comprehensible news story based solely on the material received. You need a reporter on the spot to do that best.
As a recovering journalist, I continue to value good journalism and generally respect those who work hard to uphold its values. I favour cock up over conspiracy when it comes to news judgement and errors, though the pressure is explicit to run stories that rate rather those that count.
Making it worse, I am detecting a crisis of identity among good mid-career journalists, particularly but not exclusively in newspapers, who are unsure if there is a job for them within journalism until their retirement. This is feeding into people considering journalism as a career.
All of this leads into the increasing importance of television and radio journalism and how we achieve that into, sadly, an increasingly print-free New Zealand. But that’s a separate blog…
The world would be a frightening place if news became reader pays on the net. It’s also disturbing that scandal is sometimes more important than good journalism.
Perhaps journalists are waking up to that which most of us in the real world learned twenty five years ago. There is no such thing anywhere, including the public service, as ‘a job until retirement.’
You have to work at making yourself employable right up to the time you want to retire. That means continuing to learn new skills and turning your hand to new tasks.
Frankly, I would rather pay *not* to read that tabloid junk.
Funny how there is millions on state aid for half a dozen locally made movies a year, all most all of which go unnoticed, and yet the money for ONE movie would pay a lot of journalists for a year. And lets not even start on state funded TV shows.
They dont have to even do political stuff if recieving state funds
Our radio and TV journalism/news died nearly 20 years ago when it TV was opened up to competition and became commercialised. It’s actually taken longer for our print media to do the same but it has and due to the same forces.