In the November issue of the American Journalism Review, of all places, is one of the best, most succinct, most thorough and useful reports yet on how interactivity and online news sites could save mainstream journalism and reconnect the press to its resentful and alienated audience.
If newspapers and magazines hope to flourish online, finds reporter J. D. Lasica in a report "Net Gain," they must engage in a two-way conversation with their audiences. "A more open relationship could be good news for the future of journalism," he writes.
The story offers a balanced, rational, and coherent view of the collision between old and new media, from inherent culture clashes, to perspectives of new and old media writers, to an understanding of the ways in which technology is transforming the relationship between sellers and users of media.
It suggests ways in which online communications can - or can't - help journalism.
Writing of his time online, Lasica writes that a common theme in digital communications "is that old media's practice of top-down, father-knows-best journalism is tired, clunky and obsolete."
The Net culture is given to heavy-handed cyber-rhetoric about old orders giving way to new ones. Despite the leadenness of the language, there is much truth to the notion of imminent and radical change, of an information revolution intersecting with the rise of a digital age. Linked communities online are ubiquitous, as is email, news, and research.
This doesn't mean that traditional media will or should expire, or that one culture must totally supplant the other, or is superior to it. The truth is that we need journalism. The Web culture is fragmented, diverse, and vast. Journalism is familiar and cohesive in concept, if not often in practice.
The struggle between new and the old information cultures is pointless. Journalism can survive and prosper in the digital age. The citizens of the online world could benefit from and appreciate good journalism. The sensible person will pick not one or the other, but what he or she needs from each.
Things new media is good at:
Freedom. New media let people speak far more freely on politics, sex, religion, and values than old news does. Blessedly, the online world has no tradition of objectivity - as useless a journalistic convention as ever existed. Mainstream journalism isn't very free. It's bounded by the conventions of corporate owners and timid editors, producers, and publishers.
Interactivity. New media is inherently interactive. The capacity for communications with consumers is literally built in.
Community. New, especially digital media, is by nature communal, creating new kinds of information and social communities from groups of elderly women to plumbers to black college students.
Fact-driven information and research. The Net makes the transmission of factual data - as opposed to the knee-jerk dogma of the spokesperson culture epidemic in old media - available to people easily and on demand. Here, we can easily assemble not just the liberal or conservative position, but all sorts of research and opinion almost instantly.
Culture. New media understands that popular culture from computers to TV to movies is a central tenet of American life, not a series of epidemics to be perpetually warned against.
Breaking news. No medium relays breaking news and response better, more efficiently, or more creatively than digital media.
Transmit or raise ideas. No medium has ever offered a better means of spreading truth, lies, rumors, or facts than the Web does now.
Environment for the young. Journalism has relentlessly warred on the culture of the young, chased them away in droves, and now faces the bitter consequence: It has no young readers or viewers. In overwhelming numbers, cable and digital communications are the media of Americans under 35, drawn to media that doesn't find its interests stupid or dangerous.
What traditional news outlets do better:
Present coherent, reliable pictures of the country, the state, the town. By blending text and pictures, by their inherent portability, newspapers and magazines in particular can give us a picture of the world around us (if only they would). Informed and subjective pieces on race, politics, welfare, and other social issues by writers who gather information, do research, and present conclusions would be especially welcome.
Gather factual information reliably and accurately. Journalists are trained and experienced fact-gatherers. They are far from perfect or detached, but they are in many ways, the best we have. Journalists are trained to collect information and present it, and the good ones really do want to tell the truth.
Cover the daily workings of government (as opposed to politics). The Web offers tantalizing possibilities as a medium for political communications, but that are no signs this culture can present issues and information about government in an accessible, comprehensible or reliable way, at least not yet.
Publish comics.
Undertake investigative and special reporting. This is an ability nearly unique to mainstream journalism, which has the space, format, and expertise to answer vital political and social questions, rather than simply raise them. But most investigative journalism has vanished from daily papers, along with good and idiosyncratic writing and a wide range of opinion.
Present major issues and ideas that require detail and substantiation. Big ideas are better introduced in print than any other medium, a notion relatively few webheads would disagree with.
Theoretically, if folks would just do it, mainstream journalism could become valued gatekeepers of the information revolution, helping us understand which issues are significant, what we need to pay attention to, and what we don't. As the media universe becomes more diverse and extensive, the need for traditional media only grows, if they would only grasp the function and rise to it.
The tragedy of journalism's contemporary gazillion-dollar rush online isn't that the press can't do good work online. Sure they can. It's that journalism didn't take the money and energy and create better journalism.
In their mass stampede online, the press loses either way. If they draw readers and advertisers to their Web sites, they undermine the very form of their medium. If they fail, they have wasted perhaps the last chance to transform their papers and broadcasts by making them graphically and editorial relevant and vital. To radically redesign. To cover culture well. To rethink the ways in which they present politics and government. To permit more creative writing and expression by journalists. To hire younger people again. To move beyond defining themselves as breaking news media and engage in a creative renaissance.
In his report in AJR, Lasica grasped, defined, and presented the right issues to the right people in the most balanced and coherent of ways. But journalism's sorry history of resisting radical creative change makes it unlikely that his good work will come to much good effect.
He can bring the news to the people who make it, but he can't make them read it or get it.
