Renewing the News

NEW YORK - Last week, rumors from the world of print media were rife: a hundred reporters from
The New York Times
news desk to be bought out - or to lose their jobs if they refuse;
steep cutbacks at British newspapers; staffs slashed at Conde Nast -
eight respected editors axed at Glamour
magazine. In the United States and elsewhere, there is a sense that
the long-foreseen implosion of news publishing is accelerating, having
reached a kind of critical mass.

The head of a famous journalism school, echoing sentiments common
among her peers, told me recently, "We are preparing students to enter
a profession that won't exist as we know it by the time they graduate."

There is no way to disguise the reality: newspapers readers, in the
West at least, are getting older; younger readers prefer to get their
information online, where readers spend far less time actually reading
news than print readers do; and, most agonizingly of all for the
industry, people who were willing to pay for newspapers are unwilling
pay for the same content on a screen.

But does this mean the death of news, or its evolution? I think we are witnessing something new being born.

There is a great deal to mourn about the passing of the older news model. I had the honor of attending the premiere of
The Most Dangerous Man in America
, the new documentary about Daniel Ellsberg and his daring release
of the Pentagon Papers - against the will of the US government - to The New York Times
back in 1971. At that time, newspapers held the public's focus and
could be a powerful gadfly. If you were President Richard Nixon, there
was no ignoring what appeared on the front page of The New York Times
.

The blessings of the Internet are many, but one casualty of our
segmentation into online subcultures is the loss of a common focal
point. It is easy for a president or prime minister to ignore a
thousand Web sites; the multiplicity of outlets and voices online,
paradoxically, has weakened the media's power to force accountability
from leaders.

But the passing of the old news model has also had a salutary
effect. People's relationship to authority figures - doctors,
politicians, religious leaders, or, indeed, journalists - is no longer
slavishly deferential. But this means that newspapers, in order to
survive, will have to abandon their top-down tone, their "we decide
what's important" sense of hierarchy, and create more collaborative
kinds of documentation and feedback with citizens.

This does not mean merely permitting comments on an article that is
published online; it means creating more opportunities for citizens to
document, record, curate, and edit news from their own communities. A
new form could evolve from this changed power relationship between
editors and citizens, potentially becoming as powerful as traditional
journalism, if not more so.

First, online news outlets will have to link not just to sources,
but to live footage, ideally shot by citizens. I have created op-eds in
partnership with a citizens' video news collective, The Glass Bead
collective. There is a potent immediacy to documents that have
hyperlinks to footage of veterans being trodden underfoot by mounted
police at a demonstration at the US presidential debates, or students
being gassed in their rooms during the recent G-20 summit. As more
citizens become documentarians, online newspapers will have to curate
their work to reflect reality on a level of visual urgency that new
readers take for granted.

Second, news outlets will have to be interactive: they should
regularly teach citizens op-ed writing, for example, so that editors
can receive a truly diverse set of submissions - well sourced, well
written, and well argued - from people from all walks of life.

Finally, citizens should be able to continue to curate a news story.
On Facebook, of all places, I experienced the amazing potential of
posting an item and then inviting my "community" to continue the
research as well as the debate. To be sure, I have been exposed to
flimsy sources, and newspapers of the future should help readers learn
what a good source is, and what good citizen journalism requires. But I
have also had many eye-opening experiences as people from around the
world and from every background deepen my understanding and sourcing
about issues as far-ranging as military law, religious practices, and
swine flu.

With every shift in medium, there is a period of mourning for the
old one. I don't pretend to possess journalism's Holy Grail: a
sustainable business plan for the newspaper of the future. But I do
know that that goal is far more likely to be achieved if newspapers
take their readers seriously and train them as documentarians of their
own communities and of their own moments. If newspaper publishers
continue merely to rearrange the deck chairs, their elegant, elitist -
and currently sinking - ship will deserve its fate.