Future of Journalism

The old business model for journalism is clearly on the decline as we can see from the bankruptcy filings of major newspapers. No business model is guaranteed to persist in an economy that allows creative destruction, but people's needs still need to be fulfilled in one way or another. It takes a lack of imagination to think that journalism is dead. The 20th century newspaper business model is dying for sure. I think that people still want facts to be gathered and commentators and aggregators still need a primary news gathering as support. I believe that some model will allow companies to make money by producing news whether that involves microtransactions, a separation of content and distribution (similar to ASCAP in the recording industry), or something nobody has thought of yet.

I went to a round table discussion on political journalism and I had a couple takeaways. I may turn this into a more detailed blog entry later.

• Journalism was never that well paid to begin with
• Much of what's available on the Internet, TV, etc. is aggregation or commentary rather than primary news gathering
• Newspaper model is clearly in the past. I wish the roundtable had gotten into some detail about possible business models and payment systems. At some point I will go into more depth.
• The issue with non-profit news gathering groups as a solution is that they don't care as much about interesting stories. They may cover "important" stories that nobody will listen to or read since they don't have nearly the incentive to get eyeballs.