Wordblog

According to a rather unscientific looking poll in the Atlantic, media insiders say internet hurts journalism. It may be hurting great swathes of mainstream media but journalism is empowered by the internet.

We need someone, another King Canute, to convince these naysayers that the tide of the internet cannot be turned around. Even if all the providers of news were to lock out Google and put up “Robots keep out” signs around their sites it would not take us back to some golden age of print media.

Nor is it much more helpful to tell the old print barons “You blew it” as Jeff Jarvis does in his Guardian column (link goes to two related piece) today. He writes:

Newspapers looking for fault in their fall need look no farther than the buttons on their bellies….

Newspapers have had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 since the launch of the commercial browser and Craigslist, and 10 since the start of Google and blogs, to see the upheaval in the media and to reinvent themselves for a new age. But most didn’t and those that did change didn’t do enough.

A more thoughtful approach comes from Eric Schmidt of Google who is interviewed in the related piece by Maureen Dowd. He says:

The best way to get out of this is to invent a new product. That’s the way Google thinks. Incumbents very seldom invent the future.

Neither Waterstones, nor Borders, invented Amazon, and  they have been trying to catch up ever since. The British regional press did not invent Rightmove, more relevant in the UK than Craigslist.

It is, as Schmidt suggests, very unusual for established businesses to throw out their established business model and invent something new.  To say simply, “you blew it” implies that they had a realistic option to reinvent their organisations.

But this does not mean the internet is damaging journalism. Reporting at the BBC, with its licence fee, has thrived on the web. The Guardian’s ongoing investigation of police behaviour at the G20 protest has been enhanced by the internet.

The problem is not that the internet has damaged journalism although it has severely hurt the traditional revenues of most of mainstream media which pay for journalism. Peter Preston in his Observer column yesterday (on which I posted) suggested extending the licence fee approach —- we need to explore all the possible ways of paying journalists and stop blaming ofthers.