Should the guvmint step in to save journalism?

Just got my hands on Free Press’ white paper, Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy. Free Press bills itself “a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media.” I’m only just now sitting down with this; thought I’d share before I was done looking at it.

Journalism for those who can afford it?

I’ve been wondering whether we’re headed for tiered journalism — quality news and information available only to those who can afford it, and who have a deep enough interest to bother; bloviation, press releases, gossip, trivia, poorly researched crap for everyone else.

I don’t see a conspiracy, I suspect a pattern. Public interest journalism has been on the wane for a long time. The reality is, more people are interested in the cast of Twilight than in what happened to that $700 billion we gave to the banks. And even those of us who are interested in following the money are liable to get their information from people they feel represent their interests, whether that be Fox and Friends or Paul Krugman.

Even if that tribal dynamic weren’t in play, the bottom has just flat dropped out of the “content” business. If it can be digitized, it can and will be shared, for free. Almost all efforts to build walls around general-interest news or entertainment have failed. Readers won’t pay for stuff they can get somewhere else for free, even if it’s not as high quality.

And you’ve got ad buyers abandoning media. So general interest and public interest news are shrinking, maybe toward a singularity. Newspapers, TV stations, magazines just can’t afford their staffs anymore.

So you’ve got a deepening sea of news and info out there, but less and less of it, proportionally, is what we think of as traditional, paid, professional, supervised, vetted, edited journalism. Even though everything’s digital, there’s a low signal-to-noise factor, kinda like those cheap cassette tapes you may have bought as a kid (if you’re a geezer like me.) Lotta hiss, distortion, pops and breakages.

Meanwhile, some mad scientists are tinkering with noise reduction schemes and boutique operations that produce (presumably) crystal clear news for specialty markets — but only for elite customers who can afford it. Who would that be? Big corporations, mainly. Government agencies, maybe. Well-heeled nonprofits, I suppose.

Here are a couple of examples:

My cousin, a Washington technocrat, turned me on to Stratfor several years ago. Basically, it started as a newsletter founded by author and futurist George Friedman. He looks at world events through the lens of “intelligence” (you know, CIA stuff) rather than journalism. So Stratfor treats the same stuff as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but in a way that’s of particular interest not so much to the many, but to those who have lots at stake. And it costs $399 a year to subscribe.

Now, $399 might not sound that atrocious, but keep in mind, with Stratfor you get geopolitics: analyses “without bias,” breaking geopolitical news, and monographs and assessments “which offer rigorous forecasts of future world developments.” No art reviews, no comics, no gardening section. No local crime or City Hall. (By the way, Stratfor is looking for an online direct-marketing copywriter.)

Here’s another example, a startup I just found out about today. Psydex, a company that searches and analyzes news sources “in real time” just launched Psyng, a “portal that scours newswires, Internet feeds, TV closed captions, blogs and other sources of ‘chatter.'” Psyng claims to cut through the noise to reveal “statistical patterns and trends in social networks, human behavior and financial markets.” Then they plan to sell access to that to media and corporate interests.

The example they cite: “When US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River in January, Psydex’s algorithms detected—within seconds of the incident—unusual chatter levels well before the news was broadly disseminated.”

So if you really want up-to-the-second info — ahead of your competitors, Psydex would say — you should buy it from Psyng. “Whether your Topic of interest is Oil Refinery Explosions, Apple Computer or Mergers & Acquisitions, Psyng can instantly alert you to key news events, delivering correlations and projected impacts as the news happens,” the site boasts.

Apparently, there’s a network journalists may join, but I’m not sure how that works or what, if any, remuneration there might be for “professional journalists, editors and other intelligent observers.”

Want to get back at evil corporate greedia? Carving each other up ain’t gonna do the job

Lots of bitterness and fury from people whom Tribune has canned recently. Hell, I just got a 10 percent pay cut in my non-newspaper job, so I feel — well, a sliver of the pain, myself.

It appears the head-rolling — which seems disproportionately distributed among “visual” folks — has brought long-built tension over how much value designers and copy editors add to a newsroom to a head. Couple that with resentment toward the survivors, and you’ve got a bloodbath.

OK. I get it. Newspaper owners don’t think we’re worth as much as writers (I say “we” because, though I have a writing job now, the better part of my news career was in layout, copy editing and design.) Many of our jobs have become, as The Yelv points out, obsolete.

What I don’t get is journalists turning on each other.

If you want to make a future for yourself in news, you’re going to need every friend you can find. Now’s not the time to burn bridges — at least not with our colleagues. I will go so far as to say that corporate news has already burned our bridge — and this time, I mean “our” in the sense of all journalists.

I’m not saying this to be a pollyanna. I’m saying we need a better survival instinct.

I won’t lie; publishers and executive editors have disappointed me a little in the lack of enthusiasm for Smartnews. You would think that now would be the time they’d take an interest in something that could reduce costs. They are so shellshocked, however, they cannot even begin to look two steps forward in their game. And they don’t really have a lot of leeway; I understand the money is tightly controlled right now. No one wants to play guinea pig.

I can live with that. They don’t owe me anything.

Where I’m much more disappointed is in the utter lack of heart I keep finding among my colleagues to do something concrete about their predicament. Apart from a job search.

Look, it doesn’t have to be Smartnews. Maybe a journalist doesn’t see the value or the future, or doesn’t trust us. I can live with that, too.

Do something creative. We pride ourselves on our creativity, do we not? The possibilities are infinite. Do it yourself, like my friend Ernie with Short Form Blog. That’s a great example of a designer/editor redirecting his efforts to the Web. Before, he was a curator of news for print. Now, he curates for the Web. Get involved with Publish2. Take an ad sales person out for drinks and pick her brain.

Breaking out the machetes ain’t gonna work, folks. We’ve lost one war, already.