Bill Keller and the future of news(papers)

(Photo courtesy of Just.Luc via Creative Commons/Flickr)

New York Times executive editor, Bill Keller, made a lengthy "column" out of responding to readers comments and questions on their website last week. The first series of questions delved into some of the big issues facing journalism today -- including what will happen to newspapers in the near future with so much media consumption moving online.

I can see two threads that must be identified here when discussing the "newspaper crisis." One deals with the user's choice of format. Dramatic shifts in media consumption from the printed to the web page can be identified, but they are only part of the story. People still consume traditional (print, broadcast) media at a rapid pace and the websites visited for news online are predominantly the same established brands. And with millions of people in America living without access to affordable high-speed Internet, these trends shouldn't come as too big a surprise.

The second is paying for content and journalists. Commercial media is starting to collapse under the weight of its behemoth holdings. The rampant consolidation that escalated dramatically in the mid 1990s -- allowing companies to continue buying more outlets across mediums and in the same markets -- have bared the brunt of such cost-cutting measures as slashing reporters' jobs in order to maintain the bottom line. It is far cheaper to produce weather, sports, or entertainment pieces than it is to pay journalists to do investigative reporting. The foreign bureaus began to close. Reporters were asked to fill the roles of news anchors instead of writers.

It is possible that the commercial model can't continue to service the public need for reporting in this country. But this could signal tremendous opportunity. The ideas and concepts can be seen throughout the myriad of proposals popping up across the field itself. From establishing a National Endowment for Journalism, to micro-payments for content by the user, to the television tax model used by the BBC across the pond, the discussion about driving a wedge between the co-dependent relationship of advertising and reporting is getting louder.

And if all else fails, we could always go for the flavored ink model.

Fair Use, Fairey, and Closed Comments

I admit to being a bit of a lurker.

It's not that I don't have feedback. I have a lot of it. But I tend to localize it into quasi-personal Internet spaces, like the falsified “safe walls” of Facebook, updating my Gmail chat status, or Twitter. So there is an element of experimentation in this whole “commenting on commenting” initiative we've got going on. I planned to take the plunge directly and instead of providing my feedback through the spurious safety net of this blog I would boldly post my opinion on directly to the article or piece that struck a chord with me in the first place.

Turns out that is easier said than done.

A friend of mine sent along this article last week about the Associated Press going after graphic artists Shepard Fairey for copyright infringement. As a staunch supporter of our desperate national need for intellectual property policy reforms, I figured this would be a timely and interesting issue to provide feedback on. But as I scanned the responses on the Huffington Post I realized that perhaps it would be more interesting to post my comments in a space where there was less online community consensus around the issue. When someone forwarded the same story to me, but this time NPR's coverage I figured I had struck the gold mine: many of the comments on the article sided with the AP and agreed that Fairey had indeed perpetrated copyright infringement. (Actually, the comments ran the gambit from well phrased positions to complete intellectual failures, but that's another matter all together).

The moral of the story is that the comments were closed. Because I had not responded to the piece in a timely manner (which is how long exactly?) no additional comments were being permitted on the article.

We can envision “commenting” as some sort of evolution of the “letters to the editor” format, but there are some failures in this conception. Unlike the printed newspapers that are typically discarded by the time the next issue is released, journalism online meanders and lingers and travels in unpredictable trajectories. Closing off comments with attention to the timing of the story may be putting up a roadblock to creativity. Just like suing artists for copyright infringement over works that should be covered by fair use does.