I’ve grown somewhat numb to these sorts of stories, as it feels like we’ve run out of permutations on the deck chairs.
In Ye Olde Tymes — say, 2008 — the corporate model of journalism sitting on top of ads on newsprint was rickety but still functioning. And then consolidation brought a gun to this Jenga game.
Newspapers evolved to all have substantially similar structures over the course of the 20th century because all the pieces worked together for daily just-in-time production. You start pulling out pieces, and bad things happen.
But now the industry has these Frankensteined workflows demanded by Alden, New Media Investment Group and other killers of democracy. Newsroom staff are completely divorced from any production facility in use, so the structures in place are already anachronisms with buzzword-laden window dressing.
As far as I can tell, and certainly from recent job postings, a lot of newsrooms think their audience is Twitter and Facebook, not, say … readers. (Yes, yes, we all know the paper as a whole’s audience is advertisers, but journalists are excellent at self-delusion.)
This sets up an absurd game of telephone from writer to, god willing and the crick don’t rise, an editor at a publication to Massive Online Platform™ to reader. The Value® the publisher brings to the table is name recognition and usually long-expired credibility, while the platform makes it convenient to read alongside “both-sides” thinkpieces about Nazi marches.
But in terms of product? I’d like to see two rounds of editing by people familiar with the subject matter and a proofer on everything; who wouldn’t? One editor is better than none, but that’s the extent of beneficial refinement provided before hitting the reader’s eyes.
The org is paying the reporter less than they could make with an established Patreon and an editor friend, getting ad revenue, and passing it along to Facebook, which also gets ad revenue. They are vampire middlemen in the communication process that exist for people who don’t have an established Patreon (I sure as hell don’t).
But gone are the days when a reporter left a paper and became irrelevant. The journalist is the star online, not the paper, and their followers go with them.
Fixing local journalism will take a lot of things, but we have to burn the village to save it. Let all of the value be extracted from newsrooms to hedge funds so we can stop this farce of framing the future of journalism through the lens of today’s corporate structure and concomitant high overhead costs.
