The Journalist's Dilemma

Part 1: The Medium is the Message

04 November 2009

The first in a several part series on “Journalism and the Web”

Introduction

As the Web becomes the dominant medium, the avenues by which news has traditionally been delivered are becoming less and less relevant. Unfortunately, the energy and tactics required for a news organization to fully exploit the Web as a medium for news are often viewed with suspicion. If your livelihood is based on people paying for printed copies of your words, it’s a rather terrifying prospect to put those words online where anyone can view and reproduce them at no charge.

In short, print journalists and news organizations today face a dilemma — the same one faced by almost any entrenched business in a changing market.¹ News organizations that want to take advantage of the Web will find that they need to sacrifice or cannibalize some of their tried and true revenue streams. The dilemma is whether or not to stick with the tactics that have historically made them rich or take counter-intuitive actions based on the hope that they will pay off in the long-term.

The silver lining of this cloud for the news organizations is that this dilemma is becoming less and less of a dilemma as days go by; clearly the old revenue streams are dying off and these organizations must change if they have any hope of survival.

If we take for granted the fact that hedging bets will not be enough and smart news organizations must jump in with both feet to take advantage of the web, how should they do it?

“The Medium is The Message”

When McLuhan made this famous statement in 1964, he recognized that the shape of a given medium has a profound effect on the perception that the audience has of the content being carried.² This rings especially true now as news organizations compete with Web-native publications such as blogs for readership and ad revenue.

There is an impedance mismatch between the business and operational models of classical print journalism and the social norms and technical capabilities of the Web. This mismatch leads to suboptimal performance by the Web properties of news organizations and disappointment of readers.

Leveraging the web optimally requires an embrace of the medium’s core characteristics. What do we know about the Web?

Decentralized
Open
Programmable
Linked
Embraces emergent behavior
Rewards authority and reputation
Standardized
Distributable
Immediate, infinite context is Available

The standard practice of throwing print articles to the Web with a few formatting changes and a couple links is insufficient to align the content with the Web medium.

We’ll revisit these properties later in the series. Before we tackle this alignment of content and medium, there are more fundamental business questions that news organizations need to answer. In particular:

What do news organizations produce?
Where does the journalist add value?
Are news organizations in a product business or a service business?

These and other questions will be discussed in the next post.

¹ See Clayton M. Christensen’s seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma for an in-depth discussion of this general phenomenon. (HarperCollins, NY 2003 ISBN 0-06-052199-6)

² See Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1st Ed. McGraw Hill, NY; reissued MIT Press, 1994, with introduction by Lewis H. Lapham; reissued by Gingko Press, 2003 ISBN 1-58423-073-8

Pius Uzamere is a computer scientist and the founder of a startup, Quotation.WS, whose vision is to improve journalism by making use of the inherent properties of the Web.