Separating the Journalism Baby From the Newspapers Bathwater
By Rob Kall
Newspapers are dying. Let them. There may have been people who wanted to rescue the buggy whip industry. But they were misguided. It was transportation they really cared about. We need to initiate dynamic, bottom up approaches to support the dying field of Journalism, not newspapers.
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Newspapers are dying. Let them. There may have been people who wanted to rescue the buggy whip industry. But they were misguided. It was transportation they really cared about. We need to initiate dynamic, bottom up approaches to support the dying field of Journalism, not newspapers.
The writing is on the web and the smart phone, not the wall, not the
paper. Newspapers are dying because new generations with bottom up
brains marinated in the internet no longer read newspapers. Under 30s
want text message and twitter tweet length reading material and they
want video and podcasts, not dead tree long writing.
Congress held hearings
on the newspaper industry. There's talk or allusion to the idea that
newspapers will be "rescued" by Obama, by Congress... That's a
bad idea. They are rescuing the bathwater, not the baby.
The
thing that newspapers do that is important is investigative
journalism-- digging up the less than obvious, the secrets that
government and corporate officials hide. Journalists make transparent
that which has been hidden or made hard to see or find.
Newspapers
have been among the primary sources for funding journalists. But as
media ownership has consolidated and become less diverse and more top
down, so the number of independent newspapers has dropped, and as
revenues have dropped, less and less budgets have been allotted to pay
for investigative reporting. And that diversity diminished, consolidated, increasingly top-down trend has hurt journalism, just as consolidation of the banking industry after the economic meltdown has failed to help the average American.
The new American business model,
the one that has proven to be fabulously successful even in these tough
times, is based on bottom up approaches. Google, Amazon, Facebook,
myspace, twitter, to name a few, are all based on inviting the crowd
into the business mix. Transparency is a big part of the new
corporation and so is open sourcing of information-- that means giving
things away free.
I'm a firm believer that a strong media, and
that means strong investigative journalism, is essential for democracy
and efficient operation of both government and corporations.
Investigative journalism digs and exposes. That's an incredibly
valuable function. It's so valuable, it's worth investing in... with
the expectation of solid returns on that investment.
I say,
instead of taking a top down approach and giving huge chunks of money
to a handful of failing newspapers, the same approach that was not very
effective, in the long run, in dealing with the bank liquidity crisis,
have government fund journalism and journalists. Take a bottom up
approach and give the money to tens of thousands of journalists--
writers and photographers and videographers. That will take huge
financial pressure off the newspapers, give them a lot more content
they can use and help expand the growing blogosphere, where content is
usually free and millions of people are operating small businesses with
the potential to grow. Small business is where the most job creation
has always flourished and small businesses are NOT too big to die.
Establish
a budget based on a reasonable rate of return. The US economy is about
$13 trillion dollars. I say, invest a quarter of a tenth of one percent
on journalists, whose job it is to investigate politicians, laws,
corporations, with the goal to increase transparency, decrease
corruption and increase responsibility, honesty, accountability, growth
and prosperity. A budget that size is about $ 3.5 billion. With a
salary model, we could hire 50,000 journalists at $60,000 a year plus
healthcare with that budget.
Then, those journalists would be
responsible for getting their work read. The best journalists would be
picked up by the best media. The journalists whose work did not get
attention would make less money each year. We have ways to measure
interest and readership-- google ranking, technorati, quantcast,
alexa.com, amazon all assess the traffic, the number of links and the
popularity of things, sites, even ideas. If a writer's reporting is
picked up by the TV news, by hundreds or thousands of bloggers, that
writer is reaching a lot of people. A bottom up media approach will let
we the people decide which journalists are the best.
Or,
going even more bottom up, open journalism to every writer,
photographer and videographer. Track their traffic and views, factor in
the service they do, in terms of exposing waste, corruption, good work,
etc. and reward them based on those factors.
In the bottom up
world, where thousands or millions of people share in decision making,
network TV has a limited place. There are exceptions. American Idol
taps the wisdom of the crowd to some extent. That approach could be
taken much farther. Imagine news shows where a bottom up approach was
applied to deciding what news was covered. If you look at digg.com,
del.icio.us, fark, reddit, yahoo's buzzup, buzzflash's buzz, and
twitter tweet counts, they all enable users to vote on which headlines
rise to the top. If a major network or a new network allowed viewers to
decide what was covered, this would even allow network news to become
bottom up. Would it work? The number of viewers would be a clear
indicator. It won't be surprising if certain topics gather a lot of
support that may not pull a lot of viewers. For example, if a group
like Focus on the Family goes to a site and artificially votes up
coverage of an abortion protest, but then, no-one watches the coverage,
it will be easy to develop software that discounts votes for certain
topics for a certain period of time.
Not all journalism is
mediagenic and sexy. There will have to be some way to give credit to
journalists who cover local school board and town council meetings,
because they should be covered too.
If the US government
invests directly in journalists, so their writings and reports can be
freely used by any media organization or site, that investment will
yield big results. Instead of seeing journalists as employees who
generate news to sell papers, we can view journalists as sleuths to
find waste, corruption, cool ideas and projects that are working. I
don't think that government should fund coverage of sports or
celebrities. It seems those topics are still doing pretty well. We need
to fund investigative journalism, not entertainment journalism.
Perhaps, by separating the two out, we'll have a clearer differentiation of what is news and what is noise and entertainment.
Naturally,
those on the right will call this socialized journalism or socialist
news. These are the same people though who fight to allow corporations
to be treated as people, the same people who want to screw up the Internet and end net equality. These are the ones who block efforts to
increase transparency in government, because this idea is all about
transparency.
Frankly, I'd like to see even more money
invested. Why not fund four times as many-- put 200,000 investigative
journalists to work, of all ages? They will scour the nation to find
quality stories that make a difference.
The top 10,000 or
20,000 journalists should get bonuses and the least read, least value
producing journalists should get demotions or lose their jobs.
Crowdsourcing
and related bottom up approaches wil be used to assess who are the best
and worst achievers as well as measures of money saved or developed,
based on discovering waste, corruption, getting out new ideas, etc. If
a reporter digs up a corrupt operation that has been bilking the
government of $10 billion a year. That reporter should get a big bonus,
maybe $100,000, and be secure in her job for at least a few years. If a
reporter is the first to really get wide coverage for a new invention
that saves people millions, he should get a nice reward.
Hey,
this is a new idea. It's not totally fleshed out. But it's a hell of a
lot better than dumping hundreds of millions or billions into a dying,
archaic industry. There may have been people who wanted to rescue the
buggy whip industry. But they were misguided. It was transportation
they really cared about.
Authors Bio:
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.
To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.