The vacuum might not be that bad

There’s been some excellent traffic and discussion on my last post regarding Singleton/AP and Google News. Much of that has been generated through social media (Twitter and links on other blogs), reinforcing a lesson I try to emphasize with my students: Think of social networks, not web sites, as your platform.

Anyhow, read the post and add to the discussion if you like.

I want to pull out one response I have to the comments though because it is pretty salient to the discussion. What happens if all these newspapers go away or put up walls around their content? Will people pay for it? Will the newspapers collapse and take democracy with it?

I think the oft-ballyhooed relationship between newspapers and democracy is overblown. The relationship between news and democracy is huge, but my definition of news is much more broad than that of some (not all) of my colleagues at the Missouri School of Journalism. And I don’t think news needs “saving” at all because that appetite isn’t going away; it does need to evolve and get better.

Markos Moulitsas had a nice post on Daily Kos today that highlighted the Google/AP drama (and linked to me … gracias), but most instructive to me was the opportunity to read through the comments. They were pretty varied, but these are news readers that one one hand understand the potential loss if newspapers were to collapse but on other hand realize that they wouldn’t miss most of the content.

The argument that stood out to me is what would fill the vacuum. I think Len Witt was referring to this earlier today in the comments on my post, but some of the comments on Kos’ post were highly skeptical that citizen journalism could fill the void. Most of this skepticism seems to be based on what citizen journalism is right now.

I’ve written before that the challenge news sites face is information overload, and idea I first borrowed from Matt Thompson. But if all these sites go offline and a vacuum is created, who is to say a citizen site can’t fill the void? Right now most of these sites operate in the overload age, but might they blossom in an age of scarcity?

We don’t know, but my bet is we’d be fine in the long run. It would be terribly shortsighted to think we can extrapolate a future based on what we see now. Humans evolve and adapt to change, and while there might be short-term loss in coverage the long-term good might be better. Less hegemony, less corporate-minded coverage, better methods for reporting, and so forth.

Because the point is that we would have the chance to create something new. Something that journalists and the public and populace can take ownership of together, perhaps. Nobody said a future without newspapers isn’t sad or even a little scary. But I’m more bullish on the future of news than ever, even as all these papers are going down in 2009. And, seriously, the L.A. Times ran a fake news story ad on their front page today … this is what we’re trying to save?

The million-dollar question for an educator is where the jobs will be. My guess is less on editing and more on community editing, where an editor has the dual role of content editing and site promotion, mixed with a bit of community organizing. I love the future for activist journalists who want to use storytelling and community to organize people. Creative folks who have a passion for telling vital stories will find work in this reorganization, or they’ll find a way to make work. Most importantly, we need to be training journalists not to be married to a platform and look for new ways to tell stories, even if it comes in the form of 140 characters.

And yes, I think people will pay for the red meat, with traffic that sells ads or even subscriptions if you are niche enough. It might be a tougher haul for the feature writer or the sports writer unless you are hyperlocal, but Spot.us and the Huffington Post’s fund for investigative reporting give me hope that people still want investigative reporting. They just don’t want to pay subscriptions for bundles full of other news they don’t want.