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I sit on the boards of two Journalism schools and attended the top Masters program just before the journalism crash of 2009. I am on these boards mostly becaus

I sit on the boards of two Journalism schools and attended the top Masters program just before the journalism crash of 2009. I am on these boards mostly because both schools think that some guy in Silicon Valley has insight into what journalism students should be doing. Its not true. The problem was that massive disruption of print media really came to a head due to the great recession, when low media buys plus a real uptick of traction from ad networks put a final nail in a lot of print journalists careers. Looking back its easy to think if they were more tech savvy they could have somehow survived -- but thats just not the case. Tech and journalism are more closely related than ever, and specifically scripted languages and knowledge of markup (CSS and JS Libraries) can improve the final product's production quality, but journalists are not programmers no should they be. Its similar to saying journalists should know how to roll their own print presses in the 50s -- its not their job. The problem lies more in the fact that we simply can't fund journalists to do their job anymore. We charge them with both doing investigative reporting, staying neutral and coming up with a sustainable business model for it -- and you know what? Its just too much to ask. Local news stations are slowly dying out, local newspapers are already mostly thinned out and upstarts like Patch (flawed as it was) were not able to fund real journalistic work. After a few years going back and forth on this I have come to believe that a BBC like model in the US would do the nation great deal of good. Funding journalists to do their job and keep up the good work without pressuring them to make compromises is essentially to keeping voters informed. I hope we can get over our mindset that all things need to be privatized at some point in the near future and begin funding PBS, NPR, and local news to keep doing what they are doing.

joshlegs 13y ago
Well, you really have a pretty good grasp on the state of journalism affairs. In the five years I spent reporting, I saw newsrooms decline substantially at all the papers I worked at (and was the victim of one layoff). You're absolutely right in saying that there is just too much demand on journalists now. People really don't know what they actually do. Everything from aggregating (by HAND, nonetheless) public information that isn't available easily online to investigative reporting to daily "fill-the-paper" stories (you know, the stupid stuff that nobody really cares to read anyway). Most of my time was spent writing the boring shit until the exciting stuff came along. And frankly, you can't spend all your time writing the exciting stuff because you still have to have a local product, not to mention the massive amount of time it takes just to do a single investigative report. Investigative articles are really what I consider the heart of journalism as the fourth estate, and is what sells the papers. But you can't have five days of nothing and a day of explosive articles. Or hell, maybe you can, who knows. In any case, just wanted to pipe in with some props on realizing that journalists are way too overburdened to be effective any more.

joshlegs 13y ago

Well, you really have a pretty good grasp on the state of journalism affairs. In the five years I spent reporting, I saw newsrooms decline substantially at all the papers I worked at (and was the victim of one layoff). You're absolutely right in saying that there is just too much demand on journalists now. People really don't know what they actually do. Everything from aggregating (by HAND, nonetheless) public information that isn't available easily online to investigative reporting to daily "fill-the-paper" stories (you know, the stupid stuff that nobody really cares to read anyway). Most of my time was spent writing the boring shit until the exciting stuff came along. And frankly, you can't spend all your time writing the exciting stuff because you still have to have a local product, not to mention the massive amount of time it takes just to do a single investigative report. Investigative articles are really what I consider the heart of journalism as the fourth estate, and is what sells the papers. But you can't have five days of nothing and a day of explosive articles. Or hell, maybe you can, who knows. In any case, just wanted to pipe in with some props on realizing that journalists are way too overburdened to be effective any more.