Reportr.net

Who is the blame for the sorry state of journalism in the US? According to Neil Henry, professor of journalism at University of California at Berkeley, it it is the likes of Google and Yahoo:

I see a world where corporations such as Google and Yahoo continue to enrich themselves with little returning to journalistic enterprises, all this ultimately at the expense of legions of professional reporters across America, now out of work because their employers in “old” media could not afford to pay them.

In the article in the San Francisco Chronicle, he argues that Google and new media companies like it, should take “greater civic responsibility for journalism’s plight”.

The problem with his argument is that it is based on the wrong premise. It assumes that Google, Yahoo and the like are responsibile for the decline in quality journalism in the US. Apart from anything else, newspaper circulation has been slowly falling since before the Internet.

In a sense, newspapers have only themselves to blame. They have lost out in a war of innovation to Google by failing to invest aggressively in emerging forms of communication. From the State of the Media report of 2005:

The problem is that the traditional media are leaving it to technology companies - like Google - and to individuals and entrepreneurs - like bloggers - to explore and innovate on the Internet. The risk is that traditional journalism will cede to such competitors both the new technology and the audience that is building there.

Rather than invest in new and untried forms of journalism, newspaper owners sought to continue squeezing 20% margins out of the product. This approach worked in an environment where news was a scarce commodity and a local newspaper had a virtual monopoly on information, but not in an age of an abundance of information. The strategy by some newspaper owners to keep profits high by cutting back on staff merely weakens the very strength of a newspaper, its journalism.

It is instructive to note that the newspapers that are thriving online as those owned by families, like The Washington Post or by a trust, like The Guardian.

What we can learn from new media is that the predominant model of the newspaper industry is broken. Blaming Google will not fix this. It is time to develop a new model for journalism, perhaps based on the idea of a trust or non-profit, as with the St. Petersburg Times. It is important for quality journalism to survive, be it in newspapers or online