Asking a question of the future of media (the newspaper) is something quite different from asking a question about the future of a professional practice (journalism). Any answer to the first is historically not particularly satisfying, as Michael Schudson so wonderfully expresses.

A future for/of journalism is imho contingent on a couple of considerations:

1. Journalism has be decoupled from media, at the very least in the eyes of its practitioners. And not just in word, but in deed. Research among practitioners working in/with online/convergent news operations strongly suggests the future of journalism is tied up with a cultural shift, not a technological one.

2. Related to point 1: A possible future for journalism should be all about talent – not technology. Considering mass lay-offs and a documented shift to “atypical” media work (see the 2006 IFJ report to that effect), the managerial impetus/challenge of the profession is to reinvest/build on its talent, independently of how that talent is affiliated or (sub-)contracted to the title. The title therefore is irrelevant.

3. Labor laws should ideally move across borders, and serve to protect not (just) those who are already “in”, but those who in fact choose to stay outside: the independent professionals, the entrepreneurs, who do newswork outside of the newsroom system. there seems to be no protection for them, and even unions tend not to represent them very effectively. Related to this is the need for more informal or semi-formal (transnational) networks of news professionals. Like their media, most of their professional networks are hopelessly local or national, even when their industry has become truly global.

4. Journalism students should not be trained for established news media organizations, but for the profession of journalism- there is a rather significant difference. Furthermore, scholars in the field of journalism studies should not consider it their job to defend or protect news media such as TV stations (ex. CNN) or newspapers (ex. New York Times), which are, ultimately, commercial corporations. Although understandable, by doing so we study (paraphrasing Ulrich Beck) zombie institutions through the lens of a zombie sociology (or any other discipline), rather than truly move the knowledge in our field forward. It sometimes seems the debates in journalism are historically more or less the same – which can be explained at least in part by this at times blind loyalty to this self-referential industry.

There is obviously more to this – much better articulated by my colleagues in this thread. I do not fear the effects of a fragmented media marketplace, because our behavior in it is far from fragmented, and the news agenda has actually become much more isomorphic and coherent than in the past. In fact, I fear consensual, interinstitutional “Wikiality” much more than the excesses of a atomized “networked individualism” as Manuel Castells, Barry Wellman, and others articulate it.

Second, I think the content has suffered greatly as the culture of the newsroom has become such a poisonous, cynical place where talk of ideas, innovation, facilitating conversation … or mention of words like empathy and design elicit sneers and dismissiveness.

Let’s face it, in our zealous pursuit of the always elusive ideal of objectivity we’ve distanced ourselves from the madding crowds (the great unwashed, as one colleague not-so-jokingly put it) and, increasingly unaware of the actual needs we were meant to be fulfilling, began churning out ping-pong, he-said/she-said journalism that often leaves our audience no better off than before, and maybe even more confused. Among many other things, we’ve neglected the suburbs, failed to cover our immigrant communities from their perspective, failed to cover business with any sense of ongoing responsibility to make sense and raise the appropriate alarms. We’ve dutifully fed the news beast, but left the people who gather around us malnourished.

Perhaps this crisis will force a period of reckoning upon us, and encourage journalists to redefine their role and their sense of what it means to work as part of, and in service to, a community. We need now to deploy people into our communities to un-cynically discover what information they need (not what they say they want, but need) and empathetically design (yes, design!) models for delivering needed information to the people we serve. You can call that journalism if you like. You can call it newspaper journalism. It really doesn’t matter what we call it so long as we do it.

If we attend to needs first, and stick close our communities (talk to them, live among them, and understand their needs) then the money will follow.

I study and teach at journalism in the context of a late Nordic welfare state, in Finland. Here the newspaper business has so far been able to defend itself against a full blown crisis (with fusions and rationalization, mainly). The public service ethos of broadcasting is still alive, although debates about the operating range and mandate of public service broadcasting and webcasting are getting more and more intense. And we are still only ‘seriously worried’ and utterly confused about how the facebook- and google-generations are going to want to access their news.
But even without the actual crisis, the sense of increasing competition has set in. A brief look at the way journalism has reacted to this pressure might help to speculate a bit about its future. There are at least three interconnected trends that have, I think, gained strength during the last 15 years or so.

1. Journalism has a become more distinct public agent. The performative tension between journalism and other social institutions is increasing. Journalists claim a mandate of being ‘detached’ and ‘critical’ while declaring that they are at the same time ‘neutral’. While this can be a democratically healthy articulation of ‘suspicion about power’ it also favors a division of labor, where it is the task of journalists to dramatize and clarify the plots of public life, but it is still the task of the institutions of power to control the contents and set the agenda. With the decreasing resources of news work, the role of a scriptwriter – instead of the gatekeeper or the watchdog – institutionally makes sense. It defines, perhaps, a new terrain of autonomy that works for a while in the new competitive environment.

2. Newsrooms have reorganized themselves, with two things in mind: to produce content for multiple platforms and to play a more proactive (distinct) role. This is vital not only because competition calls for instant ‘added value’ from your brand to the consumer, but also the fact production must be secured. Thus, in order to survive, newspapers in particular (or also) have started to invest on news planning and design. Template journalism rules. While this active, team-work driven and future oriented news room can potentially play a more prominent role in public life, it also tends to make journalism less creative, more ‘formatted’ and in some ways more predictable.

3. Journalism talks increasingly to individuals and through individuals. It has privatized its language of public affairs. Opinions of journalists themselves matter more than ever. News is framed through individuals, examples and case citizens. And finally, there is a growing sense of affective journalism: feelings matter more and they have to be embraced. While such ‘engaging’ strategies might help journalism to sustain audience attention, they might not be the most relevant ways of addressing the problems people will actually be facing in the future.

In the context of the late-welfare state in Nordic countries, such changes refer to certain a loss of local particularism. The ‘social democratic’, class-based social contract of the Nordic welfare state has been losing its legitimacy for the regime of ‘competitive state’. As systemic reactions to such broader changes, journalism’s reaction also has a tendency support those changes. At the same time some fundamentals of the profession are changing.
If journalism’s authority earlier relied on borrowing an aura of expertise from other system actors (with their consent), its authority will rely more on its own expertise of handling the (moral) drama of public life. If journalism’s legitimacy earlier grew out of an imagined inclusive national audience of citizens, it will be based on a polarization between special services for niche audiences and the spectacular creation of grand events which evoke affective identities. If journalism’s relevance was based on the idea of a citizen with a vested interest in the operations of the state, future journalism will measure its usefulness with individual opinions, pleasures and private benefits.
All these changes are not necessarily for the bad. But if one bears in mind some of the grand scale ‘challenges’ we are facing globally (global warming, inter-cultural tensions, economic crisis… just to name a few), it is not clear that the trends of market-driven journalism will serve as well as we need to be served. That means, logically, that other kinds of journalism will have to look for operating room in arrangements that place its logic at least partly outside the landscape of short term competition. In this respect, the big question for a more diverse journalistic future is: Are there such alliances available?

All the right points are raised here. Let us summon  others to continue the debate. Let us delve into the problems, link to the best thinking, deepen the discussion. No time to lose.   

The perceived need for local businesses to advertise does not mean that there will be local newspapers as we know them. Rather, it is quite possible that as advertising shifts, the content of print media may change. The shift of national advertising for such products as automobiles and appliances from general magazines to television is a case in point. New magazines survived by appealing to specialized audiences, such as everyone who had a television set (TV Guide) and everyone who was interested in the life of celebrities (People). I hope that on the local level at least those changing categories of news production will still address what I might recognize as democratic concerns instead of the lives of the latest celebrities.

Talk about the future of news necessarily include anticipating the day when one can learn information on television, the internet, one’s cell phone and one’s MP3 player, as well as on other media whose existence I cannot anticipate. Each of these is a different regulatory environment and how regulation occurs will have an awesome impact on what people will know and how they will come to know it. Scholars are already (rightly) worrying about “net neutrality” – which might be defined as the freedom from corporatization and the freedom to access information without invading others’ privacy. In corporatization I include both the hypermedia’s invasion of privacy and better net access to corporate actors than to individual “users. What if the internet and other media become like cable television and individuals (as opposed to corporations) are limited to the sites available through their providers? As it stands now, the internet is now “merely” awesomely commercial, a haven for corporate enterprises, but not itself controlled by corporate licenses.

Although profits are under pressure, the immediate problem is debt. Over the last decade, many of the big newspaper groups sought relief from revenue pressures through expansion. Earnings were leveraged to acquire other newspapers—often at prices that reflected assumptions about continued high profitability. Debt service was pegged to those assumptions.

As a result, many of the largest newspaper groups entered the current economic crisis highly endebted. These include the Tribune Company ($12.5 billion), the New York Times Company ($1.1 billion), McClatchy ($1.175 billion), Lee Enterprises, MediaNews, Morris Communications, Philadelphia Media, Star Tribune, Gatehouse Media and the Journal-Register ($642 million), among the most prominent—and vulnerable. Nine of the 13 largest groups have junk-level bond ratings, which make refinancing expensive even in a good lending environment.

The current economic crisis has not killed the profitability of these groups, but it has reduced profits to levels that make their debt difficult or impossible to service. What we’re seeing now—and will see more of in the near future—is a brutal process of deleveraging as this valuation bubble pops.

The debt situation alone will hasten the large-scale restructuring of the industry—with some substantial part of it passing through bankruptcy. The critical question is whether the core functions of journalism can reorganized and sustained on a lower-profit-margin basis. The tragedy of the current debt crisis is that the process of finding out is likely to be faster, more chaotic, and vastly more destructive of institutions and personnel than it needed to be.

Joe Karaganis
SSRC

When thinking about these matters I have my parents and their generation in mind – and the small western town I grew up in — where the local paper was and continues to be a vital source of communication, conversation, and provocation. Go into the local cafes, bars, doctors offices, and you’ll find the paper, and someone reading it. It is part of the lifeblood of the region, and it and hundreds of other papers like it are crucial to local democratic life. If they become only advertising gazettes, then something crucial is lost. Again, maybe bloggers and other citizen journalists would fill this void. But in the ideologically fragmented world of the blogosphere, I fear a common vehicle for conversation about local matters will be lost. The local papers are, truth to tell, pathetic vehicles for coverage of national and international affairs. They always have been, but they are vital to informing local publics about their local affairs, and the Deweyan in me recognizes their value in establishing the conversational starting points for democratic life. As instruments for keeping local publics informed about things national and international, they are easily supplanted by far better sources, but I’m not sure where those better sources will come from with respect to local coverage. I know my parents and their friends’ lives would be much diminished without their daily chronicle. They can go to other sources for the national and international issues of the moment, but they have nowhere else to go to find out what blunder their local planning board is contemplating.

But it seems to me that it is still very early days in the evolution of “newspaper” journalism. A great deal of experimentation is just beginning, much of it aimed at devising models for sustaining the distinctive forms of narrative reporting and fact-based analysis that have distinguished newspapers in modern times. The news organization I head, ProPublica, is one such experiment, but there are others, including promising local ventures such as voiceofsandiego and MinnPost. All three of these are non-profit, but globalpost, another experiment which launches soon, aims to make money.
The web, in and of itself, offers journalism much promise: costs of publishing are a fraction of the past, speed of publishing is much greater, distribution is instantly global. These factors cannot help but be pro-democratic, and create more effective checks on governments.

It is true that the lowering of barriers to entry has atomized publishing, and limits on advertising revenue, if they are sustained, may tend in the same direction. This proliferation of publishers may be thought to undermine social cohesion. But it is not necessarily so. Again, we are in the early days of this medium, and it may well be that some relatively few trusted voices will grow louder and larger as the medium begins to mature. In that case, the audience could be drawn somewhat back together.

But even if that is not the case, even if a million web flowers continue to bloom in perpetuity, there will likely be continuing, indeed accelerating need for judgment, experience and reporting in making sense of the web, and of the world, for readers. The events in Mumbai are a perfect case in point. Yes, “citizen journalists” contributed raw material of true value. But they also helped spread the initial word that the attacks were aimed at Westerners, especially British and Americans, which in retrospect they clearly were not. It took insightful, skilled journalists such as Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria to quickly discern that this was not the case, and to explain why he knew that. And it took professional journalists, such as the team from The Wall Street Journal, to make sense of the chaos of the attack, and render it in a comprehensive and comprehensible narrative.

So while I am not sure what I think about the future of newspapers, I remain quite hopeful about the future of “newspaper” journalism.

First, I’m glad to see this issue getting the attention it is, though its sad that it has taken the impending collapse of the newspaper industry to get us here. My own thoughts on this come out of a multi-year project examining local news production in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can read about the project here. I’ve been conducting online qualitative work on this topic since 2006 and completed 5 months of on-site fieldwork earlier this fall.

http://journalismschool.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/what-im-doing-1-the-big-picture/

I think it’s useful to reframe the initial question we’re asking as “What is the future of news reporting?” (I’ll add to the list in a moment). Asking the question as it is usually framed– “what is the future of the newspaper” or, more often “what is the future of journalism”– can lead to a conceptual muddle. By asking, what is the future of the newspaper, we are limiting ourselves to a medium, to a product (and probably setting ourselves up for disaster; I think the newspaper is doomed). By asking, what is the future of journalism, we are lumping a number of distinct forms of work together. After all, critics, columnists, and providers of news analysis for the New York Times can all be considered journalists. So can editorial cartoonists. It might be interesting to ask, “what is the future of editorial cartooning,” but its probably even more interesting to ask, “what is the future of news reporting,” or as I call it, “the gathering together of ‘news objects.’”

We can start answering this question in any number of ways, methodologically speaking. My own tack has been to look closely, almost obsessively, at the processes of news work, the kind of work that members of a particular media community do, and let them define for themselves what reporting and journalism are, and how it is changing.

I think that the future of reporting, sad to say, is bleak, at least under the circumstances we’ve known it to occur: reporting is at the wrong end of economic trends (it is expensive) audience trends (people may not care about it) and technological trends. Its funny to think that something so banal as talking to people and reading documents is so costly, but it is. All s not lost, however: I think new forms of reporting / advocacy / conversation will emerge, that may look a lot like this.

http://youngphillypolitics.com/city_paper_effects_ypp_poll_and_other_online_organizing_budget_cuts

Reporting, in other words, may become the province of social movements– not newspapers. The fast we come to terms with the fact that someone can be both a reporter and a member of a social movement or issue constituency, the happier we will be with this outcome. At the same time, while reporting may be more tied to movements, movement members who become reporters may increasingly resemble the newspaper reporters of old. I guess we’ll see.