I recently came across a bit of commentary in the New York Times article “For news outlets squeezed from the middle, it’s bend or bust” about a topic I’ve always held a fairly firm position on: the role of journalism in the information age.
Some grim propositions have been made surrounding the topic.
Journalism schools are attempting to adjust in order to accommodate new modes of communication, but uneasy speculation still surrounds the question of just what will become of traditional news.
The piece I mentioned earlier posited that it is “bend or bust” for news organizations in the modern climate.
Either bend and give up traditional conservative notions of what journalism should be, or bust, and presumably fall apart.
I agree with this article that those are essentially the only possibilities, and I also agree that bending is obviously the best way for news to go.
By adopting new technologies and using the vast quantities of information now available on consumer tendencies, it should be possible for currently established news outlets to evolve to suit the modern age.
Collapse is definitely preventable for journalism, and the writer of this article and I agree on that.
I disagree, however, with the writer’s notion of what happens in the “bust” scenario. The way it is painted in the article, news outlets that fail to adapt will inevitably collapse as a result.
This will leave a desolate wasteland of featherbrained superficiality which is apparently to be ruled by the Kardashian dynasty.
In short, valuable information will no longer be made available to the American public.
Caricature though this may be, the fact remains the belief behind it is somewhat short-sighted, and carries some fairly disturbing implications.
It should be clarified that the entire situation doesn’t end at the scarcity of relevant news in American media.
To explain a bit further, pretend one news organization undergoes this “bust” process.
They held too firmly to the notion that they had to publish a daily news brief that wasn’t drawing any readers, or what have you, and now they’re no longer able to produce content.
A vacuum now exists in the space that organization used to occupy, and that vacuum is likely to be filled by enterprising young people who will create a news organization that does use modern information technology to guide their decision-making and develop their content.
Now we have the role of the original news organization, occupied by a more modern entity that operates differently than the original, essentially serving the same end as the original outlet did.
This sounds a lot like the situation that results from “bending,” if I do say so myself.
There would of course be a transition period.
In this interim between the news of yesterday and that of the future, we might experience something like the widespread poverty of information in Kardashian’s America.
For this reason I still think bending is the better option, but I wish to impress that even if something that looks like a “bust” does come to pass, it isn’t the end of news as we know it.
jcworrel@indiana.edu
