Don’t Count Print Journalists Out Yet
(The following is adapted from the Keynote Convocation speech I gave at the San Jose State University Journalism School graduation on Thursday, May 22, 2008.)
They called newspapers dead when radio came along in the 1930s. Then they called newspapers and radio dead when television came along in the 1950s. And now they’re calling newspapers dead again, because the internet has come along.
Hogwash.
Like grinning fools waiting to watch a hanging, too many smug pundits are too eager for the drama of our industry’s death. They’re not seeing the deeper transformation going on before their eyes.
The truth is that we are read and watched more than ever before – just in different ways. And that even means by young people, who have never been a core audience of news before – but who now, thanks to the internet, are reading us more than ever. Even though we hear so often that everyone younger than 30 has abandoned the act of reading news.
When people click on those headlines on the Google home page or The Huffington Post, you know who mostly originated those stories – real reporters did. The internet steals from TV and radio, but most of its most substantive material is ripped off from newspapers. And without us newspaper professionals generating that material, the chattering classes on cable TV and blogs would have nothing to chatter and blog about.
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I believe you mean professional story tellers, not reporters, and certainly not anything vaguely resembling journalists.
Think for a moment what someone likely to shell out their hard earned money for a newspaper might be willing to pay for? News perhaps? Maybe something other than thinly veiled opinion pieces being passed off as truth? Maybe something other than a hastily edited AP rip that has been repeated ten million times and is available free from ten million sources?
Perhaps you should call them oldspapers. It's the same old tired garbage day after day after day. Maybe oldspaper publishers should try quality over quantity. Instead of just slopping something together on a tight deadline, take an extra day to do some real investigative journalism. Why is Sunday the biggest paper of the week, when hardly anything ever happens on Sundays? Logically, Saturday would be the biggest paper and it would take people two days to read it. What if a paper were only published on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and all the articles contained original research, not available from any other source?
Maybe then you could call yourselves "real reporters" and the articles you publish would contain information new enough to call "news".