Lew Friedland Question 4

Moving on and talking about how the media system has fragmented, what David Ryfe in his question calls a more diverse media ecology developing and the mainstream news media no longer serving as the gatekeepers and filters: what’s your view of what’s being gained and what’s being lost as this happens?

In some ways what’s being gained is fairly obvious, which is a breakdown of one set of institutions and one set of actors, namely editors and reporters as the primary gatekeepers of what people read. I’m going to qualify that in a moment, but we are seeing, among other things a plurality of news sources for anyone who wants to essentially know anything that’s going on in the world. If I want to know what’s going on in Pakistan, I can read an English-language Pakistani paper or I can read the Times of India or I can read the Guardian. I can read The New York Times, I can read The Washington Post and dozens if not hundreds of other supplementary blog sites, independent journalists and so on. So clearly on a global scale the number of perspectives that are open to people is growing rapidly – but not exponentially. The sense of exponential growth is that more and more sources will come online fed by the doubling or tripling of those numbers every year and that somehow there will just literally be an infinite number of sources of reportage on world events. While at some level that’s true and that’s the promise of citizen journalism, that essentially every person can be a reporter, so everyone with an opinion, everyone with some bit of knowledge no matter how small about any issue or event is a possible contributor. Well, that’s formally true now and that’s an achievement that I think we need to acknowledge and not bemoan.

But, on the other hand, there are unanswered questions about the organization of that material, the refining of that material, the development of that material according to a multiplicity of points of view that go beyond the one-off reporting of events done with crowd-sourcing. I think that even on the global scale or on the large metropolitan scale there’s still this issue and this problem of how much reporting is going to be done. Colleagues like my friend and longtime colleague Jay Rosen are adamant about the need for support for a so-called pro-am model. At the same time these proponents – Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, to some extent – are not saying that somehow citizen reporting is going to replace the role of the professional; it’s important to be clear that they are resolutely NOT saying that. Nonetheless, there is a lack of answers to how the reporting institutions are going to sustain themselves.

At times I think there’s an assumption that because we have this plurality of points of view that somehow it’s going to keep developing and growing, whereas I actually think that if we turn to the ecology model and we take it seriously it’s possible that we’re about to see the collapse of a niche rather than the continued growth of a set of niches – by which I mean an ecology starts to die when the population can’t actually be supported by the resources available, and I think that we’re starting to enter into a period where not just local papers but even The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and the Washington Post are starting to feel the pinch of the rapid shift of the news ecology. And so, I’m not so sanguine that the “pro” part of the pro-am is going to be sustainable. If it’s not, then I think that the media ecology is not actually a richer, more vital one. I think that were the pros to disappear, which is happening already, or if they were to scale back, which they certainly and absolutely will at least for the next seven to 10 years of some form of transition…

Look at what Detroit is doing*…

Exactly. Detroit, and you could go on and on and on … the Chronicle in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and this is just in the last week. So we don’t have to look very hard or very far to see the – if not implosion; I don’t want to use that word because it’s hyperbolic – but the radical scaling back of journalism in the United States. European papers, although they’re funded somewhat differently, are under similar kinds of pressures. It’s not clear to me that that a new, robust, networked media ecology is going to remain as robust as it appears to be right now.

Now, everything that I’ve said about the global scale is even more true at the local scale and that’s what I think is the largest blind spot of a lot of this discussion. A lot of the pro-am models that have been relatively successful have been things like the collaborative Sunlight Foundation project that Jay [Rosen] helped convene. The thing that people don’t want to acknowledge is that that’s on a national scale and it’s able to draw on a critical mass of national users who are paying attention to a national problem.

When you scale that back to local community, most local communities don’t have anything like that scale and they don’t have anything like that critical mass. It’s fine to say, “We’re going to get two or three people in every congressional district to keep an eye on earmarks.” I think that’s a good thing, even a great thing. Only a fool would say that it’s not. But it’s much more difficult to say that here in Madison we’re going to get someone in every school district to pay attention to report on the workings of the school board. That’s not a substitute in a local community in a way that it’s at least a plausible substitute on a national scale. And that’s where I think that in a federal democracy, which is what we live in here in the United States – where so much political and economic power is vested in the local, county and state level – to have to rely upon citizen journalism even in the main to report on many of the stories that are now reported on by daily metros I think is delusional.

* The interview took place on Feb. 26, 2009, about two months after the Detroit newspapers had announced cutbacks in home delivery four days of the week that were implemented in late March 2009. Three days before the interview the Philadelphia newspapers had declared bankruptcy, and just the day before the Hearst Corp. had announced it was considering closing the San Francisco Chronicle because of tens of millions of dollars in losses. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver published its final edition the day after the interview.