For some reason, this piece by the Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark has sparked a lot of commentary. Clark believes that all journalists have a "duty" to read newspapers. By newspapers, he means the printed kind that gets ink on your hands.
Until we create some new business models in support of the journalism profession, we've got to support what we have, even as we create and perfect online versions that may one day attract the advertising dollars and other revenues we need to do what we do well.
He has forced himself to do just that.
I owe it to hard-working journalists everywhere -- and to the future of journalism -- to read them. It's no longer a choice. It's a duty.
In other words, reading a newspaper is, at best, an obligation on par with eating your vegetables, or at worst, an unpleasant but necessary act such as drinking castor oil. That's hardly going to appeal to anyone, much less the young journalists Clark is trying to reach with this message.
More importantly, what he seems to completely overlook is the fact that most "newspapers" are indeed widely read by journalists multiple times per day. It's just that the reading takes place on the Web. Journalists are also tapping into hundreds of other news outlets online, including wire services, big online news outlets such as MSNBC.com, specialized publishers such as CNET, and ubiquitous blogs.
In fact, in his effort to save the newspaper business, Clark displays precisely the kind of attitude that is destroying it in the first place, namely, blindness to the reality of the Internet. Journalism and printing presses no longer go hand in hand. Paper is an inefficient method of delivery and has been supplanted by virtually costless digital distribution.
Many commenters to Clark's post understand these basic facts. Bob Wyman writes:
If you really care about journalism, you'll do your best to avoid reading or otherwise supporting "paper-based journalism" whenever possible. Since the future is clearly in pixels, video, audio, etc. you'll do everything you can to learn about, live with, and come to understand paper-free journalism.
IDG's Grant Gross nails it on the head when he comments
Next, Roy, you're going to suggest we have a duty to buy vinyl records as a way to protect record-makers? I agree that people should digest the news in order to be informed citizens, but they have absolutely no duty to protect the newspaper in its current form. You seem to be confused about what the product is here. The product is "news," not "paper." Paper is just a delivery mechanism, an inefficient and environmentally unfriendly one at that.
I think that people who run newspapers now understand the new realities, but it took far too long for them to grasp that their ships were sinking. It's not clear if newspaper publishers can, at this point, bail out enough water to save their businesses. But they clearly won't survive if they heed Clark's advice.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:31 AM|Comments(0)
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