Journalism isn't dead, but it's about as robust as an octogenarian with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
People like to place blame on their favorite scapegoat: Google News stealing their stories, Craigslist stealing their classified ads, bloggers stealing their audience.
I don't buy it. The real culprit is unstoppable. It's the Internet itself, Stupid! News and a lot of feature stories are going online, and from there, they're shared everywhere. What we're seeing now is the chasm journalists have to cross as the trade moves to a new online model.
Journalism won't die. There is a critical need for good reporters doing the legwork to dig out the stories and writing about them with healthy skepticism and insight. Blogs--including my own--just can't do that. You have to get paid a decent wage to do the legwork.
The new model to make online journalism work is really quite simple. It's just that no one is doing it.
Google understands what the new model is. Late last year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, "How Google Can Help Newspapers." He describes a compact device for the year 2015. If you want to know what type of tablet computer/e-reader Google and Verizon are likely to unveil to compete with the Kindle and the iPad, read this description from Schmidt:
Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt's Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right. Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I'd never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.
That's how it will be done. But Schmidt doesn't go quite far enough. Aside from providing these services on the reading device, across a nearly infinite number of news sources, these services need to be provided by online publications themselves.
Today's online pubs don't recognize their audience beyond their sign-in ID. They don't recommend stories that we may be interested in. Worst of all, their ads are completely irrelevant to our interests.
That's an artifact of the way the old-dog publishers traditionally dealt with print. They haven't yet learned new tricks.
If an online pub is well-tailored to a reader, she will be willing to pay a subscription. If the ads are properly targeted, they will actually bring in decent revenues.
But it's important that the news/features sites have these capabilities themselves, not just through a new tablet from Google. It's critical to maintaining loyalty to a particular publication. It's critical to bringing in loyal advertisers and revenues without paying a percentage to Google.
I would be willing to license the appropriate technology from Google to get this capability on a news/features site of my own.
Anybody want to provide some funding to try it?