What The Future Will Look Like For Journalists
Jim Spanfeller is president and CEO of Forbes.com. He is also treasurer of the Online Publishers Association and chairman emeritus of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
It is a tough time to be a professional journalist. Newspapers are downsizing or disappearing completely, magazines are failing every day and the ones surviving are getting thinner. Online, the rage is all about aggregation and consumer-generated content. But I firmly believe that in the future we will need more professional journalists than we have today and they will be as valued — or perhaps even more highly valued — than they were 10 years ago.
Will these professionals work for the same institutions that they work for now? More likely no then yes. Certainly some of our current journalistic enterprises will survive and thrive but only the ones that make the transition to a “now economy” that demands “entwined content,” or stories told in prose, video and data all at the same time. The majority of the current kings of content don’t understand these changes or perhaps they do but feel helpless to respond to them. Today consumers wants to know what is happening right now (not 20 hours ago), and they want personal insight into the events. And by personal I do not mean from the point of the view of the writer (although clearly that is part of the puzzle) but rather personal to them. What do these events mean to me? How will they affect my world?
News for news sake will continue to be commoditized, but news that is specific to the end user and filled with real-time education will be hard to come by and highly valued. This will require smart, diligent reporters who do most of their work before the event happens. In other words, they know the topic inside and out, they know who the movers and shakers around that topic are, and, more importantly, they can get those movers and shakers to respond quickly at almost anytime of day.
Stories will still develop over time and across many specific installments of reporting. But the idea of a
I hear there's a song about it….
Nice post! You can certainly discern the difference in journalistic quality regardless of format. Let's hope the business models follow.
The models will follow because the web is a platform and the same rules that applied to all other platforms also apply to it. The fact that business people can't figure out how to make money is because they are not seeing it this way.
Great post. A lot of what is said here is true.
In the future the individual reputations of bloggers/ journalists will become of paramount importance for the audiences that they themselves have developed. The future belongs to individuals who know how to filter the information and what other bloggers/ news sources are valid.
Jim Spanfeller and his cronies at OPA are a bunch of blow-hards. This guy has produced shit and should be thrown out with the rest of the losers in the publishing industry.
Jim, you are a loser.
comedy is always a good thing to add to a serious web property like paidcontent, right?
I happen to agree with the viewpoint in this article. Unfortunately most editors are way behind the curve in understanding this stuff.
Let's go back to the nineties during daytime television. Remember the nice soap operas and oprah and donahue and even the cute People Court?
And we saw what happened – Riki Lake, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Judge Judy, Maury – all gutter tabloid productions designed for the quick provocative cheapshot to garner short-span attention.
Not to take a jab at Jim but even he knows that the journalism is already being reduced to Jerry Springer style content and sinking deeper and deeper to the bottom of the barrel.
Because for every upstanding 20th century journalist like Jim Spanfeller there is a Jim Cramer out there doing for the in-your-face cheap thrill reporting and analysis.
Jim,
How have you applied these strategies at Forbes? What's worked so far? Would love to hear any lessons learned.
You may want to read my Future of Journalism post:
http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/03/01/future-of-journalism/
Peter – We have indeed applied most if not all of these strategies at Forbes.com and we have found that they work very well indeed. I can't say we have done all of the all the time but that is our goal.
What we found as I said above is that people still want what they have always wanted. Now the bar is higher in getting it to them.
Thanks for you question.