Stijn Debrouwere just blew my mind with this piece (and if you don’t know how to pronounce his name either, he says that’s ok).
He writes that the real challenge to journalism aren’t “about digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile web or the curation craze.” It’s that people are getting their information from entirely non-journalistic sources, sources he calls sort-of-journalism and maybe-media.
We journalists think of our work as “news”, but as Stijn aptly points out, we should think of it as “information.” And in terms of providing useful information, other services and sites have surpassed journalism as peoples’ go-to destination. Want to learn about new music? You could read Rolling Stone, or you can head over to Spotify or Rdio or Pandora. Want to know about something that happened not today or yesterday? You’re probably already clicking through to the Wikipedia page.
(News organizations are notoriously terrible at providing that information, as anyone who’s ever come to a story three days late knows. It’s almost impossible to figure out the context of events by that time. Some news sites, like Mother Jones and ProPublica, are meeting that need with their link collections and explainers. More news sites should do this, but I also wonder if stories need to be structured a different way altogether.)
Meanwhile, newspaper editors continue to hold on to unrealistic notions about the value of their work, thinking “that their community members will continue to see them as their most important source of information.” That’s largely because journalists believe that the way they work produces more authoritative, truthtul and better quality pieces, as Steve Myers at Poynter also comments. This often is true, but it overlooks that people value alternative forms of information. And thus, those alternative sources are churning away at that large chunk of what news orgs do that’s not investigative reporting, but just passing time and telling you what’s going on in the world.
I think he puts his finger on some of the bigger problems facing news – that people who aren’t in the news business, who don’t even consider what they do to be journalism, are eating our lunch. We need to step up our game.
Stijn outlines solutions as well, the most appealing of which is stepping up personality. Still, he admits that “highlighting the problem is easier than finding the solution.” I agree that starting to talk about the disruption of the news business in those terms is the first important step.
