To save what’s left of the newspaper industry, serial entrepreneur Steve Brill has launched a new startup, Journalism Online, which will help news organizations charge for their digital content. So far he has convinced at least 506 people in America that this is a terrific idea. They’re all publishers who have agreed to participate in the venture, but you have to start somewhere, right?
In related news, the Associated Press says it’s on the verge of creating articles that can perform investigative journalism even after they’ve been filed—a “tracking beacon” embedded in these stories will alert the A.P. when websites quote them without authorization. Meanwhile, Dan Rather thinks we should add “editor in chief” to the growing list of Barack Obama’s duties. “I want the president to convene a nonpartisan, blue-ribbon commission to assess the state of the news as an institution and an industry and to make recommendations for improving and stabilizing both,” the former CBS anchorman said in an August Washington Post op-ed. “This is a crisis that, with no exaggeration, threatens our democratic republic at its core.”
Do you want to know the really bad news? Despite all the layoffs, buy-outs, and shutdowns that have afflicted the newspaper industry in the last year, there are still 46,700 newsroom employees working at the nation’s 1,411 dailies, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ 2009 census. That means we’ve still got years of alarmist op-ed pieces, Hail Mary revenue schemes, and Hail Congress calls for subsidies and rule changes before every last school board meeting in America goes unmonitored and we descend into chaos, corruption, and life without paid classified ads.
Beato concludes:
Oh, for the days when the free and independent press was a little more circumscribed! That, in the end, is the theme that has always underscored the case for newspapers in the Web era, even when they weren’t on their deathbeds yet: We need them to protect us from how free and independent public discourse has become! But we don’t. Journalism may be in flux right now, but the long-term trend is toward more transparency, more news, a better-informed citizenry. We’re entering a new Light Ages, and when the last newspaper dies, thousands of sources will be rushing to break the sad news first. One of them might even be Dan Rather. His HDNet series Dan Rather Reports has a Twitter account, and one of his staffers posts to it regularly.
Read the full article here.
As you may know, at Derusha Publishing we are interested in making our content as freely available and accessible as technology (and each of our individual author's wishes) will allow. Our goal is to spread information, not monopolize it. Whether or not our colleagues in the media industry are "on the same page," we agree with Beato and believe that this the future of publishing.
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