"To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures..."
John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"
For journalism, it may be the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand the national media is more vibrant than ever before. The NYT, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, as well as broadcast news and cable news networks are thriving, even amidst the post Trump drop in ratings.
For these outlets the transition to digital has been painful but successful. In other efforts, recurring revenue models are driving the success of independent news outlets as well as individual journalists on Substack and similar platforms.
While romantics, like my guest Brian Karem rap quixotic about the 23 newspaper that once were available in New York, news websites and Twitter have now subsumed that, while new sites start up regularly with lower barriers to entry. In his new book Free The Press,
Brian Karem argues that journalism, particularly local journalism, is dying and that he has a specific, if very traditional formula to save it.
Too often when talking about the media and journalism we engage in a board discussion of ideas, policy, and how the levers of power really work
What we often forget is that all of this is made up of people. People who bring to the exercise of power and of reporting on it, their own values, education, and personal history.
In that fact lies much of what is wrong with the media today. It's how we lost sight of the power of class in journalism, why we’ve tried to bury class differences inside racial differences and wokeness.
If all of this sounds too nuanced, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of of Newsweek, helps us understand how it’s shaping our media and democracy in her new work Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
For journalism, it may be the best of times and the worst of times. The national media seems more vibrant than ever. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, as well as the cable news networks are thriving For these outlets the transition to digital was painful, but somewhat successful
For local news, the story of what happing in your neighborhood, your school board, your city council, is a very different story. Thousands of local newspapers and local radio stations have shut down. The economics of the enterprise has proven to be unsustainable, and even large regional papers in places like L.A., Chicago, and Miami, have proven to be problematic at best and striped by hedge funds at worst.
All of this begs the question of whether our political, cultural, and social divide stems from the top, as is assumed, or whether the hollowing out of the news in our communities, something that should be bringing us together, is at the heart of what’s wrong.
It was the great NY Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia who said that there is no Republican or Democratic way to clean the streets. His comments remind us that locally, there is only the common community interest. Take that away and what’s left is all the bad stuff.
One of the seemingly consistent things about creative destruction, particularly as a result of technology, is that we have a short memory for what came before the change. We remember just immediately preceding a dramatic shift in some vital element of our lives, but we forget what came before. It has the patina of making us nostalgic for the remembered past, even though we forget the long history.
This certainly seems to be true of journalism. We look at the landscape of what venture capitalist Jason Calacanis calls “late-stage journalism” and we see a world that is certainly far from what folks once though was the Golden Age of journalism in the 60s, 70s, and 80 and ’90s. But as a part of broader history, the picture is different. And perhaps it is only in seeing that difference, that we can adapt to the economic, political and socials needs of journalism today.
To talk about this, I'm joined by the journalist and Dean Emeritus of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann. His story, Can Journalism be Saved, appears in the most recent issue of the The New York Review of Books.
It’s hard to believe today, but there was time when magazines were an important source of news and images and information. LIFE and Time sat at the top of that pantheon of those once great publications.
Arguably, everything that has come after, from television to Instagram, is but a modern reflection of the predicate that Time and LIFE laid down.
Gerald Moore was a part of LIFE at a time when it helped shape the American experience. It was not only a reflection of it, but the decisions of reporters, photographers and editors at LIFE could shape the nation in new and dramatic ways.
Once upon a time we got our international news through the relentless reporting of foreign correspondents The Vietnam War may have brought war into our living rooms for the first time, but reporters still provided context. Citizens would come to understand events through the consistency of work from a reporter, though time and experience.
Today, that foreign correspondent, satirized by Evelyn Waugh and celebrated by Hitchcock is an endangered species.
Today the freelance reporter, dashing about and multitasking media, looking at events on a one off basis, may not have the same contextual understanding.
As a result, we tend to look at distant events without the benefit of context or connection. The result is that our mistakes and failure appears untethered from each other and this, coupled with our short memories and even shorter attention spans, prevents the foreign correspondent from providing that first draft of history.
HDS Greenway has been an eyewitness to some of the most profound events of our times, including the fall of Saigon, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and the horrors of both gulf wars. Now he shares his remarkable career as a Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir
Back in the early 80 it’s estimated that there were over 50 companies that controlled or influenced media in the US. Today that number is less than 6. In spite of the dramatic increase in blogs, the web, 24/7 cable, there is clearly a homogenization of our media.
More then the story of how this has happened, the real question is what impact has it had on our democracy and on the proliferation of new ideas, on debate and on the intellectual, creative destruction that is the very essence of a free society. Legendary publsiher Andre Schffrin has been on the barricades of these questions for over fifty years. Now he reexamines all of it in his new book Words & Money.
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