Old-school journalism vs. new media

By David Williams

The newspaper industry once marched in the vanguard of innovation.

Equipped with colossal printing presses that could quickly transplant the day’s headlines onto black-and-white broadsheets, newspaper companies flourished. The number of papers across U.S., as well as their respective circulations, soared into the tens of thousands.

Today, billions of people can receive instant updates from innumerable Web sites about what is happening near home or halfway around the world at any time, thanks to Wi-Fi and a variety of mobile devices.

Even before the Internet was born, newspapers contended with rival media that harnessed cutting-edge technology — first radio, then television. Now all three members of “traditional media” face a common foe.

Will the Web, which offers free and immediate access to a wide spectrum of information, bring about the downfall of print and broadcast media?

In the battle between old-school journalism and new media, there can be only one winner.

Uphill battle
Paul Anger ’72, editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press, believes the bedrock of traditional media always has been to provide people with the information they need to understand what is going on around them.

“The thirst for information is at an all-time high,” Anger said. “What the media have to figure out is how to take enough control of the information they provide — and others don’t — so that their business model works.”

Even if the nature of information remains the same, delivery systems constantly are changing. When Web sites — in particular “information aggregators” such as Google and Yahoo! — are giving away the news for free, those delivery systems pose a serious economic threat to traditional media.

One could argue that print and broadcast media started digging their own graves the day they mimicked online competitors, making their content available at no charge.

“At first, they would put only a few paragraphs of a relatively few new stories online per day. Then everything went online,” said Vincent Filak, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. “Why would people pay for the cow if they can have the milk for free?”

Since they started giving away the news online, most newspapers have seen a serious drop in home-delivery subscriptions. As circulation dwindles, so do advertising rates. Meanwhile, sites like Craigslist.org have evaporated most of the revenue that might have been collected for in-print classified ads.

Filak thinks the media’s all-or-nothing tactic for dealing with the Web is a side-effect of a greater problem: an aversion to change.

“Monopolies are fun, but they get fat and lazy very quickly,” he said. “Newspaper, TV and radio need to reclaim what was once theirs if they want to survive. They need to show not only what matters, but also why it matters.”

A new strategy
Due to plummeting profits — and the resulting staff reductions — journalists are devising new strategies to stay alive. What it means to be a reporter or photographer or editor is very different now than it was even a few years ago. Some fundamentals, however, remain the same.

“We are in the community, and we know the community,” Anger said. “People have a lot of ways to get information from national and international sources, but our job is to concentrate on what our local market needs, no matter if it is delivered in the print product or online.”

Or elsewhere.

The lines are blurring across the media, with newsrooms pooling their resources to make sure readers, listeners and viewers get the information they need when they need it. The Detroit Free Press, for example, works closely with a local television station, and the paper has won four Emmy awards for its video feeds.

But even as journalists explore new ways to share the news 24/7 across a multitude of platforms, they must grapple with the irrevocable fact that it costs money to gather and report information.

“The challenge is to find the revenue that allows us to continue to present a printed news report while switching our resources to concentrate on digital delivery,” Anger said.

The first step, Anger said, is reducing “legacy costs,” such as limiting the home delivery of dailies to certain days of the week or reducing the number of print editions altogether, thus spending less on fuel, paper and human resources.

Filak suspects newspapers will start restricting the amount of free content they publish online by setting up “pay walls” that show a portion of the story at no charge but reserve the full article for paying subscribers only.

Lessons learned
The strategies that will shape the future of media are unfolding in classrooms as well as newsrooms, and “adaptability” is the common denominator.

“When I went to college, I was able to double sequence in print and broadcast media, which was rare. Now all of my journalism students have to shoot video, record audio and write,” said professor Filak, who also serves as the faculty adviser to the Advance–Titan, UW Oshkosh’s student newspaper.

Under Filak’s guidance, staff at the Advance–Titan work closely with reporters at the University’s student radio station, WRST-FM.

“You have to think multiplatform,” he said.

Trevy McDonald ’90, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also teaches her students to be adaptable, especially when it comes to multimedia.

“Technology changes rapidly,” she said. “When I first started teaching in 1996, I taught audio production the same way I had learned it: with reel audio tape, razor blades and China markers. Now, everything is computer-based, but the concepts of cutting and mixing are still the same.”

McDonald teaches in a “smart classroom” that allows her to incorporate multimedia tools like PowerPoint slides and YouTube into her lessons. She requires her students to maintain a blog and to produce an hour-long audio program. She also maintains a Facebook group for her course.

“Everyone needs these skills. It’ll only make them more marketable,” she said, adding that, more and more, the media incorporate photo, audio, video and text into their coverage.

And since there always will be a need for someone credible and trained to report the facts, neither McDonald nor Filak worry about the future of journalism as a profession.

“What hasn’t changed is this: You still have to teach students how to think critically. Without that, all of the toys in the world aren’t going to save you,” Filak said.

Power to the people
As journalists leverage technology more strategically, they not will reach more people, but also more people will reach out to them.

“Today, reporters are more receptive to feedback,” Filak said. “They pay more attention to Web hits to see what people are reading, what they want to know.”

In many cases, e-mail addresses are included with bylines so that readers instantly can send comments to the reporter. Some news sites give readers a place to share their insights with one another. Reporters also use those interactive functions as well as social media sites to seek out sources for upcoming stories.

Anger sees traditional media’s position not as transitioning to a new age, but rather adapting in a period of constant change. Whether it is a 140-characters text or a video shot for the Web, information itself is the constant. Good journalism transcends the medium.

“There are so many different ways for people to get information — that’s the revolution,” Anger said. “It’s not a question of newspapers versus the Internet, Facebook versus Twitter or e-editions versus e-readers; it’s who will lose if information from credible sources doesn’t get out there.”

“As long as the information is received, everybody wins."