As a business journalist, I like to look for discrepancies. Show me two sets of facts or data that seem to clash, and chances are I’ll find a story. So here’s a discrepancy if ever there were one: In 2008, U.S. newspapers cut 15,984 jobs, according to Paper Cuts, a blog that keeps count. And yet, in the fall of that year, enrollment in undergraduate journalism and mass communications programs rose nearly 1 percent from a year earlier, the 15th straight year of increase. And SMU is no exception. In 2000, SMU’s Journalism Division had 93 majors; as of fall 2009, we have 150.
One conclusion you might draw from this is not to expect 19-year-old sophomores to make rational economic decisions. But I think something else is going on. I think aspiring young journalists still have the passion for finding and telling the truth that drew generations of their predecessors to the field. They also sense new opportunities that we longtime practitioners, with our heavy emotional and career investments in the old ways of doing things, are too depressed and distracted to see.
No question that the news media – the print news media in particular – are in the midst of cataclysmic change. You sometimes hear it said that journalism has a business-model problem, not an audience problem. I wish that were so. The truth is that although journalism does have a business-model problem – the advertising that supported it has vanished – the business problem is intimately tied to an audience problem. Newspaper readers, because they tend to be older, are literally dying off, and their replacements won’t be coming from Generation iPhone. With the closings of major dailies like the Christian Science Monitor and the Rocky Mountain News and cutbacks in almost every other newsroom, U.S. newspapers now spend $1.6 billion or 25 percent less on newsgathering than they did three years ago, by one rough estimate. So it’s not hard to convince yourself that this represents the end of the world as we know it.
One reason for concern is that newspapers, even in their diminished state, still report 85 percent of “real” news, in the estimate of Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. That means serious news – about issues like health care reform, the war in Afghanistan
and the local city council’s agenda, as opposed to lighter topics like sports scores, pecan pie recipes and stories about where Britney got that nasty rash. If you are among the dwindling band of daily newspaper readers, you know that most broadcast and online news, and nearly all blogs, feed off that morning’s paper (or its affiliated website). The pessimistic view is that, in a world with many fewer newspapers and vastly smaller newsrooms, there will be little real news – and an increasingly uninformed citizenry.
But I remain an optimist. The traditional news media have an audience problem, it’s true. But information has no audience problem. In fact, the audience for information is insatiable – that’s why 1.7 billion of the world’s inhabitants use the Internet. The trick will be to match up that audience with real news in a sustainable way.
There are hundreds of experiments going on right now that seek ways to do just that. Which model or combination of models will be the answer? Will it be an iPhone app, Twitter, an e-reader, a tablet? Will it be things with strange names like micropayments, pay walls, citizen journalism, hyperlocal journalism, nonprofit journalism or consortium journalism? I don’t know, and nobody does. But all the experimentation is the reason that young journalists are so excited by the possibilities: They’re getting in at the early stages of something new, and they have a chance to shape the future instead of carrying on a hoary tradition. It’s also why we no longer teach our students to be print journalists, broadcast journalists or even Internet journalists.
Yes, we teach them to write, to shoot and edit video, to blog, to use flip-cams and to interact with readers on Facebook and Twitter. And yes, we have a new state-of-the-art convergence newsroom where much of our students’ work will ultimately flow for distribution on the Web. But the truth is that some of this new technology eventually will go the way of the eight-track tape. So it’s not really about the gear. What we’re teaching students, still, is how to do journalism, in the confidence that uncovering the truth and telling people about it will never become obsolete.
Mark Vamos, former editor-in-chief of the national business magazine Fast Company and a former senior editor of Newsweek and BusinessWeek, is the William J. O’Neil Chair
in Business Journalism and Journalist in Residence at Meadows School of the Arts.
He can be reached at mvamos@smu.edu.