Save Journalism, Not Media

I’ve been reading quite a bit about new media vs. old media over the past few months and I am starting to think that this “us vs. them” positioning is somewhat of a fallacy. New Media does not need to overthrow Old Media or vice versa. In fact, New Media needs to save Old Media.

News audiences are migrating online at a rapid rate. Publishers have traded their print dollars for digital pennies and those pennies can no longer pay for real investigative journalism.

Many New Media advocates suggest the the new age of free information will kill Old Media. Yes – you will probably hear about big public events like voter riots in Iran on twitter before you will read about them in the Wall Street Journal.

Blogs, the most common New Media platform, are great. They are lively, opinionated, and a lot of very smart people use them as a convenient communications platform. But, will an unpaid blogger interview five sources and corroborate facts before clicking the “PUBLISH” button.

Some might.

All “Old Media” Journalists will.

Old Media Journalism has been surviving for years off of ad revenue. Yes, you need to pay for a hard-copy of the New York Times, but the revenue generated from the ads in the paper dwarf the revenue generated from newstand and subscription sales.

One publisher told me, “We’re in the business of selling our audience to advertisers, we don’t need to sell our content to our audience.”

However, there is one fact that many Old Media publishers refuse to admit to themselves. Some Blogs actually make money. And some make a lot of money.  The most successful  are written by passionate individuals who also have some good business sense. They have created an audience and discovered a profitable economic model that allows them to sell that audience to advertiser. For them, content is still King. For many Old Media publishers, profit has become King and the model for producing content is broken.

One example f how the Old Media model is broken came from the folks at The Monday Note. They paraphrased a conversation an HR consultant had with the editorial management team at a BIG Old Media company.

The Consultant gave a presentation on how to fire employees. After it was over, an editor asked, “That’s nice, but we don’t ever fire anyone.”

The Consultant asked, ” What do you mean? What do you do with employees who under-produce?”

“We give them less work.”

Some journalists have stepped out of this broken model and launched their own platform. One example is The Voice of San Diego, which formed after the collapse of  a local paper. They have learned a lot from new media. They have even adopted some of their platforms and some of this new generation of media are making money. Many of them are surviving off of grants. We are all still trying to figure out a solid, sustainable economic model and we are getting closer every day.

My point is this. Old Media may dissappear, but the values and ethics that govern Old Media Journalism cannot.