Truth be told, you won’t find 1,028 earlier posts here about the impact of technology on newspapers, just one, but the number of posts and articles written on this topic in the last six months is easily ten times that figure.
Nonetheless, the lead editorial in this morning’s Boston Globe is a good example of those in an industry failing to understand impact of technology on the very function they perform and need they fulfill.
While much has been made of the “business model” of print newspapers and the fact that online ad rates are insufficient to support the same news gathering infrastructure as newspapers employ today, that line of reasoning assumes that the only difference that matters is simply a difference in delivery mechanism, from ink on paper on my front porch every morning, to online on my laptop anytime anywhere.
Instead, the ubiquity of web access and its broad adoption throughout society combined with the growing number of free, easy-to-use tools for collaboration and information sharing, means that the fundamental way in which information is gathered, analyzed, and distributed is changing.
Gone are the days in which full-time employees (reporters) were the only ones who could spend the time needed to deeply research a topic and the only ones who had access to the needed people and documents.
And it’s those days that the Globe laments this morning when it describes the three examples of journalistic perseverance and fairness to be recognized tonight with Taylor Family Awards for Fairness in Newspapers administered by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.
Read the editorial and the descriptions of these and other honorees and one immediately thinks of the way in which the web puts this information in the hands of so many and gives them the tools to analyze, collaborate, comment, and rate the analysis and discussion of anyone who wishes to participate.
Consider the most celebrated example of journalistic success from the past fifty years, the coverage of Watergate and the Nixon administration’s attempted cover up, and one quickly imagines that if this were to occur today that more people would come forward with bits and pieces, and others would help knit them together more quickly than any two men, however talented and persistent, could accomplish on their own. (Would Watergate have given rise to the first wiki?)
The awards are, in fact, rich with irony, including . . .
- They were created by former Globe publisher Bill Taylor, whose family owned the Globe for many years (before selling it to the New York Times Company) and under whose ownership lifetime employment was introduced. Today, 435 employees at the Globe have been promised lifetime employment.
- The awards are administered by the Nieman Foundation, which was funded originally by Agnes Wahl Nieman’s gift of $1 million to Harvard in 1937. As the Foundation’s site states,
Her directive to ‘… promote and elevate the standards of journalism and educate persons deemed especially qualified for journalism‘ ultimately gave virtue to the concept of continuing education for working journalists.” [emphasis added]
With the web, the tools to gather and freely disseminate information broadly are available to all, regardless of education or station in life.
- The source of money was her enterprising husband, who is also described on the Foundation’s site:
The Milwaukee Sentinel Building (1911)
Lucius had a hardscrabble youth. He lost both parents as a boy and was raised by his grandparents. Attracted to journalism at an early age, he started work as a printer’s devil when he was just 12 and rose quickly through the ranks to become managing editor of The Milwaukee Sentinel only six year later. By 25, he owned his own paper, The Milwaukee Journal, which he ran for half a century.
Lucius’s lifelong commitment to telling the news fully and truthfully won the respect and loyalty of his readership and eventually, the Pulitzer Prize for the Journal in 1919.
Reading this one can’t help but think of the opportunities that the Web has ushered forth, including for men and women as young (and younger than) 12 years of age.
If Lucius were alive today, do you think he would have sought a job in the press room of a newspaper? (He would have been barred from such employment based on his age alone, which is yet another barrier that doesn’t exist on the web.) Or that, at the age of 25, he would have invested in a traditional print newspaper?
