Journalism: Where Are We Going?

Jake Zuckerman

jz673213@ohio.edu

@jake_zuckerman

In 1964, a Canadian professor named Marshall McLuhan wrote a book titled, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.”

The book landed McLuhan a spot in the annals of humankind as the pioneer of media studies; today, as the digital revolution sweeps the planet, it might be high time we pull it off the shelves and use it to figure out how to save journalism.

Marshall McLuhan - Source: Aldea Villana

McLuhan’s most oft quoted – and pithiest – line is, “The medium is the message.” Meaning that content is not what’s important; what’s important is how that content is accessed.

While a pure McLuhanian approach is a bit radical for journalism (the news does) matter, there are still lessons to be learned from his book. Namely, the way people access the news is changing. If journalists won’t change how they package the news, they’ll become obsolete, a forgotten relic of the early 21^st century.

One key player to saving the news is one of the media titans often accused of killing it: Google. Critics of Google’s say that the site is butchering news-gathering because it plays into the human psychology of the availability bias. However, according to an article by The Atlantic, this is dead wrong. They argue that Google exists in a symbiotic relationship with quality journalism; if one loses value, so does the other.

In an op-ed withThe Washington Post, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt wrote, “We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper's Web site.”

Eric Schmidt - Source: The Guardian

Just as Google needs the news, the news needs Google. More specifically, the news needs to find a way to sell itself within Google. They need to know where their audience is coming from, and now how to pull them to their site from said medium or platform.

The American Journalism Review also published a similar article, saying journalists are going to need to adapt. Their ideas: journalists considering and marketing themselves as service providers, not content providers; a focus on social media (where most their site entrances come from); better market segmentation; and better website metric analyzing software to track user behavior.

The pathway forward is unclear, but what needs to be left behind is. Journalists are no longer men sipping whiskey at their desks, clickity clacking on typewriters, smoking cigarettes as they race to make deadline.

There is no more deadline, because deadline implies an end. Stories get updated, they get shared, they’re a forum for discussion below­ the article.

Bob Dylan once sang, “You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a’changin’.” It’s time for journalists to start swimming, otherwise we’re all going to sink like stones.