The irony and the pessimism in journalism
There were two vastly different points of view in the world of journalism today.
A new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that most leaders of today’s newsrooms in the U.S. don’t believe their operations will survive another 10 years.
The gloomiest: Nearly a third of those surveyed believe their operations are at risk in just five years or less.
The deepest pessimism is seen among broadcast news execs, who are more worried about where the industry is headed than editors at newspaper-based operations.
Strange but true. The medium that helped create the “Now Revolution” is feeling the heat as it tries to keep up with social news.
On this very same day however, support for the news industry came from an unlikely camp — Google.
CEO Eric Schmidt told the American Society of News Editors in Washington, DC that journalism is irreplaceable:
We’re not in the news business, and I’m not here to tell you how to run a newspaper. We are computer scientists. And trust me, if we were in charge of the news, it would be incredibly accurate, incredibly organized, and incredibly boring. There is an art to what you do. And if you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are.
I can’t think of a better way to look at what we do. As Schmidt put it, “We have a business model problem. We don’t have a news problem.”
