Two leading publications chronicling the journalism profession are the venerable Columbia Journalism Review, founded in 1961, and the upstart Nieman Journalism Lab, based since 2008 at Harvard University’s Nieman Center. Both represent high peaks in the often barren landscape of newsroom shoptalk and media criticism. Reading them, however, you may start to wonder whether they are even chronicling the same industry.
With articles documenting the sad decline of a range of traditional newspapers and journalism institutions (from the Philadelphia Inquirer to the San Jose Mercury News to everywhere in between), CJR can often read as an elegy for a vanished world. The Lab, however, overflows with news about the latest journalism experiments, chronicling a range of media organizations, many of them barely a week old and some of them not even launched yet. While there is some doom and gloom at the Lab, and some future-oriented thinking at CJR, this contrast is unmistakable for anyone hoping to stay current about the latest developments in the news business.
The problem with talking about journalism institutions, and one reason that discussion of them tends to be so polarized, is that both CJR and the Lab are telling honest stories. It is a moment of both catastrophe and rebirth for institutions that house journalistic work.
The story we tell ourselves about news institutions, in short, is really three stories, all occurring more or less simultaneously. There is a story of institutional decline and collapse, a story of institutional rebirth, and, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, a story of institutional adaptation. Where death ends and rebirth begins, the degree to which new institutions bear some responsibility for the decline of the old, whether more is being lost or gained, and how we can possibly tip the scales toward “gain”—all these are tangled arguments that arise from the fact that we are not observing a single story unfold. We are watching three.
A Story of Institutional Decline and Collapse: In Michigan, Louisiana and Alabama, Advance Publications is moving out of the daily newspaper business, cutting the number of days it prints a traditional hard-copy paper. From Chicago to Boston to San Francisco, news organizations are struggling with ethical and logistical questions as they increasingly outsource their local coverage to content farms (and the Philippines). The venerable Philadelphia Inquirer finds itself with its fifth owner in six years. Even the New York Times, although buoyed by its digital subscription model, is locked in a struggle with its union over plans to freeze pensions, cut health care benefits and increase hours worked. And these are only the headlines from this week. Two years ago, we were discussing the closure of some newspapers in Denver and Seattle. And two years from now? As we argued in the opening section, even if the news business stabilizes, it is unlikely that it will ever experience the kind of profitability it maintained prior to 2005.
A Story of Institutional Rebirth: But decline isn’t the only story here. While reports on the future of news often tout Talking Points Memo and ProPublica as emblematic of the institutional rebirth simultaneously being experienced by the news industry, these sites are, by digital standards, graybeards. Websites like SCOTUSblog can exist for several years before an event like the Supreme Court’s health care decision propels them toward wider visibility, and the same holds true for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com blog covering national elections, now part of the New York Times. A quick look at the Knight Foundation News Challenge awards in June 2012 reveals a half-dozen new and not-sonew institutions—Behavio, Signalnoi.se, Recovers.org, the Tor Project and others—working to provide journalistic information to communities. And these are merely the organizations mentioned in one round of the challenge; there have been many others.
The conventional wisdom about these emerging institutions, appearing in a multitude of studies ranging from the 2011 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report “The Information Needs of Communities” to a case study of Baltimore carried out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is that none of them will replace the original reporting being produced by traditional (and declining) news outlets. Insofar as sheer volume of news is concerned, we do not dispute this claim. But we also think the story is more complicated, and we’ll turn to some of the reasons for that later on.
A Story of Institutional Adaptation: The focus on decline and emergence also obscures a third story, one that may be, in the end, the most important of all. How do new entrants in the field of journalism ever get to the point where they can be said to have reached a point of organizational stability? How do they move from being a precarious startup to a fully fledged member of the journalism community? As we will discuss below, one of the strengths of institutions lies in their ability to change personnel without risking their organizational extinction. How that happens, and how an emerging news organization becomes an institution, is one of the central questions confronting journalism as it moves into the digital age.
We also need to ask how traditional news organizations are reshaping their processes to adapt to a changing information environment. A forthcoming case study of the New York Times by Nikki Usher, an assistant professor at George Washington University, will hopefully go some distance toward answering this question, but we also need to start synthesizing the ways that creative news organizations are adapting to the digital age. Researchers need to build on a basic sociological insight—the fact that most news institutions try to routinize disruption with as little change to their work processes and ideological self-image as possible—and begin to ask how creative institutions work around these systemic and self-imposed constraints.
When it comes to news institutions, we’re telling ourselves a lot of stories at once. While the stories of decline and rebirth make up the majority of discussion about the “future of news,” there is a relative gap when it comes to understanding the third story, that of institutional adaptation. Though the effect of the internet on the American journalism ecosystem has often been portrayed as anti-institutional, serving mainly to erode or even destroy institutional viability, its effect is actually more complex. While the internet has indeed disrupted many existing institutions, it has also helped usher in many new ones. Much of the fate of the news business will be decided not by what is going away, and not by what is exciting and new, but by how new institutions become old and stable and how old institutions become new and flexible.
At this point, it is important to keep two things in mind. First, while we will stress the relative inflexibility of large-scale institutions, we are not claiming that all institutions everywhere are incapable of change. What we are instead arguing is this: Changing the institutions of news is not impossible, but it is hard, and harder than it might logically appear to those on the outside. Arguments about the economic efficiency of change, the normative value of change, and the managerial imperative of change are often both true and, from an institutional point of view, irrelevant.
Second, news institutions that are able to adapt represent one of the most valuable potential sources for growth and evolution within the larger news ecosystem. Adaptation has a powerful impact no matter where it occurs, of course, but larger news institutions are somewhat like a battleship; while it takes them a long time to turn around, once the turning has stopped, they can move forward with an impressive amount of power and speed. Newsroom executives, editors and managers should keep in mind that it is upon their ability to think differently that much potential ecosystem change depends.
So just what are institutions, anyway? Economist Geoffrey M. Hodgson has argued that institutions are “the kinds of structures that matter most in the social realm: they make up the stuff of social life.” Institutions, Hodgson writes, can be defined as “systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions.” Sociologist Jonathan Turner offers a somewhat more wordy analysis; institutions, he argues, are “a complex of positions, roles, norms and values lodged in particular types of social structures and organizing relatively stable patterns of human activity.”
Without a doubt, some complicated stuff. But what matters for our purposes here is the embedded argument that institutions need to be understood as something that can, at least in theory, be located outside of a particular physical struc ture. Office buildings and even payroll invoices don’t serve as the bedrock of institutional material; rather, institutions are fundamentally a series of social rules that create stable patterns of behavior. Of course, working together every day in a newsroom or getting paid to perform a certain kind of work doesn’t hurt the establishment and reinforcement of these social rules, but money and physical proximity aren’t always the essential thing.
It would also be a mistake to think about institutions as simple agglomerations of rational individuals, each making a calculated choice that entering into institutional arrangements is the best way to maximize his or her self-interest. In the words of Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio, two leading sociologists,
“while institutions are certainly the result of human activity, they are not necessarily the products of conscious design … the new institutionalism in organization theory and sociology comprises a rejection of rational-actor models, a turn toward cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties of supra-individual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individual motives.”
In other words, while understanding individuals is an important part of understanding institutions, there is an accumulated detritus within institutions that makes them irreducible to individual behavior. All of this boils down to third argument, one that we think can shed some light on the crisis plaguing journalism today. We quoted a scholar above who noted that institutions organize “relatively stable patterns of human activity.” Stability has its advantages, and we’ll discuss some of them below, but, as Powell and DiMaggio put it, “behaviors and structures that are institutionalized are ordinarily slower to change than those that are not … institutional arrangements are reproduced because individuals often cannot even conceive of appropriate alternatives.”
During our interviews with journalists in a variety of institutional settings, we were struck by the contrast between the pride they expressed in the organizations they worked for and the frustration many of them felt when talking about the slowness of organizational adaptation. As one reporter put it, “I don’t think there is a lack of will to change at these huge organizations, but the cost and the risk are really high. It could be a financial disaster, yes, but it could also be a cul tural disaster in the newsroom. And no one knows what this [new newsroom] is supposed to look like. At every iteration, when you look at something, you only know how it works when it’s broken.”
We’d sum up the general lament this way: The presence of process is a bigger obstacle to change than the absence of money. This conundrum isn’t surprising; as we noted in our definition of institutions, the entire purpose of institutional arrangements is actually to ingrain and rationalize standardized patterns of behavior—in other words, to make change hard.
Occasionally, this frustration with the slowness of institutional change spills into a general organizational nihilism: If institutional arrangements are failing, the thinking goes, and if these failing organizations won’t face reality and change, then blow them up and start from scratch! The problem with anti-institutional thinking of this sort is that, paradoxically, the very qualities that make organizations conservative are the same ones that occasionally make them such powerful producers of the “iron core” of news.
So what kinds of journalism do news institutions make possible, and is there a way to preserve their positive affordances while simultaneously opening them up to evolution and change? Is there any way out of this institutional paradox? Institutions add the ingredients of leverage, symbolic capital, continuity and slack to the news production recipe. More broadly, institutions use these ingredients to produce two different kinds of democratically relevant news—generic information about public events and a more specialized information designed to have an “impact” upon other social institutions. Confusion about the purpose of journalism, and the journalistic tendency to deliberately conflate these two types of information production, make it harder to come to grips with how best to preserve leverage, symbolic capital, continuity and slack under changing technological conditions.
Modern American journalism can trace its origins to the 1830s, when a growing crop of “penny press” editors sought to standardize and rationalize the production of regular news. Rather than relying on letters from abroad, the news brought to colonial harbors by trans-Atlantic passengers, or stories clipped from other, circulating newspapers, the reporters employed by the penny press sought out specific “beats”—most often the courthouse, the police station and the society party. They did so, in part, because each of these locations could be relied upon to be regular, predictable generators of the kind of news valued by the growing mass of literate news consumers. The story of early journalism, in short, is the story of an emergent institution seeking out more established institutions in order to feed the 19th-century “hamster wheel.” Journalism studies scholar Matthew Carlson generalizes the historical argument, invoking the earlier research of Mark Fishman (1980), who proposes that “bureaucratic affinity” propels bureaucratically organized news organizations to seek out other bureaucracies to provide information.
Sociologists of news often focus on the negative consequences of this bureaucratic affinity. “While journalists do not purposively seek to bolster those with power, the news legitimates ‘institutions of social control by disseminating to the public institutional rationales as facts of the world,’” Carlson continues. Journalists, meanwhile, usually focus on the accountability function embedded in this institutional monitoring; “eye always on bureaucracies,” as reporter David Burnham put it in a 1998 article in Nieman Reports.
But why are news institutions particularly suited to covering large bureaucracies and governmental and corporate organizations? As David Simon argues:
It’s hard enough to hold agencies and political leadership accountable in a culture that no longer has the patience or inclination to engage with the actual dynamics of actual institutions. At this point, we are having trouble as a society recognizing our problems, much less solving any of them. But absent a properly funded professional press—one that covers the civic bureaucracies with constancy and tenacity, we’re going to have even less of a shot going forward.
The new organizations emerging in the digital age, Simon further contends, are ill-suited for this kind of work:
As for the blogosphere, it just isn’t a factor for this kind of reporting. Most of those who argue that new-media journalism is growing, exploding even, in a democratic burst of egalitarian, from-all-points-onthe- compass reportage are simply never talking about beat reporting of a kind that includes qualitative judgment and analysis. There’s more raw information, sure. And more commentary. And there are, for what it’s worth, more fledgling sites to look for that kind of halfway-there stuff. ... [But] beat reporting—and the beat structure of a metropolitan daily—is what is dying here.
Simon’s argument is a powerful one, but it is largely anecdotal. Can we define with any more specificity exactly what it is that institutions do? And once we specify, can we figure out a way that their core functions can be preserved, even in a period of transition? Here are four factors that define the value added of a news institution when compared with a random assortment of individual journalists.
If journalism is, at its root, designed to provide the public with the information it needs to be self-governing, and if part of that information is the insight that emerges from the aggressive and often hostile monitoring of a variety of social institutions, why would anyone in power ever talk to a journalist? Why would the subjects of monitorial scrutiny not simply communicate with each other and with the public directly, avoiding all dealings with news reporters? In part, for self-interested reasons: government officials and other powerful people know that talking to the press is always an opportunity, however limited, to “get your side of the story out,” even if the results will ultimately be damning. In part, however, officials engage with the press because these officials fear the consequences of non-response.
Journalism institutions, at least in their 20th-century incarnation, had a few qualities that allowed them to increase their power vis-a-vis other structures of public governance. The first was their claim that their authority was directly proportional to their mass audience—the notion of leverage. A large audience, in this case, was the guarantor of power insofar as readers and “public opinion” were perceived as being shaped by journalism on a large scale. Ironically, the roots of this equivalence between audience and power lie not in the penny press era but the party press era that preceded it, where there was a more direct correlation between the size of circulation lists and the strength of a party in a particular area. Nonetheless, the era of “mass” media included the notion that a mass audience was responsive to, and influenced by, the conduct of journalism.
Today, the notion of leverage, at least insofar as it is guaranteed by audience size, is undergoing a shift. While no one denies that today’s journalism institutions remain uniquely powerful in their ability to mobilize public opinion and punish wayward politicians, the fragmenting of the news audience has upended the traditional notion of the audience as a mass. Once again, this is not to deny that traditional news institutions possess large online audiences, as the managers of these websites never tire of pointing out when they compare their number of unique visitors and page views to those of tiny local blogs. What has changed is not the size of the audience, per se, but the way the relationship between institution and audience is understood—between journalism and its image of the audience. Changes in this image of the audience are deeply connected with a second set of shifts: the decline in traditional news institutions’ symbolic capital.
Along with their levels of financial capital, news institutions have witnessed the decline of a second form of capital—reputational capital. Part of the historical authority of news institutions cannot be reduced to such easily quantifiable metrics as audience size, revenue, or even Pulitzer Prizes. In the long-term sweep of history, the 20th century saw news institutions move from being exciting, muckraking and often scandalous conveyors of useful information and advertisements to the sober guardians of democracy itself. This is an exaggeration, of course, but it is not an entirely unfair one. The reasons for this change lie outside the scope of this paper, but they are as much cultural and sociological as they are economic, and the myth of Watergate marked more the culmination of a long-term reputational upswing more than it did the emergence of it. Between roughly 1908 and 1968, news institutions became the “Fourth Estate.”
Reputational capital primarily attached itself to journalism as a profession and as a set of institutions, rather than to individual journalists. What this meant was that, at least in part, the levels of symbolic capital possessed by individual reporters were as much a function of where they worked as who they were. Although there are exceptions (I.F. Stone being a particularly prominent example), the symbolic capital that individual journalists possessed in the minds of the public and in the minds of politicians was largely a product of their institutional and professional affiliations.
In short, a second advantage news institutions provided to reporters and to journalism as a whole was a remarkably powerful brand. While it’s hard to sort out the chicken-and-egg problems of the 21st-century news industry (did journalism’s reputational decline lead to its economic difficulties, or did economic difficulties lead to reputational decline?) the fact remains that the trends in this area have been in largely one direction: down. Much like the economics of monetary capital, the economics of journalism’s symbolic capital appears caught in a structural, not cyclical, downturn. In the 21st century, reporters and newsroom managers and executives are going to need to think hard about these institutional shifts.
News institutions exist in time as well as in space, and we can helpfully think of continuity as “accrued leverage, distributed over time.” This, perhaps, is the most essential of the four ingredients that make up the institutional stew, although it is often the one most under-theorized. Continuity means being able to decide to cover a certain story, beat or section of society persistently and over the long term, even as the individual reporters come and go. The Philadelphia Inquirer has covered crime in the city of Philadelphia since the paper was founded, and this coverage does not stop when the lead crime reporter retires. In theory, at least, it is the institution that monitors crime in Philadelphia. This is the essential function of those “stable patterns of behavior” mentioned above when we were defining institutions—the idea that the process carries on at a level beyond the individual.
Drawing on an analogy proposed by Len Downie and Michael Schudson in their 2009 report “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” we might say that institutional continuity provides support for journalism’s watchdog function and also its scarecrow function. Both a watchdog and a scarecrow stand guard. But the fact that only a watchdog actively barks and the scarecrow does not bark does not always matter. Though the scarecrow “does nothing,” its very existence, the very fact that the crows know it is out there, “watching,” is often enough to constrain bad crow-like behavior. And the same goes for journalism. The watchdog press, it must be admitted, barks only rarely. But the continuity of that press, the fact that it is “out there,” is often enough to constrain bad behavior on the part of powerful institutions.
Most discussion of how news institutions might be affected by diminishing institutional capacity, whether those institutions entirely go away or simply cover fewer topics, focuses on the watchdog function—the fact that fewer stories will be covered than before and that the watchdog will bark less. We think the real institutional function at risk in this case, however, is the scarecrow function. Both functions are related, of course, and success in actively keeping corporations and politicians honest leads to a stronger sense that journalism is out there, keeping watch. The real dilemma for the news business, however, is how to convince people that it still matters.
News institutions, or at least those organizations we have traditionally thought of as news institutions, do more than cover a single issue. They do more than manage beat coverage, and they do more than mount long-term, resource-intensive special investigations. They do all three. And they have been able to do so because of their ability to rapidly deploy excess capacity. This institutional slack implies that news organizations, traditionally, have had the ability to adapt to uncertain and rapidly changing world events in short order. Paradoxically, their operational conservatism has provided organizations with the ability to be quite nimble when it comes to the one thing all those conservative processes are designed to facilitate, that is, report the news.
Many emerging news institutions, highly focused enterprises living permanently close to the bone, lack this excess capacity. Technically Philly is a website with a single mission—to cover business stories related to Philadelphia’s high-tech businesses. Similarly, the Texas Tribune, the Voice of San Diego, the Smoking Gun—the common characteristic of most news startups is to avoid trying to be all things to all people. Andrew Donohue, editor of the Voice of San Diego,
summarized it this way: “[More] than beats, people here specialize in particular narratives within beats. We’re not going to cover something unless we can do it better than anyone, or if no one else is doing it.” There is nothing wrong with being focused, of course. Nor do we think the massive duplication of labor currently at work in the news industry (sending hundreds of reporters to all cover the Super Bowl, for instance) is either healthy or sustainable. We simply want to point out that the removal of excess slack from the arsenal of news institutions is a genuinely new development, one whose full implications remain unclear.
As institutional capacity declines, news organizations need not sacrifice the depth of their offerings given the resources available elsewhere in the ecosystem. In other words: make journalistic partnerships a more regular part of the institutional repertoire.
In our opinion, there is a stark difference between institutions that see partnerships as a genuine part of their DNA and those that do not. A true genuine embrace of partnerships does not ultimately hinge on the benefit of that partnership to the institution; rather, it hangs on the ability of that partnership to bring value to the ecosystem as a whole.
News institutions, to conclude, have provided added public value to the political and journalistic spheres by leveraging the work of many people, by accumulating symbolic capital, by laying down stable patterns of behavior that can guarantee continuity over time, by being able to focus on many things at once, and by generally fulfilling the scarecrow function of the press as much as they do the watchdog function. Many of these institutions are under significant threat because of the economic, social, political and cultural changes in the larger media ecosystem. And it is in this moment of crisis that the liabilities of institutions—liabilities that paradoxically arise from the very same sources of strength that served them so well in moments of stability—rear their heads.
Over and over again the working journalists we interviewed, across a variety of publications and media types, lamented the inherent difficulty in shifting the directions of their legacy media organizations to meet the challenges of the digital age. Zach Seward, the former editor of outreach and social media for the Wall Street Journal and now a senior editor at the Atlantic Media business publication Quartz, told us that the very success of newspapers at doing what they do makes changing them difficult:
The notion of adjusting course for an organization that is either still obligated to put out a daily print product or is otherwise very good and well oiled at a particular process feels as though the best an organization in that situation can do is make slight adjustments, if they are obligated to a production process that already exists. It’s truly no small miracle that daily news organizations are able to produce what they do already, so 100 percent of effort is expended on existing processes.
What we’ve called this “presence of process” doesn’t manifest itself just when it comes to making big decisions. Indeed, the nature of institutional processes is that they are enacted on a daily, even hourly, basis. Process shapes what is and isn’t possible, not just in conversations between reporters, editors and publishers, but in the very technological infrastructures that make the production of journalism possible. Tools put in place to manage process also put in place the assumptions used to design the tools.
Take newsrooms’ content management systems (CMS). A CMS has a built-in idea of workflow—when and how content gets created, edited, checked and published. As a result, a CMS doesn’t just help an organization manage its content in a particular way; it also deflects or even prevents it from managing it in ways that aren’t built into the CMS.
The point is general, of course; all process exists to forestall alternatives, but CMSes are often at an extreme, because the requirements and assumptions are encoded in software and are difficult to argue with, or to override. As Anjali Mullany, a former online editor with the New York Daily News and now a social media editor with Fast Company, put it:
The CMS and the project management systems are the crux of a lot of these [process] problems. Maybe 90 percent. Sometimes workflow and CMS aren’t even compatible, or the CMS is inconsistent with the workflow. Or the workflow destroys the CMS. Look at any major organization, where it’s multiplatform. It’s not uncommon to see the same version [of a story] a few times. Or several reporters did the same story because they weren’t communicating. The great, flexible CMS that will allow you to change your process over time does not exist. You should do this: try to find the one reporter in NYC who likes their CMS. This is a huge problem. If your CMS restricts you, it’s going to restrict everything about the newsroom. The technology you’re using is going to change what you produce.
The dilemma here is clear. We already noted that institutions can be defined as stable patterns and processes that allow collections of people and technology to accomplish more than they would as a mere aggregation of individuals. These institutional processes provide news organizations with many advantages vis-avis other political, social and corporate institutions they monitor. But these stable patterns, particularly when geared to particular production cycles that are themselves wrapped around particular technologies, can constrain news organizations as much as they empower them to report the news.
Matt Waite notes that the problem with large, hierarchical organizations is not that they discourage creative thought—a subtle and important distinction: “When working in a newsroom, [process is] a huge problem. But often in rigid hierarchies, working within constraints, we could have the greatest creativity. The problem was just getting someone to say ‘yes.’ Getting it to happen.” He also noted that organizations with highly refined processes tend can make trying novel approaches politically difficult: “Newsrooms are still structured like the military. That makes it hard to do anything without stepping on someone’s toes.”
We can also catch a glimpse of the difficulty of institutional change by looking at how startup news organizations, though largely made up of veteran journalists and editors, navigate changes in process. Andrew Donohue recalls that when the Voice of San Diego began, “we were just doing what we did at newspapers, but online. Report through the day, wrap up at 7, then put it up on the site. We were not worried about constant updates.”
We heard a similar story from a senior editor at the New York Times: “We were told effectively that the cuts meant doing more with less, one less person, no letup in the coverage. At no point were we ever asked by someone who had the technical capabilities or authority to actually change the tools or the ways we might use them: ‘Let’s look at what you have to do in a day and see how we can change processes.’ This is what was so maddening.”
At a smaller, nimbler organization like the Voice of San Diego, however, it was easier to shift this legacy process toward one that made a bit more sense in the current technological era. We had “a structured routine that slowly unwound as we got more people, and as social media came upon us. Now, our routine very different in that we both get our stories the traditional way, through sources and observing, but we have to decide how to present the story—a blog post, a daily, a three-month thing, a crowdsourced form. So that’s the biggest question these days.”
The “process gap” is often most visible in work patterns tied to content management systems, because those systems exhibit a double conservatism. First, deploying a CMS represents such an enormous effort, the design of the technology typically reflects managerial choices about how employee workflow should work. Second, like Donohue’s account of process at Voice of San Diego, CMSes are typically updated incrementally; products with print-centric daily rhythms that are adapted for the internet often feel like web- and mobile-centric features are an afterthought, because they often are an afterthought.
It is possible to get a sense of how misfit many existing production processes are by seeing what “digital native” CMSes and their attendant processes look like. To take one recent example, Vox, the publisher of several niche media sites, including SB Nation and the Verge, designed its own CMS from scratch. As Trei Brundrett, Vox’s vice president of product and technology, put it in a public interview, “We map our development plan around the tools that our editorial and advertising teams tell us they need.” This seems an obvious way to work, but it actually involves essential and rare skills: an editorial staff that can correctly characterize its needs; management that encourages editorial and technical collaboration; editorial and technical departments able to talk to one another; and a technical staff talented enough to create a working product that is simple and stable enough to be usable. The point here is not that every news organization should build its own CMS—that’s not possible and wasteful even if it was—but rather to illustrate how far print-centric tools are from fitting the new realities of news production.
The units of journalism are often tied to the logic of daily updates, a logic that does not always exist under conditions of digitization. In response to changing user expectations of time and timeliness, organizations need to rethink everything about how stories are organized and accumulate in the queue of news work. The newsroom assembly line is almost entirely anachronistic as a way of producing content to be produced for digital use, and it must be rethought.
A failure to rethink workflow under condition of digitization can often lead news organizations to suffering all the drawback of digital processes while achieving none of the benefits. Some commentators have referred to this worst-case scenario as the “hamster wheel”—increasing demands on journalists’ time and loss of professional autonomy.
The hamster wheel is real, but many who discuss it mistake its cause. We are not technological determinists who blame “the internet” for the hamster wheel effect. Rather, we blame news organizations themselves for adhering slavishly to old processes under new technological conditions. In other words, technological demands of the internet must be managed in order for the hamster wheel to be avoided. Examples of how to manage the internet might include a focus on intelligent linking rather than constant aggregation and rewrites of already existing news, rotating “link whoring” duty, as Gawker does, and many other process changes.
Content management systems often embody ossified newsroom processes. To the degree this is the case, the ability to subvert a content management system can be a powerful strike against the casual tyranny of impractical process. Journalists should prepare, individually or in teams, to be able to override every step of their CMS. With luck and persistence, these hacks and workarounds can lay the groundwork for a more rational process in the future.
There is an analogy here with the design of medical information systems. As hospital records have become digitized, there is tension, as always, between security and access. A system that is secure enough to prevent all misuse would end up preventing at least some good but unpredictable uses as well. However, a system that allowed all potential uses would do too little to secure its contents.
The usual compromise is a “break the glass” function (analogous to breaking the glass covering of an alarm bell). A doctor who requests files that the system, for whatever reasons, says are not accessible to her, can override the security, saying, in essence, “My need for these files trumps the systems’ security model.” If she does this, she then gets access to the files.
However, to do so, she must be logged in so the system knows her identity, she must provide a rationale for why she is overriding the system, and she is told that her override will be audited within 24 hours. If her reasons for doing so are spurious, she will be disciplined.
What we are recommending is the journalistic equivalent of “break the glass” for overriding the assumptions a CMS makes about process and control. If a journalist wants to bypass or override a particular step, for reasons that seem justified and urgent, she should be able to do so, provided she is sufficiently senior to have internalized the local version of news judgment; that she is identified to the system and willing to provide the rationale for the override; and that she is willing to vouch for this rationale when reviewed by management.
This opens the door to the possibility of errors of commission, of course, errors that come from journalists doing something they should not have done, but far too many CMSes force errors of omission, which is to say errors that prevent journalists from taking advantage of an obvious opportunity. By allowing journalists to override their own processes as needed and with review, news organizations can keep their desire for predictable workflow from crushing the opportunity for novelty and initiative on the part of their staff.
As a counterpart to the power of hacking your process and working around your CMS, news institutions should also make the new processes they are using to generate quality journalism transparent and systematizable by other organizations. In other words, when you invent a process that works, you should “show your work” so the same process can be used by other news outlets. ProPublica has been an industry leader in this regard. While some news organizations might fear that this kind of transparency will “aid the competition,” the fact remains that, for a century, news processes were an open book. We see no reason that organizations cannot continue to make money and get scoops in this new era, even when they show their work.
The fact that an increasing number of individuals contribute to the information ecosystem for free, or do so for reasons that do not strictly boil down to making money, has caused almost as much consternation in the media industry as has the question of pay walls. Early optimism about the ability of “citizen journalists” to transform the news business was quickly overtaken by both professional defensiveness and the economic crisis that enveloped the newspaper business (a crisis that had nothing to do with amateur production of content, but which was often lumped in with arguments about citizen reporting).
We will discuss the role amateurs and interested citizens play in the larger news ecosystem in the next section. For now, it is enough to argue that we think both sides of what is now a very sterile debate are missing the point. The role of everyday people in news production is an institutional question as much as it is an economic one. In general terms, the fact that at least some news producers contribute their labor for free means that a world of limited information has now become a world of overwhelming, often unprocessed, information. This poses a general challenge for news institutions: how to come up with new institutional processes and procedures to go from an information-scarce environment to one that is information-rich.
In more specific terms, one of the major dilemmas of amateur production is how to organize, rationalize, and systematize that production. It is not a coincidence that Amanda Michel, the former head of the Huffington Post Off the Bus project, began her career as an organizer rather than a journalist. As an organizer, Michel was well trained in understanding what amateurs and volunteers can do, what they can’t do, and how to get them to work together for the benefit of a larger institution. How to manage amateur production can thus be tied to larger questions of how new entrants to the journalistic ecosystem might turn themselves from ad hoc networks to institutions. We now turn to that larger question.
Institutions provide certain key advantages when it comes to reporting news in the public interest: the kind of leverage, symbolic power, continuity and slack necessary to go toe-to-toe with other institutions: politicians, governmental agencies, businesses, schools, nonprofits, religious organizations. Yet the very same “systems of established and prevalent social rules” that help give institutions their heft also, in their inertia, serve to block necessary and needed change.
The solution to this paradox is not to abandon institutions. Nor is it to blindly stick with the institutions that have traditionally provided the best journalism in the past. Institutions are needed to do certain kinds of important things—but we need to reinvent the existing ones and to invent new ones. We need to focus on the way formerly ad hoc social arrangements become institutionalized, the barriers to such institutionalization, and the lessons and strategies for reporting the news that can be gleaned by watching this institutionalization take place.
There are two dilemmas of institutionalization at the heart of 21st-century journalism. The first, obvious and widely discussed since the 1990s, is the requirement for traditional news organizations to adapt to the internet, and the attendant difficulties they are having in doing so. The second, however, is less widely discussed: New forms of news production, from Andy Carvin’s curated Twitter feeds to MapLight’s database journalism to the stabilization of nonprofit web publishers like the Voice of San Diego or the Texas Tribune, have to become institutionalized, because without the virtues of institutions, albeit ones fitted to digital production, these new efforts will not be able to survive or to become persistent or powerful enough to discipline other institutional actors.
An example of a new, loosely structured digital journalism organization achieving some level of institutional stability can be found in the paradigmatic case of Talking Points Memo. We focus on TPM here, not because it has not dealt with its share of struggles and institutional challenges, but precisely because it has. Understanding the dynamic interplay between organizational challenge and institutional evolution is key to understanding the ways that the news media ecosystem is changing. Launched in 2000 by Ph.D. student and journalist Josh Marshall, the site was largely indistinguishable from the numerous “single-person” political blogs that were launched during the early days of the blogging revolution.
In 2002, the architecture of the site was fairly typical of the blogging genre at this early stage, with a “personalizing” photo of Marshall himself and a two-column setup (links in a narrow column on the left, major content in the middle of the page). Four years later, in 2006, the look and feel of the site illustrated the emergence of a very different organization. The picture of Marshall remained, but a far more structured page greeted readers.
Most importantly, by 2006 TPM was employing journalists, a process that began in 2005 when Marshall solicited money from readers to hire two full-time staffers; he raised $100,000 directly from the public. The right-hand column also linked to TPMMuckraker, an affiliated project that aims to do more original reporting and “muckraking.”
By 2007, the architectural transition of Talking Points Memo was complete. The web page had come to resemble a full-time journalism operation, with boxes, links and different size fonts indicating different branches of the project and various editorial judgments about important news. The growth in staff continues apace; in 2010 it had 16 employees, and by 2012 it had 28. The site also received a significant financial investment in 2009 from the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz.
By looking at the arc of Talking Points Memo over time, we see the emergence of a non-institutional website in 2000, followed by an increasingly complex level of organizational structuring, staff growth and symbolic capital accumulation (the site won a Polk Award in 2008 for its coverage of the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys). While TPM is, by now, an “old” project in digital terms, it is useful for precisely that reason. Only by looking at the history of digital organizations on the web can we see how the story of journalism in the digital age is more than simply one of decline and birth. There is institutional stabilization as well.
Just as important, the story of Talking Points Memo represents the stabilization of a hybrid series of old and new journalistic practices, not simply the adoption of traditional reporting methods for the digital age. TPM was a pioneer in what is now known as iterative journalism, which it defines as the “using of tips, reporting, and explanatory writing from readers alongside original reporting to piece together wide-ranging stories.” Although less is known about how TPM incorporates these practices into the 2012 iteration of its organizational structure, there is little doubt that the solidification of Talking Points Memo’s institutional capacity represents the mainstreaming of a certain set of organizational practices.
A more proximate example unfolded over the summer of 2012, when Homicide Watch D.C. was threatened with shutdown. Homicide Watch, as described in Section 1, represents a fusion of traditional court reporting and novel technical infrastructure; it operates on a tiny budget; and the founders, Laura and Chris Amico, offer licenses for their platform to other news organizations. It is an ideal case for creating high value at low cost by rethinking process. Nevertheless, by the summer of 2012, after two years of operation, Homicide Watch was threatened with shutdown, for two reasons. The first was that, despite the Amicos’ offering the platform for licensing, few news organizations bit.
Homicide Watch is so different from the “story-driven/should we report this?” model of the traditional crime desk that no existing organization could use the platform without altering its internal assumptions and processes as a side effect. The process gap made it far harder than the Amicos imagined to license their platform.
Despite this persistent difficulty, they kept the site going, running on a shoestring. Then came the second problem. Laura Amico, the reporter in the duo, got a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Faced with even the temporary departure of the founder, Homicide Watch had none of the advantages of large institutions—a deep bench of talent, employees with overlapping responsibilities who can pick up the slack, and so on.
It was only a last-minute Kickstarter campaign that enabled the hiring of D.C.- based staff for Amico to work with remotely that saved the site. This delays but does not solve the problem—small organizations like Homicide Watch are marvels of low-budget leverage, but they are also perennially threatened. To survive and spread their model, they will need to acquire more secure sources of funding, a larger and more varied staff, and more complex processes for managing that staff. They need, in other words, to become an institution.
Starting a new news organization isn’t as hard as stabilizing these startups over the medium to long term. Because of this, successful startups (such as Talking Points Memo, the Texas Tribune, West Seattle Blog, Baristanet) should create publicly accessible “startup guides” that can be used by emerging news organizations.
We also need to keep in mind that, because these organizations are successful, their founders might have little time or interest in devoting resources to explaining their success. They, after all, have journalism to produce! For this reason, these organizations and others like them should receive foundation money that will allow them to engage in this “meta-reflection.”
Understanding how new journalistic organizations stabilize themselves, and how in so doing they make a particular set of institutional behaviors seem like common sense, is a missing link in our attempts to understand the emerging news ecosystem. It is a financing gray area as well. Most foundation dollars are directed toward projects that can demonstrate a tangible “impact,” which makes them less likely to help organizations engage in the boring, out-of-sight practices of institutional stabilization (things like setting up payroll systems, purchasing office space and providing employee health care, as well as training new employees and hardening institutional norms). Now that large national foundations like the Ford Foundation are increasingly investing in traditional media outlets such as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, investments in smaller, not-quite-newbut- not-yet-legacy outlets seem even less likely. The Washington Post received $500,000 from the Ford Foundation; it is not hard to imagine what Homicide Watch might be able to accomplish with a fraction of that money.
“Public” or noncommercial resources (including government and foundation money) should be used primarily to helping organizations institutionalize. Paradoxically, this is what these foundations and the public sector appear the least comfortable doing, focused as they are on demonstrating impact. Given the importance and fragility of new players, there must be a rethinking of this funding strategy in the foundation world.
When all is said and done, how are we to understand if news institutions— whether old, new, or somewhere in between—are doing what they are supposed to do? How do we measure the success of these organizations? When success is primarily defined as “business success,” the answer is simple—although by that metric, the news industry has been in a tailspin for at least half a decade. Once we no longer define success as simply “making money” but rather as “making an impact on the world,” however, our calculations change. There are many more ways of defining impact than there used to be, although the complexity of the question has correspondingly increased. To understand if institutions are working, we need to understand their purpose, and we need to measure the impact they are having on the institutions they monitor.
The question of “impact” has only recently begun to become a topic of conversation within news organizations and in the “future of news” conversation space. ProPublica has long been a leader in thinking about the actual impact of journalism, writing in its “about” page that “in the best traditions of American journalism in the public service, we seek to stimulate positive change. We uncover unsavory practices in order to stimulate reform.” ProPublica adds that it does this “in an entirely non-partisan and non-ideological manner, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality.” It concludes by noting that “each story we publish is distributed in a manner designed to maximize its impact.”
This would appear to be a noncontroversial mission. Surprisingly, however, it is one that is not publicly echoed by more traditional media organizations, although a desire for “impact” does undergird journalistic belief structures more generally. Often, news institutions will argue that they are there simply to “present the facts” and that questions of what those facts will do lie outside their purview. Journalistic institutions usually view the news consumer as an empty receptacle for public information who, when well-filled with the proper knowledge, will act in a variety of democratic ways. The impact of the news, in other words, comes not from the news producers but the news consumers, from the democratic citizens themselves.
It should be clear by now that this empty receptacle analogy for thinking about, to quote NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, “what journalism is for” is obviously not an analogy to which we lend much credence. Instead, we believe that it is news institutions themselves that often do the most to advance positive democratic outcomes. Given this, it has become essential to understand exactly how news organizations make an impact, and for news companies to admit that they are in the impact business.
We are heartened by the announcement, in the summer of 2012, that the Knight- Mozilla Foundation will be placing one of its fellows at the New York Times specifically for the purpose of designing ways for news organizations to measure impact. “What we do not have are ways of measuring how a piece of journalism changes the way people think or act. We don’t have a metric for impact,” Aron Pilhofer, the newspaper’s editor of interactive news, wrote on his blog.
This is not a new problem. The metrics newsrooms have traditionally used tended to be fairly imprecise: Did a law change? Did the bad guy go to jail? Were dangers revealed? Were lives saved? Or least significant of all, did it win an award? But the math changes in the digital environment. We are awash in metrics, and we have the ability to engage with readers at scale in ways that would have been impossible (or impossibly expensive) in an analog world. The problem now is figuring out which data to pay attention to and which to ignore. It is about setting up frameworks for testing, analysis and interpretation that are both scalable and replicable. It’s about finding that clear signal among the white noise that tells us whether our journalism is resonating or not, whether it is having the impact we believe it should. Helping us clear away the noise is the goal of our proposal to host a Knight-Mozilla fellow.
We hope that this step by the New York Times and the Knight-Mozilla Foundation will open the door to other news organizations thinking hard about what they do, and why it matters. Only if they start to think of themselves as organizations that “do things” in the world can we ever hope to understand the value of news institutions, and the ways we can replace the institutional value currently being lost in the digital tsunami of the early 21st century.
Make assessing impact, including job assignments and promotions, part of organizational culture. Consider partnerships with organizations that can provide information or insight into areas of desired impact.
We’ve now discussed why institutions are essential to secure the proper functioning of a healthy journalistic ecosystem. We’ve also discussed an institutional paradox: The traits that make organizations successful during times of relative social stability can be the very traits that leave them unable to adapt to a rapidly changing organizational reality. Given all this, what would healthy news institutions look like in the 21st century? What kind of institutional arrangements should newsroom editors, corporate CEOs, rank-and-file journalists and future of news commentators demand?
We should note, right off the bat, that the news institutions of the future will be smaller than they are today; drawing from our earlier arguments, we acknowledge that staffing reductions, lowered budgets and a need to “do more with less” have become the “new normal” for journalistic organizations. We also think that news organizations will probably get new forms of funding from a number of sources, including some form of digital subscription, website advertising, social media-driven sales strategies (such as those adopted by BuzzFeed), foundation grants and governmental subsidies. It is not our intent to recommend any of these revenue sources over others, although we do note that certain forms of revenue generation make the institutional strategies we envision below easier, while other choices make the transition harder.
We want to argue that news institutions of the future, apart from simply being smaller and revenue agnostic, should have three defining characteristics. They will have a hackable workflow. They will embrace a form of what we call “networked institutionalism,” and many of the largest, national journalism organizations should embrace local accountability journalism in partnership with local news outlets. Finally, news institutions will have to dramatically rethink what counts as “valid journalistic evidence,” find new ways to evaluate this new evidence, and program these collection and evaluation process into their hackable workflows.
Currently, news production processes are designed around two imperatives. The first is that they rationally manage the generation, transmission, editing and production of content, and do so for as many simultaneous platforms as possible. The second imperative, related to the first and largely a legacy of the print/broadcast production process, is that this workflow management is designed to produce a single finished product that will be “consumed” once and then disposed of. Thinking about workflow this way (and, more importantly, managing the production and dissemination of content this way) makes sense only so long as this “create once/consume once” model holds.
Online, journalistic content can be produced, added to, altered and reused forever. To take advantage of this change, workflow will have to be altered to support these new technological and cultural affordances. Creating a workflow that reflects the more flexible production of digital content will have the secondary consequence of making rigid newsroom routines more “hackable.”
The organizational breakthrough of the hacker-journalist lies not in being up to speed on the latest social media tools or even in being able to manage a thousand- column Google Fusion Table. Rather, the key insight of journalists raised on the rhythms of digital production and programming languages is the understanding that “content” is not used once and then discarded. Rather, content is endlessly reusable and should be designed for perpetual levels of iteration. In our interviews with working journalists, we were struck by the degree to which all news organizations remain trapped in a basic newsroom workflow that sees the ultimate goal of journalistic production as a singular, finished product. Rebuilt news institutions will design their workflow around a new, basic fact: News is never a finished product, and there is never a daily paper or evening newscast that sums up the work of the entire day.
This implies that news content, and the production of that content, will take iteration as its starting point. News products will have to be made as reusable as possible: on other platforms, on other devices, in new news stories, and even by other news organizations.
It also has another consequence: Newsroom CMSes will have to be designed to allow them to be broken. The obvious corollaries are that the act of choosing (or, in rare cases, designing) CMSes will have to include questions of who can override the expectations embedded in the CMS, and how, and that the processes put in place around the CMSes will have to emphasize the ability of at least some employees to exit the expected process in order to make novel decisions in response to novel circumstances.
In other words, they need to be flexible and adaptable to particular organizational needs. The focus of news production management should not be the creation of a final product within a one-size-fits-all workflow; rather, the focus should be upon the creation of endlessly iterable content through a highly hackable CMS.
Much ink has been spilled over the question of organizational partnerships in the news business, and many arguments have been advanced as to how institutions need to be more open to collaboration with other members of the digital news ecosystem. To date, however, the verdict on existing collaborative projects is mixed. A number of the New York Times’ most highly touted collaborations (with the Chicago News Cooperative, the Bay Citizen, and the CUNY-sponsored Local, for instance) have come to a rather inglorious end; at the same time, many Times partner organizations have noted how working with a powerful organization has the potential to distort their own organizational priorities. The notion of institutional collaboration, while intellectually powerful, is in need of some rethinking.
We want to argue that the news organization of the future will probably not be an entirely open institution whose primary purpose is collaboration, nor should it focus on only collaboration in an entirely project-based sense. Instead, we’d recommend a strategy much like that pursued by ProPublica in its “Free the Files” project.
In Free the Files, ProPublica sought to crowdsource the collection of FCC political advertising buys. And because the media markets in question are inherently local, ProPublica essentially engaged in an act of local accountability journalism, even as it coordinated this journalism on a national scale. The final step for a project like Free the Files would be to collaborate with local news organizations to publish the data in relevant, journalistically interesting ways. This is neither permanent collaboration, nor is it based around a onetime event. Instead, it is using smart, targeted networked institutionalism to fill a gap opening up in local accountability reporting. Not surprisingly, this new collaboration is also based around the existence of new forms of journalistic evidence, specifically large data sets.
In Section 1, we discussed new skills that will be required of the post-industrial journalist. In many respects, these skills can be summarized as an ability to recognize, rather, evaluate and display new forms of journalistic evidence. What do social media conversations, large data sets, and on-the-scene, first-person media production all have in common? In essence, they present the 21st-century journalist with a plethora of new sources that can be integrated into the journalistic production process. As we already argued, these changes in the larger media ecosystem present the individual journalist with new challenges and a need to master new skills. Every individual working in the news business thus needs to take this requirement seriously. At the same time, the institutions in which these journalists are embedded need to create organizations and newsroom workflow patterns that support individual journalists in this regard. In other words, we cannot continually require reporters to master new skills and evaluative procedure without simultaneously providing them with a workflow and an organizational structure that shows them that such skill mastery is valued and rewarded. Such a workflow will need to be both hackable and networked in smart, labor-enhancing ways.
In a 1995 essay, the late communications theorist James Carey writes eloquently about what he calls the Fourth Estate view of journalism, a view of the relationship between the media and democracy that did not emerge fully until the 1960s and the Watergate era:
In this view, journalists would serve as agents of the public in checking an inherently abusive government. To empower it to fulfill such a role, the press had to possess special rights to gather news. Thus, under a fourth estate model a free press essentially was equated with a powerful press possessing special privileges of newsgathering.
Under the Fourth Estate view, according to Carey, the press increasingly began to see itself as the public’s representative within the political arena. For this notion of representation to resonate, however, the public not only had to see the press as its authentic political stand-in, but also had to believe that this representative press was capable of accurately understanding and portraying the basic empirical reality of the world. It is fair to say, if surveys of trust in journalism have any validity at all, neither of these conditions holds true in 2012.
What Carey did not consider—what almost no one considered in the world of 20 to 30 percent newspaper profit margins that still prevailed less than a decade ago—was that the press might also become incapable of fulfilling its end of the newsgathering bargain. From the 1960s on, most media criticism consisted of the argument that journalism was capable of far more powerful, in-depth, aggressive newsgathering than it decided to undertake. As Downie and Schudson argue in their analysis of “accountability journalism,” and as the 2011 FCC report on community information ecosystems reiterates, the problem with news today is as much one of incapacity as it is of purposeful neglect. We have also analyzed the connection among institutional capacity, the problem of time, and beat reporting in our discussion of David Simon’s arguments: In short, much of journalism’s value added lies in the operation of the daily routines, this monitorial beat system is best facilitated by healthy institutions, and institutional decline is leading to the evisceration of the unique journalistic resource.
At this point, a brief discussion of the economics of the news business is unavoidable, because it is at this moment that the future of news consensus breaks down. According to at least two camps in this debate, better market mechanisms will lead to revived institutional health, although the manners by which these camps define “better market” are directly opposed. A third perspective despairs that a market-based solution to the problem of institutional news industry decline can be found.
The first cluster of thought, represented by future of news thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, believes that the digital news ecosystem itself represents a more transparent, accurate marketplace than the monopoly news market of the previous regime. The contention here is that the funding for public interest journalism will emerge from a combination of transparency, increased public sharing and improvements in the ability of the advertising industry to micro-target consumers. Pointing to the monopoly status enjoyed by the most powerful news institutions for nearly a quarter-century, these thinkers see the current moment of informational abundance, the ability to tailor content to consumers, and “frictionless sharing” as remarkable steps forward from an earlier, less free model of media production.
David Simon, in comments on the blog post discussed above, nicely articulates a second understanding of what a “better” market means, one apparently shared by an increasing number of news industry executives. “I believe that local news can be sustained through an online revenue stream,” Simon argues. “But it requires that institutional journalism value and protect its own copyright and act as an industry to protect that copyright. And further, it requires a real reinvestment in that product.” To this list Simon adds the imposition of pay walls, which have, he contends, already demonstrated their success at the New York Times. In short, Simon and those like him argue that unified action to crack down on aggregators and charge for news will address the causes of newsroom decline via industrybased solutions. To maintain news organizations’ position as the dominant provider of news, speed bumps should be installed on the internet.
A third perspective despairs that either of these market-based solutions can be easily conjured up. Thinkers and writers in this camp point out just how unusual the confluence between wealthy capitalist institutions and the public-minded journalism they produced actually was. They argue that digital market dynamics actually punish institutional players that seek to create broad-based, monitorial media content. Unlike thinkers in the second camp, however, they do not believe that the current dynamics of the digital news system can be easily undone, nor do they think the dynamics necessarily should be undone even if such an option were possible. Some thinkers within this perspective move from here to an argument that the public goods produced by news institutions (particularly beat reporting) can be funded only via non-market forms of subsidy, whether philanthropic or proceeding more directly from the state.
The three authors of this essay would place themselves in this third category, a standpoint that also informs our transition from institutions, in this section, to the news ecosystem that immediately follows in Section 3. We must move away, in other words, from pinning our democratic hopes entirely on the Fourth Estate conception of the press. Public accountability must come, in part, from the networked news ecosystem itself. Let us be clear: This is not to argue that these news networks exist in some sort of institution-free vacuum. Indeed, journalism institutions turn out to be some of the most important nodes within this new digital environment. Nevertheless, they must coexist in new ways, alongside and in concert with more groups and institutions than ever before—not simply for economic reasons but also for democratic ones. They must lean on these new groups and networks in new ways. We are echoing here our opening argument that the journalism industry is dead but that journalism exists in many places.
In the essay quoted earlier, James Carey contends that the “watchdog notion of the press, a press independent of all institutions, a press that represents the public, a press that unmasks interest and privilege, a press that shines the hot glare of publicity on all corners of the republic, a press that searches out expert knowledge among the welter of opinion, a press that seeks to inform the private citizen, these are ideals and roles that have served us well through some dark times.” But, he continues, “as the century progresses, the weaknesses of modern journalism have become increasingly apparent and debilitating.”
Carey’s thoughts on the benefits and weakness of the Fourth Estate are as true now as they have ever been. The crisis, however, is even more acute than it was when he wrote those words in 1995. The communicative universe, moreover, has changed radically. If the democratic accountability fostered by the institutional press is to survive in a post-Fourth Estate world, democratic accountability must itself become a networked property.