For today's column, I'm going to be straying a bit from my recent pattern of feminist-y analyses of popular TV shows. I want to bring it back to the basics - journalism, its general health and its future.
Anyone talking about media loves to bring up how journalism is either very ill or already dead. Newspapers all over the country are facing some pretty daunting foes. There's declining readership, the conglomeration of ownership and, of course, the game changer: the Internet (bad and scary or full of exciting potential?). No matter how you look at it, traditional news structures must change - simply because in its current business model, it can no longer turn a profit.
As a possible aspiring journalist, I've been told to expect a low salary and have even been actively discouraged (mostly by friends of my parents) from the profession - "It's a dying field! Why don't you go into something more stable and secure?" Personally, I believe that people still want and need well-researched, well-written and well-rounded news. It's a matter of finding an effective way to structure and distribute it.
And that's where there's a glimmer of hope. Yesterday, while perusing Twitter, I found out that Jay Rosen, prolific journalism professor at NYU and author of the critical PressThink blog, will be joining Pierre Omidyar (billionaire, eBay founder and Tufts alumnus) and Glen Greenwald (Guardian journalist who was involved in covering WikiLeaks) in a new journalistic venture. I know almost nothing about it, other than that it is temporarily referred to as "NewCo," and it is potentially revolutionary.
Here is my (shaky) understanding of it after reading through Rosen's post on PressThink explaining his decision. "NewCo" will be a re-imagining of a large news corporation. It will be structured around individual journalists, who have an established reputation and specific expertise, and write from an explicit point of view. It will try to serve a more general audience for news, with a focus on bringing hard-hitting investigative journalism to more people in order to make it more effective. It will be technologically up-to-date, employing multiple platforms at once to maximize its flexibility.
This is all very new, different and exciting. To me, it seems to be the first serious attempt to significantly alter pre-existing models of news - and that's why it's such a novel, slightly frightening concept. But Omidyar, Greenwald and Rosen seem serious about this venture and willing to put themselves on the line to make it work.
I still have some questions about how all this will work. First of all - what exactly makes "NewCo" different from multi-platform online news as it already exists? How will it interact with print? Will it be primarily online? How domestically-oriented as opposed to internationally-focused will it be? And probably the biggest question - what is their proposed business model? This is definitely a for-profit venture, so how do they propose to make money?
Some possibilities are floating around. Omidyar, a billionaire, could simply make a deep endowment that would keep things running for a long time. If his donation could help Tufts go need-blind during the 2007 and 2008 admissions processes, I'm sure it could boost "NewCo" as well. But that isn't a long-term solution. Another idea is the subscription model, which has worked well with investigative journalism before (see the French company Mediapart, which exposed French budget minister J?©r??me Cahuzac's gigantic Swiss bank accounts and currently has around 80,000 subscribers paying monthly fees).
There are many things still to be figured out as "NewCo" moves forward. This is definitely something to keep an eye on, as it very well might be the future of news.
Lily Sieradzki is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Lily.Sieradzki@tufts.edu.
