Independent Magazines and the Power of Connection

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And the high-tech crowd unloaded on him.

The ABC News is a dinosaur! Don't you see, Peter, that on any topic that ABC might skim the surface of in a two-minute report, the average consumer will be able to "drill down" via the Internet to exactly the depth of information she desires and get those results anytime, anywhere on her cell phone?

Jennings gamely parried back. What about the notion, he asked, that there are issues that people don't know they need to know about? What about the Nightly News as the starting place of our democratic conversation about the issues of the day? What happens to our society if the news is so highly individualized that there is no common ground?

Pish, say the execs. How 1960s. Get over it.

And that, more or less, was that.

As that conversation has percolated with me over the subsequent years, I've come to believe that neither side got it right that morning.

On the one hand, it does seem ever more laughable that a guy (or Katie Couric) in a $2500 outfit and a $500 haircut could, in just over 20 minutes, summarize the world's events in a way that is adequate to the needs of our jobs as citizens. (Factoid gathered from I don't remember where: There are more words on the front page of today's New York Times than there are in an entire ABC Nightly News broadcast.)

On the other, where exactly did those high tech execs think this richness of Internet-delivered news was going to come from? Alberto Gonzalez's PR guy?

Our society has benefited, in ways that aren't widely enough acknowledged, from a commercial news-gathering system that has been funded in significant measure from profits derived from the government-protected oligopoly of broadcast TV licenses and de facto newspaper monopolies in our major cities. There have been flaws, often deep flaws, in the resulting coverage, but the investment in daily reporting has certainly provided a baseline of public intelligence. With those profits now under threat, the response from the public companies that dominate the traditional news business has been to chop costs -- and reporting staffs, and the public interest, have taken huge hits.

What exactly will take the place of the mainstream reporting that is being disappeared? This is a hugely important question with no one answer. But it seems to me that this is an enormous opportunity -- almost a calling -- for the independent press.

So what should the Utne Awards of the future expect from independent publishers?

To set the stage, I predict there will be a significant shakeout among the providers of generic news. Who survives? Time or Newsweek? NBC/ABC/CBS?  AP/Reuters? I really have no idea, but I wouldn't want to be in any of their boats.

Further, the old days in which a news media elite at the Times, the Post, and the TV networks "set a national agenda" will never be the same. Rather than a hierarchical system -- or perhaps in addition to -- news will indeed become more personalized, but I believe that much will be organized and channeled through "communities of interest." Our networks and communities will have an ever larger role in determining what we learn, what we believe and what we act on. And what are our publications but communities of often intense interest? Yes, the mix of media we employ will shift over time, and that shift will pose its own challenges, but if we listen to our people, they will give us clues -- or perhaps, as in the case of Mother Jones' readers, strong opinions -- about the smart and sustainable way ahead.

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