When This American Life founder and host Ira Glass addressed the University of North Texas's fifth annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, he had a few hopeful words about the future of journalism. I keep a list here at Utne Reader of every sputtering mouth that bemoans the "death of journalism" and at the end of this year I'm going to travel the country with the world's largest role of duct tape. Everybody on my list will have their mouths covered (I promise I'll be gentle) and their hands secured behind their backs (and away from their keyboards). Ira Glass, you will be free to continue as you were.

Hmph, that was a little creepy. Apologies. Here's an excerpt from a Dallas Observer report on Glass' address:

Glass focused his lecture on the beauty of a good narrative story, but also gave some practical advice. Glass threw the journalists in the room an idea for future survival based on Jon Stewart's Daily Show. Glass imagined a future for journalism "where you would have the tone of the Daily Show—talking in normal language, but they would be real reporters."

As an example, he played a segment from his radio show where a reporter found a way to make a piece on the mortgage crises mesmerizing. The reporter recorded her attempts to find the person who was supposed to be in charge of oversight for the industry that collapsed. Each person she spoke to sent her to somebody else. Throughout the piece, she used chatty sentences to talk to the listener, like, "It sounds crazy, right?"

"I can imagine that would be a place that journalism could move towards and survive," said Glass, suggesting a casual conversation would replace the medium's more "stiff" formalities. "I feel like it's a great time, because it's wide-open."

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Source: Dallas Observer 

Image by Nancy Updike.

For those of you who bemoan the slow demise of investigative journalism as we have known it, dry your eyes. Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine has seen journalism’s future, and it is public relations. You’ll want to get right to fighting over this, so I’ll cut straight to Cavanaugh’s vision:

Are flacks the future, or even the present, of investigative journalism? This interpretation makes intuitive sense. Important data points by which we continue to live our live—the number of jobs that were created or destroyed by NAFTA, the villainy of the Serbs in the Yugoslav breakup, all sorts of projected benefits or disasters in President Obama’s budget plans—are largely the inventions of P.R. workers.

And though it’s considered wise to believe the contrary, these communications types are not constructing all these news items entirely (or even mostly) by lying. Flackery requires putting together credible narratives from pools of verifiable data. This activity is not categorically different from journalism. Nor is the teaching value that flackery provides entirely different from that of journalism: Most of the content you hear senators and congressmen reading on C-SPAN is stuff flacks provided to staffers.

…the idea of public relations (and its many fancy permutations, from “image management” to “oppo research” to “crisis”) replacing objective journalism becomes less scary when you reflect that … frequently the most valuable information comes out just because somebody wants to make somebody else look bad.

Source: Reason 

Normally, I don’t spend much time fretting over the plight of marketers. These are the creative types that irked me with their solid post-graduation plans and now rake in the dough by seducing me into wanting things my bank account can’t afford (thus sowing a nagging suspicion that I should have gone into a more lucrative field like, say, marketing). So when I went last night to hear Bob Garfield, the host of NPR’s On the Media and a columnist for Advertising Age, talk about “The Future of Media,” I was a bit disappointed to learn that he’d really be talking about  “The Future of Advertising.” Since advertising pays the bills, though, I decided I’d better stay put and listen.

Madison Avenue, it seems, is in danger of becoming Skid Row. We can thank the Internet for that. Advertisers are recoiling from the printed page, abandoning the 30-second televised spot, and scrambling to recreate these bygone paradigms in the digital world. But there’s no going back. Craigslist has siphoned the classifieds section money stream, the few people who click on banner ads probably do so by accident, and blocking pop-ups is a much-appreciated default setting. As for commercials? “Online video has killed the video star,” says Garfield. That, and TiVo. Why sit through silly spots when you can blip blip blip your way through commercials, catch programs online, or, better yet, make your own entertainment for all the World Wide Web to see?

So far, the marketing biz hasn’t found its footing in this brave new world, says Garfield. But, he assures, there is money to be made because people love consuming and crave information about their consumables. That’s why smart companies are abandoning the conceit of the captive audience and are instead pouring money into the IT infrastructure that will drive search optimization, aggregate consumer data, and build “relationships” with consumers. Don’t bother with a scripted ad, the logic goes, just build a really good website and let the buyers come to you. Or devise super clever ways to entice consumers. To drive this point home Garfield showed a slide of a handy new technology out of Canada that essentially functions like a marketers’ version of VH1’s Pop-Up Video, though instead of snarky observations you get brand names, company links, and sales info when you mouse over the people and objects in the video.

That’s when my heart sank, because the solutions for marketing in this new media world seem apocalyptic when applied to journalism. Product placement has long since infiltrated and cheapened entertainment, but it would kneecap good reporting. And if marketers don’t have to rely on advertising anymore, what does the news business do for funding?

When I asked Garfield what happens to good journalism in this new media landscape, he talked about some hopeful developments. First, there’s the symbiotic relationship forming between mainstream news outlets and the blogosphere, whereby newspapers churn out the daily news and the blogosphere aggregates it, points out the holes, and contextualizes what’s going on for readers. Second, there's the opportunity to involve readers, either through the crowdsourcing that’s proved a gold mine for document dumps or by tapping readers not only for input on their interests but as citizen journalists.

There are pitfalls and potential in both these realms, and I’m excited to see how they hash out, but neither speak to the question of funding; they address only the new possibilities afforded by online technology. The problem remains: Who’s going to pay for it? Some, like Garfield did last night, raise the specter of minimal charges, a la pay-per-view. “Why bother shoplifting from the dollar store?” he asked. I’m skeptical that such charging schemes will work: the New York Times already abandoned its premium content scheme, and the internet has reared folks to expect free content—weaning them of that now is nigh impossible. There are others that say journalism should turn to foundation funding. And there are those that argue that government may have to step in. If you’ve got any ideas, let us know. We might need them.

—Hannah Lobel

Image by DRB62, licensed under Creative Commons.