Dear Friends of Democracy,
Today, let's look into journalism, a cornerstone of democracy.
Jeff Jarvis, the keen observer of journalism (mainly in the US but it is not that different in Europe), takes stock at the end of his career.
"I come with no solution, no salvation; nothing's that simple," Jarvis writes on his blog.
That's sobering. But no wonder. The decline in journalism as a business model has been going on for a long time, as has the search for new ways to make money.
Jarvis has watched that decline for decades. The business of news on paper, with its revenues from the sale of these papers plus advertising, is almost dead. And the old news industry has also "failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors — from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionnaires — has failed them", Jarvis writes.
But there is hope. Of course, there is. And Jarvis has his part in this.
Over time, he helped with many ideas that could develop new ways of journalism. But the problem that he couldn't solve either: Compared to the old times, there is still little money to be made with journalism in the digital age. The slowly growing plants of new journalism (like Solutions Journalism, Collaborative Journalism, Constructive Journalism, Reparative Journalism, Dialog Journalism, Deliberative Journalism, and Solidarity Journalism) are weak and tender.
But I bet they are here to stay. Because something fundamentally has changed as well.
Today, everyone can be a journalist. Theoretically, this was often already possible, but for the first time, it is real and possible for many, maybe all.
Digital progress has created the conditions.
So, the prerequisites are there. What it takes is a desire to learn.
There are a lot of ways to learn. Just two examples from Germany, where I live: The Reporterfabrik from Berlin calls itself a “journalism school for everyone”. And Ellen Heinrichs’ Bonn Institute offers practical online courses for “everyone who is interested in the future of journalism”.
Can there be a better hobby than becoming and being a journalist?
We all can learn what is so urgently needed in the digital age: the skills to check content and sources for credibility and accuracy and, moreover, to create credible and correct content yourself – in a way that people enjoy reading, listening and watching (perhaps the enjoying part is the most important and most challenging part in journalism).
In a way, what was back then becoming a journalist is today’s becoming media literacy.
In any case, media literacy is a crucial skill to strengthen democracy and protect us from right-wing populists and even worse people, isn’t it?
So, finally, where are we heading?
Jeff Jarvis draws the following self-critical conclusion of what has to be done:
“I think we need to be more radical, much more radical than I have been.”
Well, this is vague, and you don't really know what to do with this sentence, but that's just how it is when you go on a journey, right? Before a new thing is in the world, you don't know what the new thing will be. And journalism needs such a new thing, namely an answer to the question of how journalism that costs money (and journalism often still costs a lot of money) can be financed in the digital age.
Those new things won’t come without radical thinking. Only in retrospect does a business model look obvious. As if this had always existed. As if there was nothing particularly special about coming up with this idea. But it was not like that. The double revenue model of old journalism was brilliant. And in the beginning, there was radical thinking, I bet.
So let’s think radical. Democracy needs it. We all need it.
✊,
Johannes Eber