Keynote to the University of Texas Symposium on Online Journalism

March 2007

Jeff Jarvis – of Buzzmachine.com, the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, Daylife, the Guardian, and PrezVid.com

1. I’ll engage in the curse of bloggers: repeating or quoting ourselves.

I didn’t much like Frontline’s narrative about the war on and in journalism. During the interview, I scolded them for not seeing the possibilities, the opportunities, the need to rethink their red-herring assumptions. But that didn’t get me far. None of that made it to air. They wanted to pit digital against print, bloggers against MSM, me against Nick Lemann, business against editorial, the past against the future. They wanted war, damnit. That’s such old news about news, I argued, but to no good end.

And so I gave them this silly quote.

2. But I am a cockeyed optimist and I’m tired of the bleating about the business I hear in newsrooms. Just last week, San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein reportedly told his staff that the newspaper business “is broken and no one knows how to fix it.... And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.” What a frightening lack of imagination and optimism that betrays.

There are lots of ways to fix it and as soon as Bronstein’s bleat was published, suggestions began pouring in from blogs. And it’s not about fixing, anyway. It’s about growing, expanding, exploding. It’s about new opportunities.

So I’ll declare this a whine-free zone. No moaning, mewling, mourning. Let’s talk instead about our reasons for optimism.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t risks in this change. There are. But we already know most of the risks, dangers, and problems. We’ve been obsessing on them. Now it is time to turn our attention to the opportunities.

3. So the rules of the hour: no us vs. them, no war narrative. No defeatism. If anybody starts in on that tired blogs v. MSM argument, I’ll call them out of order.

4. Instead, let’s see the possibilities, the opportunities, the growth, the excitement. Let’s see how we can work together to expand news.

When I blogged this talk, asking my readers why they were optimistic about news, they came back with great notions.

John C. Abell said that “the good news is great news: there is no evidence that the public interest in news has waned.”

Richard Bennett, a regular wag in my comments, said that “the good news about news is that there’s no shortage of news. The best experts forecast a nearly boundless supply of news clear into the next century, so the news conservation efforts of the past (recycling, echo-chambering and other forms of plagiarism) are no longer necessary...”

Cause for optimism, indeed.

5. So here is what I hope to cover.

6. I’ll start with the most inconvenient truth: that American journalism is inefficient. It is built on now-obsolete market realities, which we all know are changing: Newspapers are no longer one-size-fits-all monopolies in isolated places with few competitors or alternatives and endless supplies of money.

But efficiency is good and healthy. Cutting certain things is necessary. It is an opportunity to refocus ourselves. And we, the editors, are the ones who should do it. We have to take back the scalpel before someone else wields it again.

We need to do this because we need journalism to be a sustainable business.

And we need to refocus our attention on what we can be today given new realities, new opportunities.

We need to boil ourselves to the essence and decide what we really are, what our greatest value is.

7. Well, of course.

8. So how do we do this? Where do we cut? I have a few suggestions.

First, the easy part: I say we have for too long managed around the fear of losing one reader (or one more reader) who wants one of the services we provide. In June 2001, the Star-Ledger killed its stock tables, improving the business section but saving, still, $1 million a year. I asked Ledger editor Jim Willse recently how many readers he lost, net, for his decision. Twenty. So the paper had been investing $1 million a year in keeping 20 readers who were probably near death anyway. Bridge columns. TV listings. Yes, even cartoons. What else is taking up money and paper -- even though they can be found elsewhere, often served better -- because of that fear of losing the one reader? What else doesn’t fit our mission (once we decide what that mission really is)? Turn up the heat and boil down the paper. Get to the essence.

I also say we have wasted too much money for too long on ego: on having our byline there because the other guy does. We do not need to send 15,000 journalists to the political conventions where nothing happens. We do not all need our own movie critics, which may be heresy from the founder of Entertainment Weekly, but the movies are the same everywhere and entertainment is exploding beyond our ability to cover it with one critic. So the audience is now taking on the role of the critic.

Do we really need to edit the already-edited wires? Do we need to deliver the commodity news that our audiences already know?

9. I knew you’d bring it up. Others have. Well, I can hear you asking, don’t we want more journalism like the Washington Post’s at Walter Reed? Bloggers didn’t do that. The Post did.

Right. Of course, we all want more such reporting. No one wants less journalism.

And if we concentrate on that unique value of ours -- reporting -- then we should be trying to find the ways to eliminate every distraction that gets in the way of that. It becomes our duty to eliminate that waste.

But let’s go one more step: The New York Times was criticized for matching the Walter Reed story too slowly. But to do what with it? To catch up? To replicate the results, as if this were a peer-reviewed science experiment? Why shouldn’t the Times send readers to the Post to read its great reporting? Why shouldn’t the Times do this so it can concentrate on its own unique reporting, its own unique value and contribution to an informed and open society?

Look at the architecture of news and media in the age of links: We don’t need to deliver it all. In fact, we can’t. The public can find more information with a click. And through those clicks, unique and quality reporting can rise to the attention of more people.

I’ll even argue that The Times had a duty not to replicate what The Post did but to send readers to it, not only to be more efficient itself but also to support the journalism at the Post, sending them readers, traffic, attention, and thus value and revenue.

We must support journalism at its source. So....

10. ....this leads to (in Bill Maher’s act) a new rule: Do what we do best....

11. …and link to the rest

12. Consider the LA Times, the poster child for the ills and evils of business pressure and cutbacks.

Consider too that when Michael Kinsley arrived to head the editorial pages there, he found 15 opinion writers writing little more than a thumbsucker a week. It’s hard to argue, he argued, that there was not waste.

That Frontline piece I mentioned at the start lionized the editors there for defending the size of the newsroom. Frontline then demonized the corporate business people who tried to cut the budget.

But this was a paper that believed it had to write all its own stories. It was addicted to byline heroin.

And it believed that it had to be a national, even an international newspaper.

But what suffered was local service.

I had this argument with Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, who challenged me and said that surely The LA Times of all papers needed a Far East correspondent. Well, perhaps. I had nothing against having one. But how many stories can this one person write to cover the vastness of Asia: one every two weeks or so? Every foreign correspondent I know -- and every foreign editor -- complains that they can’t get more into the paper anyway. And let’s be frank: Most correspondents at least once in a while end up not reporting but catching up to the work done by native reporters.

So, I suggested to Ken, perhaps it would be better to use that same budget to hire three bright, young, multilingual people in LA who can scour and translate media, professional and amateur, in the Far East and provide an incredible guide to that part of the world not once every two weeks but every day online, where they will not be limited by scarce space, where they are powered by links.

At least we need to consider such new methods.

I was in London a few weeks ago when Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, announced to his staff that every journalist there now worked for the web and that the demands of the web would be preeminent. I was, as I have been before, impressed by Alan’s strategic execution.

But then I came back and found that I had missed a very similar announcement by Jim O’Shea, the new editor at the LA Times, the company man from Chicago, Tribune Tower. If I were good at PowerPoint, this is where I would cue the horror-movie organ music: Tribune Tower.

O’Shea acted on the findings of a report that has been commissioned by his predecessor and set in motion big changes in how the paper operates, declaring the web to be preeminent and the paper to be local. I had just talked with editors who were undertaking similar changes at the Guardian, the Telegraph. . . . and even Gannett. I say “even” because I did not expect Gannett to be a leader in journalistic innovation but it is.

Gannett, too, reorganized its newsroom around the ideas that the web and other media would be preeminent, that there is no edition clock so we tell the world what we know when we know it, and that we can cooperate with others to gather more news.

I find much to be optimistic about in this, even at the allegedly beaten-down LA Times. I am optimistic that it is finding new methods to do more journalism.

13. We have new methods. There is no end of possible innovation -- of experimentation and failure and success.

When I was in London, meeting with the Guardian, Telegraph, Times, and Economist, I saw a race in innovation, a hearty effort to be first. Now, of course, being first is not a proper goal in and of itself. But being first in the service of journalism, sustainable journalism -- the Guardian’s mission is “Guardian in perpetuity” -- is a good thing and not just for she who is first but for the guy next door who will learn from and copy that.

This is why I got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation at CUNY to establish a News Innovation Project: to pull together news people with ideas and best practices and inspiration.

So let’s start that list of new and best practices. Not every idea will work. But we can’t get anywhere if we don’t invent and innovate.

We’ll die not trying.

So here are a few of the new methods I’m seeing, methods to expand journalism:

There is networked journalism. I no longer call it “citizens’ journalism” because I have come to see that it is a mistake, even a dangerous mistake, to define journalism by the person who does it. Anyone can perform an act of journalism.

NYU’s Jay Rosen has begun NewAssignment.net, which does not for a moment presume to think that it will replace or save or fix journalism but will augment it with publicly supported journalism, supported with ideas (which is even an act of journalism: ‘You must cover this story!’ Why? ‘Because....’), and with money (perhaps), and with reporting. Jay’s master stroke is in realizing that the real task is cutting a story into its component assignments and then wrangling the volunteers to match them with the right tasks and to help them improve their work on those tasks. This is a project worth watching.

I’ve been thumping the bible of hyperlocal journalism for sometime. And I have not succeeded yet. I’ve made many mistakes and learned many lessons. I saw the need to develop hyperlocal journalism because it would serve both the journalistic and business mission and needs of newspapers. It would give us more journalism and more readers at a local level and more advertisers now able to afford to reach and target those local readers and more money to support that journalism. A virtuous circle if I ever saw one.

First, I hoped that local forums would contribute news, but they were too disorganized and anonymous and unruly.

Next, I thought I could get people to create town blogs but I learned that that is too much to ask. But it inspired Debbie Galant to start her own successful hyperlocal blog, Baristanet.com. I wanted to establish a relationship between her and NJ.com but failed.

I went to Northwestern to work on an experiment that led to Skokie.com, a group blog, and that inspired Backfence, which also has not (yet) worked. I think that’s because it required people to still come to us and give us stuff when the relationship should be the other way around: we go to them and give them stuff.

So now there is Outside.in, from Steven Johnson, which is working on zip-code-based blogging. That is, I may not write a blog exclusively about my town and I may not want to give myself to the centralized local site, but when I write a restaurant review or a report on my school board, I want it to be found. So I may tag it “mexican - restaurant - basking ridge” so it can be discovered. I contribute to a base of information. That is a social act. It is an act of organization. It is an act of creating data.

Note how this is related to the other leg to Gannett’s stool in its new newsroom: data as news.

And so this is about seeing new opportunities as they come. I think that blogs as a form are stagnant and so I welcome audio and video and wikis and more. What can we do with them? We could, for example, tell all our readers in all our towns that they should go record their school-board meetings and we’ll serve them as podcasts. I’d listen to mine since having kids prevents me from going to the most important local meeting about kids. That would throw bright sunlight on local government. That is another view of hyperlocal. It doesn’t need to be just blogs.

And add omnimedia journalism: In the comments on my blog for this talk, one reader said he found hope for optimism in the Guardian’s job posting a week ago for a head of video and four producers.

These are just a few examples of new methods and they yield changes in how we operate.

14. At Davos, I watched the publisher of a certain unnamed major American newspaper ask Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, how he could create a community. Zuckerberg, who is the bluntest -- and thus the best -- panelist I’ve seen, told this mogul simply and directly, “You can’t.”

What he meant was that the community already exists. It is doing what it wants to do. The question, then, is: what can the publisher do to improve that. Zuckerberg said that he should add “elegant organization.” I do love that phrase and that new job description for media organizations. We mediate. We organize. Elegantly.

We have so many new roles to play in the new, expanding, exploding journalism where everyone can help do journalism.

We are enablers. We help people do what they want to, need to, and can do.

We can be educators. I need to be careful how I say that, for bloggers may object. But there is plenty they want to learn and plenty we can teach and also learn. Shouldn’t newsrooms be classrooms?

We are part of pro-am efforts. We needn’t do it all alone. We needn’t go to that expense. We needn’t be limited by our own scarce -- and ever scarcer -- resources.

We can become members of networks. I’ve created a new site covering the election through the eyes of YouTube and a certain news organization -- don’t blog this -- has talked to me about a relationship in which we share content and traffic and promotion and branding and -- yes -- ad revenue.

By working together, we build a new relationship with our public based on trust and respect (and, yes, we only work with those we trust and respect; the web is a meritocracy; that’s why God and Tim Berners Lee created links).

This is a two-way, many-way relationship. And it means that we serve the public in new ways, no longer one-size-fits-all, no longer mass. We can serve people in the ways they want to be served. Even the most one-size-fits-the-entire-world organization, the BBC, has seen that it must create new products to serve and work with new communities.

This is a tremendous opportunity.

15. And this yields new jobs and new kinds of jobs that bring out new talents with new people.

Note the emergence of the programmer-journalist in the image of Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post, God to many.

Note the new organization of newsrooms around this: teams who create content.

Again, I believe we must become educators. At WKRN in Nashville, they shared their knowledge about how to shoot better video and now they are getting more video and it’s better than it would have been.

We are enablers. But that means we have to learn what people want enabled. And so we have to meet with our public. At the Telegraph and in Turkey, newsrooms are inviting in those bloggers in to talk and share.

We nurture talent inside and outside of newsrooms.

We encourage innovation, invention, creativity. That’s fun. That alone will enliven and re-energize newsrooms.

I’ve been discussing with editors the reorganization of their newsrooms – rearranging the deck chairs – but I wonder whether we even need newsrooms. Like a sales staff, aren’t we better off with our people out there in the community? Can’t we figure out ways to bring the community in? And if what we do is no longer produced exclusively by our own people in our own space, doesn’t that alone explode the newsroom?

And that’s an important element of all this: independence.

After I finished scaring the bejesus out of some of my students at CUNY -- I did that a bit too well -- I brought them down off the bridge’s edge with the knowledge that they could be independent. This can be almost as appealing as a paycheck. This isn’t just about being freelancers. This is about owning and running your own thing that works in a new, loose network in the new architecture of news.

This is why I am teaching a course in journalistic entrepreneurialism (or is that entrepreneurial journalism?) at CUNY in the fall. Whether they work on their own or in an organization, tomorrow’s journalists must take part in inventing tomorrow.

16. So this yields new business opportunities:

We can be more entrepreneurial.

We can begin to exert more control over the fate of journalism. When I came up through the ranks, I was lectured about not worrying my pretty little head over money; let the folks on the other side of that wall do that. But when the business side at Entertainment Weekly did a bunch of numbnutty things -- which I’m happy to recount over drinks -- I vowed that I would never again find myself in a position where I could not argue business with the business side.

But I also came to see that the business side was not the enemy. They are helping to sustain journalism. I watch the partnership of Alan Rusbridger, editor, and Carolyn McCall, business head, at the Guardian and see that shared goal.

We have the opportunity to grow in new ways. The Guardian, for example, is a national paper that is now becoming at once international and local. How can we grow: Getting more local? Serving more niches? Entering new businesses (like education and events)?

This is why as the second half of my MacArthur grant at the News Innovation Project, we will concentrate on new business models for news.

If we do our jobs well, we come out with new, different, likely smaller, but more efficient and still profitable and sustainable enterprises in journalism.

We’ll die not trying.

And I think it’s an appealing picture: a world where we are not responsible for, in control of, liable for everything.

17. I mentioned this notion of the new architecture of news earlier. Credit goes to Jim Kennedy at the AP for first showing me a model of supporting journalism at its source as we discussed Daylife, the startup I’ve been working with. In this structure, reporting stands out, journalism will out. We do what we do best and we get credit and attention and thus traffic and thus monetization for it.

At the Online Publishers Assocation meeting last month, Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times Company and I got into a theatrical tiff over this architecture. People could be forgiven for thinking that we were holding the same old damned argument about bloggers v. professional journalists (and Martin was rather snarky about us amateurs). But in truth, we were arguing about architecture. I responded to a presentation by Jeffrey Rayport quibbling with his phrasing about “outside-in” journalism with the pros being on the inside. I said we needed to turn that inside-out. We, the people are at the center and journalists are at the edge to help us.

I argued that Yahoo is an example of the last of the old media model: It controls content and markets to draw people to it and serves them ads as long as it can hold them there.

Google, on the other hand, puts pieces of itself everywhere -- its ad on my page makes my page part of Google’s broader network -- and by sharing functionality and links and knowledge and value and money, it enables us to do what we want to do. That, I said, is the position we should be in in our communities.

So, I say, we should ask WWGD -- what would Google do? (And, yes, Google is the new God.)

When we open ourselves up to openness, we will expand. This is key.

18. And so the result is more journalism:

More people gathering and sharing news and information.

More coverage deeper into our communities.

Better journalism if we see ourselves as educators and enablers who make that happen.

More sunshine on government.

More journalistic enterprises.

More people supported in them (though perhaps without car services and expense accounts).

A more sustainable industry.

More independence (don’t even get me started about the folly of regulating media ownership).

In the end, if we think like inventors, innovators, and cockeyed optimists, we end up with....