Peoria Pundit

The mainstream media is collapsing under its own weight. At one time, most newspapers and broadcasters were locally owned. Today, most are owned by corporations that would rather overpay executives who are experts in outsourcing and downsizing than pay people to actually cover the news. That model is failing all over this country. GateHouse Media, owner of the Journal Star and almost every newspaper in this part of the state, is one of them. As B.J. Stone often points out, so is Regent Communications, owner of many local radio stations.

Fine. Let them die. People will still need news, and entrepreneurs will find a way to make money fulfilling that need. The new model is for small online start ups. Some of them are trying a non-for-profit model. For others, a for-profit model is the best fit.

But as the media changes, so should the rules that the operate under. And that’s good. The public is dissatisfied with the news as practiced by the mainstream media. They find it shallow and sensational, and consider claims to be unbias to be dishonest. Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review has suggested new rules that will be a better fit as news gathering moved away from the media conglomerate model to the online blogger/citizen journalist model:

• Old rule: You can’t cover something in which you are personally involved.
  New rule: Tell your readers how you are involved and how that’s shaped your reporting.
• Old rule: You must present all sides of a story, being fair to each.
  New rule: Report the truth and debunk the lies.
• Old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.
  New rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

THIS is more honest, and certainly more workable when you have single blogger/citizen journalists out there doing original reporting and trying to make a living at it. And lets face it, the contribution a part-time journalist can make is limited. To do it right , you’ve got to do it full time. That means citizen news organizations have to spend some time selling ads and les time trying to maintain the fiction they don’t have a point of view.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The public doesn’t really care about objectivity. What they want is fairness. They know that newspapers are affected by the need to sell ads, They know that reporters have opinions and those opinions inevitably MUST creep their way into their reporting. They know when someone is telling a reporter a bald faced lie or is spinning the facts. What they want is for reporters to be honest with them about these things.

These opposed rules work better. But the MSM won’t adopt them because that’s not how corporations do it.

Hat top: Poynter’s Romenesko.

This entry was posted on January 16, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under On the Media with tags citizen journalism, GateHouse Media, OJR, online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.