Atlanta Journal-Constitution Forgot to Ask All of Us
Welcome Romenesko readers, this is an open letter to the Publisher and Newsroom Management of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A couple of weeks ago you announced that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was restructuring its operations. You made a mistake in judgment. Before you made the decision, you should have consulted me–and all your other readers, nonreaders and stakeholders. It would have been the smart thing to do; indeed, in moving forward it might be the newspaper’s and good journalism’s salvation.
Restructuring the AJC is a reaction to the open source, open content movement and the online disruptive technologies that are eroding audience time and advertising dollars. That management reacted is smart, that they ignored the open source, Web 2.0 imperative of collective participation is worrisome. Tim O’Reilly, in his essay, “What Is Web 2.0,” writes that the most successful players “have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence.”
Let’s take a step back to 1991, Linus Torvalds, just 21 years old, posted a message on the Internet asking for help in developing a kernel of a code he had written. People from around the world responded. The result is Linux, the operating system, that many argue is more robust than Microsoft. Eric Raymond, in his defining essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, would write: “the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approached…out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.”
Those open source, babbling bazaar miracles continue to come online almost daily, be they the powerful Mozilla Firefox browser or the nimble WordPress used by bloggers. People working together with minimal central control have produced Wikipedia, with more than a million English entries written by everyday people just like you and me, and that collective power shines in commercial enterprises like eBay, Amazon and craigslist.
People in Georgia are ready to join the conversation and to get involved. We learned that at the SoCon07 unconference held at Kennesaw State University earlier this month. In just three weeks about 200 mainstream folks from business, academia and the community, with almost no prompting, materialized online, signed up and attended 1.5 days of Web 2.0 networking. This “unconference” had two selling points — connect because you can and the audience knows more than the presenters. Thatâs also the citizen journalism mantra of Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, who says, “Instead of lecturing our audiences, let’s ask for their help and offer ours. We can do great things together, and we should.”
Robert Picard, in an extremely comprehensive research paper, “Journalism, Value Creation and the Future of News Organizations,” concludes in part that, “News organizations that align themselves closely with their audience…and that allow their audiences to participate in journalism and communication processes will be able to create the value needed to sustain themselves and financially benefit in the new environment, while at the same time providing value that serves social goals.”
Through open source vetting prior to the restructuring, the AJC might have found productive ways to keep all the journalism jobs on board and to expand its market rather than contract it. Instead you decided to offer buy-outs in the newsroom and cut circulation outside the metro area.
Wouldn’t it be better if the AJC were the amplification voice of all Georgia rather than just metropolitan Georgia? Certainly from purely a journalistic point of view, it would have more value.
In the future, as advertising and news diverge, the audiences will have to pay more of the costs. Giving them great journalism will not be enough–that’s a sad reality. However, if all of Picard’s stakeholders — advertisers, investors, journalists, consumers and society in general — feel they have ownership in the paper, and are part of its decision making process, and if the paper and the community are indistinguishable, one adding to the strength of the other, then journalism, the AJC and all of Georgia will profit. Getting there will require innovative thinking and trust in the power of collective thought, but the lesson of Linus Torvalds says that it can happen — and as Microsoft learned — if you stay too closed and don’t trust your audience–then that audience will find someone else who will trust it and who understands the worth of community involvement and collective thought.
Still it is not too late. Ask us all how we can help preserve a great news organization and improve journalism in this digital age, ask us all how we might get involved. You might be surprised at the answers we can collectively produce.
AJC, Collective Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Journalism, Web2.0, Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
March 1st, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Dang Leonard. You’ve created a revolution already with this open letter to the AJC. I just had a MSM reporter (from the AJC even) email me to correct a glaring error on a blog post of mine today. I kid you not! (I’d written “Bob Woodward” numerous times, when I meant to write “Bob Woodruff.” So see, they’re good for something. And me, well… editorially, you get what you pay for at the SGR.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:33 am
Right on. If we want to trust the readers to decide what’s best.
But the question following from LW’s critique is: Why?
If news/publishing execs don’t check on readers’ preferences and ideas, could it be because they don’t want to know?
Don’t discount that possibility. And, while it has its undemocratic-sounding dimensions, they may have some good reasons. If my students are any indication, the audience could seek more fluff and less substance. And if the metropolitan area’s concerns are to be diluted in the pursuit of broader regional concerns, what will happen to the imperatives of metro journalism? Will the paper be able to retain the top journalists who entered the business to pursue those priorities? Should “we” turn everything over to the preferences of the majority? Hello, Us magazine, goodbye, Pulitzer-seeking agents of social uplift and correction?
What I am suggesting is that Journalism 2.0 (or whatever stage we are approaching) will not necessarily be better just because it prioritizes the readers’ preferences. In fact, it could be worse. The wisdom of the many may offer some great ideas, so LW is right that there is value in gathering readers’ views (and, I would argue, those of a broader assortment of stakeholders). And I acknowledge that seeking input doesn’t necessarily connote slavish devotion to its less worthy dimensions, but in a world where market research rules (and even the academic ethicists take the side of the “will of the people”) can we really expect the public’s true best interests — investigative journalism, devotion to multicultural and global awareness — to prevail? The working and nonworking poor are unlikely to gain powerful representation in reader surveys. Just something to think about. When we make claims for representation, questions of degree and apportionment thereof should not be banished from the equation. We’ll see what the AJC comes up with, and we’ll never know what the alternative would have been had they invited broader input (or we may yet — power of the blog vs power of the old MSM?), but simply responding to whichever voices can afford to make themselves heard most loudly won’t necessarily produce the best journalism, even if it does serve the market best. What is — what should be — the true objective?
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
I decided to write this as a full post on the PJNet.org. It is here too in full:
I started to write this as a response to a comment to RealityChecker who thought engaging the audiences, as I suggested in my open letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was not necessarily a good idea. We’ll start with this quote of his and go from there:
For me those two sentences, and anyone who believes them, demonstrate journalists’ distain for their audiences. If you think they are so stupid, why write for them in the first place. As someone who was in the thick of the public journalism movement, I heard that argument time and again and pointed it out time and again. As in this instance:
I have written extensively on this topic and you can search out my articles on Reinventing Journalism to Is Public Journalism Morphing into the Public’s Journalism?
However, here is a simpler test. Would the Internet be a better place if only professionals in all fields were allowed to write for it and be its gatekeeper, or is better now with a cacophony of voices, amateur, professional, nutty and sane, all contributing? Which is smarter? You can pick the former, but I want only the latter. I also want journalists to tap into that creative energy, as USAToday.com is beginning to do, and if they don’t, they might start thinking of going into the mirror business because it might be the only job they will find.