PJNet

Two years ago I was one of the few voices saying that if we wanted high quality ethically sound journalism, we would have to pay for it. I said advertising would totally decouple from the news. Lucky for me, Ruth Ann Harnisch of the Harnisch Foundation heard my voice and fully agreed and started pushing me to take action with her inspirational, intellectual and financial support. Hence the Representative Journalism project in Northfield, Minnesota.

Today in The New York Times media critic David Carr wrote:

Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.

Here is what I wrote on January 12, 2007 exactly two years ago to the day:

Here is my biggest question. What will happen when only the journalism is left? It has grown out of a Christmas present I received. It is a small portable GPS. So I can walk about, tell it to find me the barbecue places or the department stores or the visitor center. In other words, what I might have needed a newspaper for in the past all pops up instantly in front of me when I need it and literally walks me to my destination step by step, street by street.

So who needs newspaper advertising if you have that, and, of course, soon everyone will have it in a more perfected form than we have now.

Today we have the iPhone and that is only a primitive example of what we will have in the future.

David Carr ended his piece today by saying:

Now all we need is a business model…

Well a week later in January 2007, I posted my manifesto of sorts called: The Need to Reinvent Journalism While We Can. In it I wrote about what we needed then and still need now. We need:

A model where everything goes back into paying for the journalism. High quality equipment, high quality reporters and editors paid an excellent wage, high quality connectivity with the communities served, and high quality journalism that helps the community members find their way, while always being ready to speak truth to power. We can do it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Harnisch Family Foundation, Journalism, Journalism Business Models, Newspapers, Representative Journalism, Ruth Ann Harnisch, journalism jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.