Anne Kibbler | Dec. 5, 2008
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| Photo by Kurtis Beavers |
| Panelist Dennis Ryerson of the Indianapolis Star said he has never been more frustrated, nor more energized, regarding the news business. |
The School of Journalism hosted the forum at the Lilly Auditorium in the IUPUI University Library. National Press Club president Sylvia Smith moderated the discussion, titled “The First Amendment, Freedom of the Press and the Future of Journalism.” The press club has held similar forums around the country this year.
The panelists were Dennis Ryerson, editor and vice president of the Indianapolis Star; Bob Zaltsberg, editor of the (Bloomington) Herald-Times; Cheryl Jackson, visiting broadcast professor at the IU School of Journalism, Bloomington, and a former Indianapolis TV anchor; and Emily Metzgar, assistant professor at the IU School of Journalism, Bloomington.
Ryerson said he has never been more frustrated, nor more energized, regarding the news business. He sees potential for news organizations to use new technology to provide credible information people can use in their daily lives, and he sees a future in the continuing development of niche markets to attract advertisers online.
But the industry hasn’t yet done a good job of figuring out how to do either well, he said, citing clunky mechanisms for managing reader-submitted content as an example.
Newspapers are laying off staff, but at the same time they are asking journalists to take on new roles as they learn to present information in a variety of media. And while some of the gaps left in news coverage by shrinking reporting staffs can be filled via so-called crowd sourcing, or citizen journalism, newspapers must be careful not to abandon their investigative role, Ryerson said. The declining press corps sends a message to public officials that they’re going to be under less scrutiny, and that makes him nervous.
“Crowd sourcing is like ‘First Amendment lite,’” he said. “There’s nothing like good, old-fashioned piece-by-piece digging by a good reporter who knows how to interpret information, who can painstakingly go through legal documents and official records and look for connections and disparities and inaccuracies. You can get some of that from the crowd, but I think we’re going to have to champion those things that we can do and other people can’t. In this era when we’re being asked to do more with declining staffs, that’s one thing we need to protect with the ferocity of a mother cat.”
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| Photo by Kurtis Beavers |
| To concentrate on reporting, newspapers may have to let go of some of the tasks they have traditionally performed, such as style details, said Bob Zaltsberg, center, editor of the (Bloomington) Herald-Times. Left is broadcast instructor Cheryl Jackson and right is assistant professor Emily Metzgar, fellow panelists. |
Jackson, who was a TV reporter at WRTV-6 in Indianapolis, as well as a convergence reporter at WSBT in South Bend, said television news reporters have to be able to write for the Web, often getting stories online before they’re broadcast on the air.
With those added responsibilities, reporters can be stretched thin. Television news is more likely to be sensational, she said, with less emphasis on covering government and less accountability.
But Metzgar said there are examples of the public successfully filling in gaps in coverage.
“The citizens, the bloggers, the pajama-clad pundits who work in their mother’s basement are indeed picking up a lot of the pieces,” she said. “Are they professional reporters? No. But at the national level and at the state level, we’ve seen time and again examples of how a story that was not picked up on by state media or national media is picked up by someone who happened to be present, happened to have a certain area of expertise on a policy issue, happened to just catch video of someone saying just the wrong thing. It snowballs into something that becomes a national issue, and it causes people to lose appointed positions, it causes people to lose elections.”
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| Photo by Kurtis Beavers |
| National Press Club president Sylvia Smith showed a video about the NPC’s 100 years and then moderated the panel discussion. NPC is hosting events such as this all over the country to mark its anniversary. |
Ryerson agreed more reader content may be the answer. But he said there’s a need for an aggregator who can summarize and use thoughtfully the huge amount of information available online.
Metzgar suggested “a community-centered news institution that is neither newspaper nor television nor radio, but a news consolidator of all kinds, where when you want to be fed local information, that is where you go to find it.”
But any changes in newsrooms will require news organizations to rethink their business models, Zaltsberg and Ryerson said. Newspapers haven’t yet figured out how to make the kind of money online that they have been used to making in print, and newspaper owners and stockholders may need to reconsider their expectations of revenues and profit margins.
“We were fat, sassy and happy for so many years, we didn’t feel the need to invest,” Ryerson said. “We weren’t strategic. We’ve learned a lesson from the emergence of the Internet.”
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