State of the Media

The 2008 State of the Media report was published recently and any student of journalism should be taking a look. According to the Pew Center Foundation, which puts out the report, the major trends are:

News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, Web site or newscast — to becoming a service — how can you help me, even empower me?

A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations.

The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs.

Increasingly, the newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry.

The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden.

Madison Avenue, rather than pushing change, appears to be having trouble keeping up with it.

These trends, and the fascinating data that support them (check it out), have real implications for the way press theorists examine political/social/economic/cultural/personal life here in America.

We have entered a new "Answer Culture," the report states, and in response, newsrooms much adapt: "journalism may have to move in the direction of making its work more transparent and more expert, and of widening the scope of its searchlight."

I've been hearing this call for more transparency ever since I got into journalism nearly two decades ago. And lately I've seen lots of attempts to comply (I am thinking particularly of work being done at The Spokesman-Review, for example, with their posted reportage interviews and their broadcast newsrooms). But I do not see a lot more reality represented here, in the sense that by hearing the interview I have a better sense of what is going on in my society. Rather, I get a lot of information I am not really sure what to do with. Journalists are supposed to transform into "authenticators," according to the report. That's a good word, and a fascinating concept, but how can this be done while staying within the parameters of institutional, cultural and economic constraints (i.e. realities?) and still making meaning for people?