Credit: Anthony Mattox/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Journalism is not in crisis. The media industry — and journalists — might be, but the journalism itself is actually improving.

Such is the argument made by international documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak and Annenberg professors Michael Parks and Manuel Castells in a recently published article about “Networked Journalism.”

As the authors see it, the problem is that most of the doomsayers mix the concept of journalism with the business of journalism. In their article, journalism is defined as the “production of reliable information and analysis needed for the adequate performance of a democratic society.” Not mentioned in the definition are “profits,” “professional journalists” or “traditional publishers.” Just the pursuit of reliable information.

When the authors discussed their paper at Annenberg last week, Castells started by saying, “This is the beginning of the golden age of journalism.” People have greater selection and better access to information than ever before to help make democracies perform better. Or to make democracy happen in the first place, as we’ve seen in several “Twitter revolutions” in recent years.

But the golden age comes with a few caveats for traditional journalists. “Journalist” is no longer defined by background, schooling, and salary, but by the contribution to the expanding body of reliable information about the world.

Making that contribution is getting harder. Van der Haak predicted that “robots will produce most of the basic stories we see in newspapers today.” And the more developed automated journalism becomes, the more journalists will have to specialize in interpretation, analysis and storytelling. Mere transmitting of information doesn’t count as a meaningful contribution, since anyone with a cell phone and a Twitter account can do it.

This is where the power of networking comes in. In networked journalism, journalists are not working alone at their desks but instead act as nodes of the network, adding value instead of competing against each other. Journalists collect different feeds from various sources and create a meaningful version of the story, contributing to the body of information already available. With  networked journalism, they can optimize resources and generate synergy, and new creativity will emerge from our sharing. It is very similar to any other industry in a networked society.

This will mean growing pains for journalists. In a networked system, “pointing all the microphones at the same time at the same person” doesn’t make sense, as van der Haak noted. Instead of sending all the reporters to City Hall to listen to the mayor’s speech, a news organization might serve readers better by fact-checking the speech in real time at the office.

Michael Parks noted that journalism is evolving far more rapidly than journalists are. The most sought-after skills in journalism will be analytical capacity and the ability to network. This is what the authors call “sense-making,” or professional processing and understanding of information.

And this is where the authors hit their most controversial point. They argue that “not objectivity, but transparency and independence are vital for journalism to be credible in the 21st century.” People have multiple sources of information and they are more aware about how all of the sources serve some sort of interest. It might be political, as it is in partisan media, or financial, as it is in traditional, for-profit publishing.

In this environment, the authors write, “journalism with a clear perspective is more convincing than neutral narrative, and there is increasing value placed on the voice or vision embedded in the story — that is, on a point of view. This, however, calls for analysis grounded in reporting, not opinion or ideology.”

And this, according to the authors, will distinguish the journalism from the “informed bewilderment” that the world has become. Networked journalism is not a threat to quality or to the independence of professional journalists but rather a liberation from corporate control. But it requires a massive shift in the minds of professional journalists, who are taught to determine the value of journalism by which organization produces it, instead of measuring its value to the vast body of information we already have on the Internet.

So next time you read that “journalism is in crisis” and start getting depressed about the state of the media and our democracy, make sure the author is actually referring to journalism — not the industry or the profession of journalists, but the actual “journalism.” Because while journalists may have their work cut out for them, journalism itself is thriving.

(Bluemarine/Wikimedia Commons)

As USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism looks for a new journalism director, Columbia’s Graduate Journalism School hired former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll to lead. Though some have criticized Coll for taking a job sculpting tomorrow’s journalists having never tweeted once in his life, The New York Times’ David Carr wrote a positive appraisal of Coll in which he calls the Pulitzer-winner a Dumbledore to Columbia’s Hogwarts.

Carr, the Times’ media columnist, suggests that Twitter isn’t central to journalism (“my boss likes to point out that I tweet constantly but Twitter never sends me a check”). He also argues that Coll definitely has a knack for thinking ahead, evidenced by an early plan to equip reporters with portable cameras, which Carr made fun of at the time.

“I think the great digital journalism of our age has yet to be created,” Coll told Carr. “The cohort that is at Columbia now is the one that will be making the journalism that is going to shape our democracy; working on mining data sets, creating video that is not 2012, coming up with much more powerful ways of accruing and displaying information.”

Musician Amanda Palmer (Joi/Wikimedia Commons)

Jeff Jarvis writes that the value of media should be based increasingly on relationships, rather than solely on the content produced.

He cites Google ad exec Susan Wojcicki and musician/artist Amanda Palmer. Palmer had a famously successful Kickstarter campaign for an album she chose to do without major label support. She championed the notion of relationship-building as business model recently in a TED talk:

“By asking people [to pay for your work], you connect with them, and by connecting with them, they want to help you. ‘When we really see each other, we want to help each other. People have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, How do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, How de we let people pay for music?’”

Wojcicki applied similar logic to advertising in a post on Google+, writing “In years to come, most ad views will effectively become voluntary.”

If media (as content and as advertising) are voluntary, Jarvis suggests, then the “argument about paywalls — and copyright and the value of content — is the wrong argument. Instead, he writes, “The discussion we should be having is how better to build valuable relationships of trust with people as people, not masses, and then how to exploit that value to support the work they want us to do.”

NY Times app on a phone | Credit: methodshop.com/Flickr

For years now journalists have discussed how online paywalls can help “save” the newspaper industry, that if major print publications could just figure a way to charge for web content then the industry could thrive.

The New York Times is hardly your run-of-the-mill paper, but they have managed to lead the way with successful paywall strategies. After two years, the Times’ online page keeps adding tens of thousands of subscribers per quarter, according to CJR. In the fourth quarter, NYT online reached 640,000 digital subscriptions and added 74,000 new subscribers.

Still, as writer Ryan Chittum points out, the paywall was really about slowing the decline of its print operation. The company still has a way to go before it can make up in digital advertising what it’s losing in its quickly vanishing print ad revenues.

Newspapers are for the birds! (Flickr Creative Commons: Nationaal Archief)

Poynter chatted with Chris Seper, founder and CEO of MedCity Media, who says “there has never been a better time to be in journalism.”  Seper spent nearly a decade working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is now in its death throes.  “I think in the past we associated journalism jobs with big outlets that contained hundreds upon hundreds of jobs,” he said in the chat.  “And we associated them with traditional media outlets.  That’s not the case now.” 

But because of the rise of digital, he said, there are “more opportunities to publish than ever before. To start your own shops. To launch and serve readers in the ways they truly want to see themselves served.”

You can read the whole chat here.