Save the journalisms!

By MEDIA FARM

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AS HIS HOMETOWN paper sputters on on life support, our very own muppety Sen. John Kerry, who happens to be the chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (ladies, take note: the longer the title, the more someone's compensating for something), had to preside over a congressional panel on "The Future of Journalism," and listen to experts squabble over who was making journalism's future more bleak.

According to David Simon, who did a 13-year crime reporting stint for the Baltimore Sun (and wrote The mutherfuckin' Wire!), real journalism takes, you know, money.

"High-end journalism is dying in America, and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web, or anywhere else. ... The industry is going to have to find a way to charge for online content. Yes, I've heard the post-modern rallying cry that information wants to be free. But information isn't. It costs money to send reporters to London, to Fallujah, to Capitol Hill, and to send photographers with them, to keep them there day after day. It costs money to hire the best investigators and writers, and then back them up with the best editors. And how anyone can believe that the industry can fund this kind of expense by giving its product away online to aggregators and bloggers is a source of endless fascination to me."

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So, how could Arianna Huffington argue with that one? She told the senator, "I was not around when the printing press was invented" (which is actually a pickup line in Greece!). She went on to claim that she knows exactly what the rhetoric was like at the time, which either casts doubt on her assertion that she's not 569 years old, or means she's talking out her ass. She said, "But if I were around, I would imagine that the people dealing with stone tablets would be making a similar argument, saying, 'If you just left us alone and just forgot about that printing press, we could really charge you for that.'" She called Simon's argument "antiquated," because "it cannot happen."

It's the same tired back and forth that we've seen a million times before; both sides deride each other without listening. The first hurdle we have to overcome, if we're going to save journalism, is a rhetorical one. Simon's point is kind of the crux of the problem: Journalism, real nose-to-the-grindstone journalism, costs money, because most people who want to dig deep into policy, politics or warfare, working long hours, becoming antisocial wonks and wading through paperwork and politicians' bullshit ... they need to eat and don't have magic carpets (well, except for maybe Geraldo).

But charging for access to websites presents its own set of problems. What if some aggregator paid for content and then regurgitated the information? How do you hold the Twitterati accountable to their information sources? Could journalistic content go the way of the music industry, with a widely accepted information black market? Sure, paid content worked for the Wall Street Journal and ESPN Insider, but what about larger publications with less of a niche following and stranglehold? In that sense, Huffington might be right that it's antiquated to assume you can stem the tide of the free information age, especially when it's defended by the idealistic assertion that information belongs to all of us.

But web advocates refuse to recognize that there's any problem at all, even though new media relies on the publications it simultaneously shits on and aggregates. It's also ludicrous for Huffington, and Google's Marissa Mayer, to testify that print dying will make way for a new journalism, because they can't even articulate what that would look like. When Kerry pressed Mayer on this point, she replied with meaningless psychobabble:

"I think you could say, well with the product we have today, it's not working. But you could try and preserve the business model as it exists today, or you could attempt to change the product, in a way that maintains the core of what's wonderful about journalism, but ultimately becomes more engaged and adept online, generating more demand."

Well, we're so glad she cleared that up.