In the first of the Paul J. Schatt Lecture series, three panelists discussed the future of the journalism industry and ethics with a moderately good turnout of students and faculty.
Jennie Buckner, who spoke to us earlier today, Jim Crutchfield, former president and publisher of the Akron Beakon Journal, and Tim McGuire, former editor and senior vice president of the Minneapolis Star Tribune talked about the issues while sitting on comfortable- and expensive-looking furniture on the stage of the Evelyn Smith Music Theatre.
The panel predicted that newspapers were going to morph and slim down, but that their content will have to get more ambitious if they are going to survive. There will need to be a balance between the expectation for reporters to write five or six stories in a day, and the expectation for reporters to write in-depth stories. Meanwhile, the Web should be used to experiment, to push the envelope, and post news more instantly.
Some of the issues include: The fact that you can't charge people to read a newspaper's Web site. Young people *typically* don't read the newspaper as much as older generations do. One major complaint with today's media is that it is too biased. (I thought it was clever that McGuire, currently the Frank Russell Chair in the Business of Journalism at the Cronkite School, would assign his students to find 10 examples of the media being biased, and the students complained that the assignment was too hard.)
On ethics, Buckner said they will be the deciding factors for those news organizations that "make it." Crutchfield said, "If we give up our ethics, we're toast." With the increasing number of news sources, credibility and reliability will be a news organization's most valued asset.
During the question-and-answer portion toward the end, McGuire referenced a conversation he had with Dr. Thornton. It was about how broadcast-oriented students and newspaper-oriented students interpret stories differently. He said Cronkite School professors "have to take that as a challenge," which I thought was interesting.
Overall, the panel didn't discuss ideas that were necessarily ground-breaking. Many of the industry trends they discussed have already been covered in our classes or overheard in the newsroom, but it was still worth attending, if only to gain additional perspectives.
1 comment:
Nice write-up. I went and thought the lecture was pretty interesting. I wish they would have talked a bit more about the ethics of having big newspaper-owning corporations.
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