I’m at the AEJMC conference in Washington DC this week. This is the time of year when educators in journalism and mass communication get together to present papers, share experiences and generally discuss the state of education.
With simultaneous panels taking place back to back, there is little time to report back on the sessions in detail. So I wanted to highlight the best thing I heard today, during a panel on that perennial topic, the future of news.
The most striking comments came from Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
First he said that news producers needed to go to war, and he stressed “go to war”, with broadband providers and Internet aggregators. He argued that while Verizon and Google get paid, the providers of the content they carry was not getting a cent. One solution, he proposed, was to add a little extra to bills to pay news providers.
Rosenstiel was equally blunt about news organisations that describe themselves as platform agnostic. He said that this implied you did not believe in the web, whereas your competitors are driven by a belief they can do things better online.
If you’re platform agnostic, you’re going to be dead and you deserve to be dead
There is something to Rosenstiel’s point. The big names on the net, the likes of Google, YouTube and Facebook, are successful because they realised they could do something online better than on any other platform.
Media companies could do with learning this lesson and instead of being “platform agnostic”, focus on what they can do better online than on any other medium.
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Okay, first of all, Rosentiel is full of s**t. Aggregators and ISPs are two different things. ISPs provide *access* to the Internet. They do not – as a rule – provide content, although AOL and others have tried that track. An ISP is a lot like a paper delivery person in that respect. The delivery person doesn’t have any control whatsoever over what goes into the newspaper.
Second, Aggregators like Yahoo *pay* for content from AP, AFP and others. The fact that that money isn’t going to newspapers should be taken up with the Associated Press and others, not Yahoo. If he’s thinking about Google, that’s another issue. Google doesn’t pay for content, but then again, Google isn’t gathering and posting all of the content from news providers. It’s not Google’s fault that most newspapers run the same damn AP story about a topic.
Finally, platform agnosticism is the official company policy of the New York Times, and if Rosentiel is saying that the Times “deserves” to be dead, then he’s got bigger problems than ISPs and aggregators.
What a stupid statement. (for more on the issues of delivery vs. content, I’d encourage everyone to read Howard Owens’ blog, where he’s discussed this ad nauseum).
(btw, it was good to meet you at AEJMC. Hope to get together again some time – without the nouveau indian cuisine.