Emily Bell, director of Columbia’s Tow Centre for Digital Journalism, opened the 2011 Future of Journalism conference by arguing that journalism was becoming defined less by the businesses supporting it than by the activities it involved. Arguing over who counts as a journalist was futile; paraphrasing Warhol, she said that in future everyone would be a journalist for 15 minutes.
Journalism had many futures — as a business, as a profession, as a process — and 2011 was their start. Earlier debates, she said, had cast that future negatively, dominated by technologists and the “hamster wheel” of live coverage. Bell took the opposite view: disruption and technology favoured good journalism. “It feels like journalism has been in defence mode for a long time and is now breaking out of its boundaries,” she said, pointing to her own students, for whom how best to tell a story was no longer a question for technologists. The emerging core skill was collaboration across disciplines.
She contested the idea that instant journalism is bad journalism, calling the real-time social web and mobile devices a galvanising force: “Live journalism isn’t hamster journalism.”
Her most contested point was about money. Revenues and profits, in her view, did not equate with good journalism and the primary focus had shifted to sustainability. She cited the Journal Register company’s digital experiments, unclear as it was whether they would work, and ProPublica as evidence of what was possible outside traditional structures. “There is no clear answer to what a news organisation will look like in five year’s time,” she said.