This very provocative consideration was posed by none other than Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, in an article in the NYT’s Sunday magazine section on March 10. Although published a little more than a week ago, the article titled, “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate” offers enough thought provoking discussion points about whether or not Media and journalism are really synonymous, to trigger many more such conversations.

Keller’s point that, “we in Media have transcended earthbound activities like reporting, writing or picture-taking and created an abstraction — a derivative — called Media, in which we invest our attention and esteem,” is well taken, albeit likely to be perceived, by a great swath of consumers of news, as an old- fashioned point of view. Especially so, when he goes on to say that, “our fascination with capital-M Media is so disengaged from what really matters.” His point as to what matters, is that it is still the credentialed journalists that cover history-in-the-making, while others indulge in “the orgy of self-reference (which) is so indiscriminate, so trivializing.”

Keller supports that point with the observation that “some once-serious news outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are “trending” on Twitter — the “American Idol”-ization of news. And we have bestowed our highest honor — market valuation — not on those who labor over the making of original journalism, but on aggregation.”

Keller has little respect for aggregated media, which used to be called “plagiarized” media, but which now has become the “new normal” media — whose whole existence is to regurgitate what someone else already did. However, the reality is that news aggregation is actually a necessary outcome of the radical explosion of information of the past decade and news aggregators have become the best means for the average consumer of information to be able to reasonably digest even a fraction of this explosion.

From Keller’s vantage point, that as caretaker of some of the world’s best news “originators,” it is clearly an affront to have their work repurposed and repackaged. Moreover, since aggregators fall under the new “normaI” category they have often dumped journalists into the “old” media category rather than the well-deserved elevated category of “originators of news.” Aggregators are now generally positioned on equal par with those that travel the world, under difficult circumstances, to garner the news. In other words, in becoming a new news medium, aggregators have garnered undue respect, which seemingly continues to rankle the likes of Keller. Just consider as to what you hear more often, “Oh, I just read it on the HuffPost,” or, “just saw it in the Washington Post,” for example.

I offer a different perspective, however. The real objection that I have is not about the aggregation of news in general, but rather that aggregators get to choose the news that fits interests relevant to each one’s “seeming or expressed” preference, profile or demographic, and therefore limit the exposure to the gamut of news. I prefer to be the decider of what news I consume and therefore will continue to take the time to peruse favorite publications and then individually decide, on a moment-by-moment basis, what news I wish to consume.

Anyway, the times are a-changing. Since we live in a society where price very often is akin to value, I think that the NYT is playing it smart by throwing up a pay wall for receiving the news online, which is about to happen. You get what you pay for, right?

We introduce our next guest blogger of our monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary this year, Geneva Overholser, director of the U.S.C. Annenberg School of Journalism.

Geneva Overholser is director of the U.S.C. Annenberg School of Journalism.  She is former editor of the Des Moines Register, ombudsman for the Washington Post and editorial board member of the New York Times.

As the director of a Journalism School lucky enough to include a distinguished and growing department of strategic public relations, I’m struck by the many similarities in the ways our two fields – journalism and public relations – are experiencing today’s fast-changing times.  Since I figure we need all the help we can during this Time of Unsettlement, I thought I might share with the blog’s readers my top five thoughts to keep in mind amid the change. They’re journalism-based, it’s true, but I hope you might find them helpful as we confront the many (similar) opportunities and challenges before us.  And hearty congratulations on your 25 years!

1. It’s about the public.  Change is hard, especially when the good old monopoly days were so generous to journalists.  Still, how well journalists’ 401k’s are doing and whether we get to wear the fedora with the press pass is not the primary question.  Rather, it ‘s whether or not the public is going to continue to get a high-quality flow of reliable information.  When you cast your eye in this direction, the terrain still looks scary, but it also looks wide open and far more promising. And those good old legacy journalists will still, I’m betting, have a powerful role to play.

2.  Traditions aren’t what matter; principles are. Here’s an example: I fought with all my might, when I was a newspaper editor, to keep ads off the front page.  Now I’d welcome them hungrily – though I’d want to be sure they weren’t designed to deceive anyone.  Ad-free front pages were a tradition; being transparent with readers is a principle.  Other traditions?  The inverted pyramid.  The ink-on-paper platform. Paying little attention to what readers have to say.  These, we must remember, are not the heart of the matter.  Verification, transparency, proportionality, and comprehensiveness: These are what count.

3. Collaboration and participation are the future. Those who partner with others, link to others, aggregate the material of others, concentrate on what they alone can do best and point their news consumers to those who can offer them the rest – that’s what’s coming. Those who participate and collaborate are likeliest to thrive.

4. The good old days had their problems. We left out wide swaths of the community – the poor, people of color, most folks (for that matter) who weren’t in power or hadn’t done something criminal.  As we journalists became more and more comfortable, we began to lose track of the old responsibility to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Moreover, our content was too top-down driven, and  we tended to get stuck in conventional thinking.

5.  We can do it BETTER this time. The people formerly known as the audience want to be (and are!) part of creating information in the public interest now. Helping them become better informed about how to do that (news literacy is key) will make our work ever richer, and our democracy ever stronger.

Treasure the journalists, for as former WSJ.com reporter Jason Fry recently commentated, digital media may very well be the end of  journalism as we know it today.

Whereas that may sound somewhat dramatic, you have only to look at the digital media site that Fry mentions, Demand Media, as well as other similar ones like Associated Content or AOL’s Seed — the so called “content mills” or “content farms” — so nicknamed for the large volume of content that they churn out, based on a set of algorithms of popular search queries.

On such sites, topics are usually selected by low-paid freelancers who, because the economics of these sites’ business model that don’t allow time for several rounds of edits, fact-checking or further investigative reporting, write in a one-draft style, written with the intent to lure, as well as satisfy advertisers.

And now comes another entry in this arena, Yahoo’s new blog dubbed The Upshot.  In an interview with The New York Times, James A. Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo Media, said that their newly launched news blog, will create content “in response to audience insight” aggregated from Yahoo search and popular search queries, to guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media.

Where is the validity of the news if  subjects are only selected to attract eyeballs and sell ads?

In contrast, journalism, to date, has been about not just informing readers and listeners, but also about illuminating something for readers, giving them a perspective that might trigger new thoughts and opinions.  I am speaking about the professional journalist — the ones who are passionate in the pursuit of a story who, by the very nature of their profession, understand how to research a story, are relentless in their hunt for facts and substance and who are able to organize their thoughts in a way that actual “tells” the story in a comprehensible way.

Demand Media has issued strong protest about being called a “content farm” and bristles at criticism of their editorial content.

Maybe both sides deserve consideration.   Maybe the word that is new and arbitrary here is “content,” which gets confused with news, but is not news.  And the “farm” or “mill” parts refer to mass content, or quantity versus “investigating reporting” quality.  Maybe digital media is about advertorials without a new labeling system.

So, for now, “content mill or farm” may fit, until new terms are found and adopted to separate digital media from journalism as we know it.

Look, advertising has always been the life blood of most news generating publishers, online or not, but the traditional wall erected to separate editorial and advertising has got to keep standing to allow for independent reporting.

But in light of digital media sites being so hot and rich, (Demand Media generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009, and is now planning an initial public offering) that wall may very well come “a-tumbling down.”

It seems it was all done backwards…. First came the innovation, then the run-away successes and then – oh dear, how do we get paid?  Take the freebie online publication dilemma. Who thought that one up?  Now comes all the chest beating, albeit a bit late, in light of the need to make money – or as we used to say, manage a sustainable business.

Look, hindsight doesn’t work.  You don’t get to charge once ‘you’ve given away the store.’

Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp. is mumbling about the need to end a “malfunctioning” business, per Eric Pfanner’s article in the International Herald Tribune of May 18.  According to the article, other publishers including The Guardian Media Group in Britain and the New York Times Company said they were examining ways to get readers to pay for digital news.

Even the ever-growing and popular two-year old Twitter is getting concerned about getting paid.  It wants to steer clear of advertising, per company cofounder Biz Stone in an article on CIO.com, on May 19, 2009, but needs to consider options.  Apparently, the company is developing tools and services that it may offer on top of Twitter’s free microblogging service.  According to a videotaped interview at a recent Reuters event, Stone offered, “I think by the end of the year we’ll have something out there.  It doesn’t have to be this super home run in terms of making billions of dollars. … But it has to show a little bit of signs of life, telling folks, ‘Yes Twitter can be a sustainable business.”

Let’s hope…

Lawmakers in France have come up with a whopper (pardon Burger King) of a plan to fight against unauthorized sharing of digital music and movies, in the hopes of having consumers pay for such services.  The approved law simply threatens such pirates with the loss of Internet access.  Good luck…

There seems to be an answer amidst all this brouhaha, and the example can be taken from the music industry.  It’s about packaging, that is, not charging for what the customer expects to get free, but offer add-on services as a package — and then charge.  Example: unlimited music, packaged with broadband subscriptions or other purchases.

But just think — it would not be a bad business model if digital news were to be packaged in a similar way, with legitimate offerings consumers actually want.  Basically, sell something other than basic services, which can then remain free.  Clearly there some other attempts at getting paid for receiving the news electronically, such as subscriptions to Amazon’s Kindle DX tablet and the soon-to-come Reader from the New York Times.

One expects business paradigms to change, but in the end, business has, and always will be, about getting paid for services or products.

I think that the original allure of the Internet, with its infinite possibilities, had us all jumping into the water but, apparently, not with feet first…

In Camelot, it was the knight in shining armor that saved the princess, locked away in the tower.

With yesterday’s unveiling of Amazon’s Kindle DX, a new multi-purpose version of its digital eBook reader, the beleaguered newspaper industry may very well have its “own knight in shining armor” as quoted from a pre-launch article by Brad Stone in the International Herald Tribune (IHN) and The New York Times on May 5.  According to Stone’s report, Amazon is first in line to potentially save newspapers as in “throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies.”

Maybe…

As opposed to the launch of Kindle 1 last February (labeled as ‘experimental’ by the firm), which had skeptics wondering about large-scaled adoption of the device, the Kindle DX was launched with a “safety net” so to speak.  Even before yesterday’s announcement, several high-circulation newspapers including The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post had planned pilots with Kindle DX for this coming summer, where they would offer the device at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available, and who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Kindle edition of the newspapers.

But I don’t get it.  How do you continue to convince people to pay for subscriptions when most publications have their material freely available on the Web?

Reality is, freely available or not, many of us still pay for subscriptions today, anyway.  Print publications have always offered something tangible and comfortable — as in holding a newspaper or magazine in our hands with our morning coffee, or sharing an article with a fellow commuter, or simply enjoying the rustling sound of turning pages, folding down corners to mark a page, etc.

Old habits die-hard.  Time will tell whether consumers will migrate to reading from tablet-like devices or not, and how quickly…

However, for newspapers, the potential for huge cost savings from the discontinuation of printing and distribution alone, may be just the “second chance” that they need.  Several similarly-positioned devices are due to hit the market in the next 12-months, with other offerings reported to be in the works by the likes of News Corp., the magazine publisher Hearst, and upstart Plastic Logic.

The concept becomes very attractive when you hear Amazon’s Chief Executive Jeff Bezos’ comment, “With the Kindle DX, you get to carry all your documents and your whole library in one slender package.”

How convenient and efficient.  These, may just be the drivers for consumer adoption…

Look, most everybody gets their news online, so what was all the fuss about Denver’s recently shuttered Rocky Mountain News or the rumors about the possibility of a shut down for the Seattle Post Intelligencer or whatever is next?

The thinning of newspapers has been obvious.  It’s been blamed on disappearing advertising dollars, resulting in disappearing revenues, resulting in disappearing staffers, resulting in less journalistic talent, resulting in making newspapers on the short list of things becoming obsolete.

Not so fast…

Blogger TJ Sullivan has taken up the cause and founded Know Newspaper, to promote the Web blackout petition which urges a complete shut down of all news web sites to non-paying subscribers for one week from July 4- July 10, 2009, allowing only for published news in print.

Madness!  What is the point?

According to Sullivan most news outlets, whether online news sites, radio or TV, look to the morning dailies before assigning and assembling their own reports.  As such, evening news is mostly a regurgitation of what was already reported (minus breaking news, of course).  If that’s true, then it is the print journalists that deserve the credit for uncovering news and making sense of what matters and what doesn’t.  Still, if newspapers get shut down, most likely somebody else will uncover the news…

But the case to be made for reading newspapers, is in the detail of the story, that rarely gets heard or seen.  Clearly it can get read online, but the format is more for quick glances, promotes short attention spans and allows for a lot of ‘flitting’ – clicking over a number of sites to get more bits and pieces of evermore information, rather than an evaluation or an analysis of a single piece of news in depth.

And I do believe the community is better served by its own voice – in print.  What the Rocky Mountain News would cover (other than front page news) would have nothing to do with what the Seattle Post Intelligencer or the Atlanta Constitution would cover.   Sure, the newspapers’ sites would carry this information, but then we go back to the format that does not lend itself to any depth.

There is something else that is troubling here…

As I wrote in a blog entry on February 11, consumers don’t generally bother to check the source of their online news, so ‘amateur’ or ‘social journalism’ can ‘trump’ respected journalists.

I agree with Sullivan.  It’s a sad commentary if we let more American newspapers fade into oblivion, notwithstanding their online presence.

Besides, how would my morning coffee ritual happen without my morning newspaper?