Unleash the Watchdogs

I don't think any industry has ever been as clueless about its future role as journalism is today. The telegraph after the invention of the telephone, I suppose, could also be lumped into the same category.

Unlike those telegraph operators, though, I think journalists still have things they can/should do that no one else can/will do. and if we can do those things better than anyone else, suddenly all the hand-wringing and bots of industry-wide depression (see: Romenesko) are suddenly wholly and fully moot.

We need to look at the new media landscape like a failing TV station looking to make a killing. We need to find out what is and is not happening in the market, taking into account all the avenues for communication and news delivery, find out what's not happening and exploit it. Shall we?

Getting news "first" is no longer neccessarily possible, nor is it important. Bloggers, TV stations, and -- hell -- even interest groups or companies or other PR machines will get the information out faster than us. Entertaining our audience is equally worthless; because of the sheer volume of stuff(TM) on the Internet(TM), the best we can hope for is to not seem to far out of touch with what's actually entertaining. It's also pointless to act as a catch-all repository for the major events of the day; Yahoo and Google have a monopoly on that market, with niche sites reaching out to interested parties across geographic markets.

So those are out. What's left is essentially two of the roles as defined by Kovach and Rosenstiel in the Elements of Journalism:
1) "a discipline of verification"
2) "An independent monitor of power"

In an interview with E&P, The Seattle Times' David Boardman backed up that second assertion with strong support of increasing investigative reporting in newspapers, saying the effect would help the bottom line and newspapers' relevance. "You’re not going to see Bill Gates do it or the bathrobe-wearing bloggers."

And both these disciplines -- hard-edged watchdog reporting coupled with a tireless effort to verify fact -- helps add a valuable layer in world that is being increasingly created by advertisers on behalf of their clients. The ability to cut through the crap they try to foist off as truth or try to ignore is going to become increasingly valuable. The ability to force an institution to address something they'd rather sweep under the rug, to call statistics from the latest press release into question, to poke holes in the spotty logic of a blogging public too caught up in the scandal of the day: these are the skills of journalists in the world we're heading into.

I love to turn a phrase as much as the next guy, but that's no longer our role. Snark is available for free. Lampooning culture is the essence of many a successful website. Style and prose are a dime a dozen. We, unfortunately, have to realize that the content of our work is now king, that a feature story is rarely going to cut it anymore.

Again, this industry has to find what it can do that nobody else is doing, and do it so well no one ever tries to compete. To verify and to investigate; those are the things we can do that will let us continue to be viable. and if we do those things, people won't talk about journalists in the same way we (never) talk about telegraphs.