The business of selling news is disappearing, just like the business of selling recorded
music is disappearing.
Now's a time where people are going to have to really have some skin in the game.
If the New York Times is going to survive, if Time Magazine is going to survive, if CNN
is going to survive, they're going to have to find a new business.
Very, very few large media institutions, as they are currently constituted today, will
be around in 25 years.
These are big ships.
This is like turning an ocean liner, and a lot of them are also, they're part of publicly
traded companies, so they have a great deal of pressure from shareholders to stick with
models that still have considerable life in them, even if they aren't, you know, medium
and long-term engines for growth.
Old business models are failing, and newsrooms, for the most part, just don't have the resources
they used to have.
It's really hard to watch institutions die, like Newsweek may die.
It gave me my start in journalism.
Just once upon a time, only you could do these things, and now many more people can do these
things.
And I believe that what will replace them, what is already beginning to emerge, is a
much healthier system of news that is more diverse, that has much more direct connection
with its community, and that is much more responsive to the world.
Journalism is in such a tumult and such an uncertain transition with pretty much everything,
except hopefully its core essentials being up for grabs.
Good journalism gets itself done when people say, I want to do this because I find a personal
satisfaction in connecting people with information.
There are a lot of journalists who I think grew up thinking of their jobs as being something
shaped and determined by some delivery mechanism, right?
You were a newspaper man, you were a broadcast person, and all of that is kind of falling
away.
The internet didn't, for at least these particular reporters and these particular institutions
at this particular point in time, it did not liberate them.
The point of being a journalist, I think, is all up for grabs.
The question I ask myself and that I just wish I knew the answer and everybody else
wishes they knew the answer to is, okay, how many years?
Took 150 years after the invention of the printing press before someone thought of printing
the first novel.
I don't think we're much faster than that.
Maybe 150 years from now we'll really get the techniques that are going to make the
best use of the internet.
