9th
Paying reporters
Jay Dedman posted a Clay Shirky article about micropayments to the videoblogging list:
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers
At the end it raises the issue of whether we should be worried about paying for publishers or thinking about how to fund reporters.
What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the longer we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one.
Reporting is the raw material of these conversations we’re having online. If good quality and important stories aren’t being fed into the system, you just get a lot of people prattling about inconsequential but diverting rubbish.
One of the brilliant things about the new networks is that anyone CAN do the reporting, depending on where they happen to be and how keen their eye is for a story.
In theory we could allow all reporting to become an unpaid pursuit done by the interested, the rich, the idle, the nearby, the garrulous, and the lucky/unlucky (depending on the story). But that tends to lend itself to a situation where the stories that get reported are the really big and obvious ones and the ones that PR companies, or pressure groups want in the so-called “news agenda”
Unless there are people out there (let’s call them reporters) constantly seeking stories in all the regular places where mundane but extremely important things happen every day, I think we’re going end up in a situation where the only new material being pumped into the system is essentially rubbish.
Crap in, crap out. We’ll all be sitting at our laptops gassing on about the latest social networking fad while everything we take for granted falls apart.
Then again, I work in journalism, so I’m not unbiased. I agree with Clay though, how information is published is of much less consequence than the quality of that information.
A newspaper is (or was) a useful way of organising and collating the work of reporters. Reporters do not (or at least should not) exist as a useful way to fill up space in a newspaper. If the newspaper model doesn’t work anymore then we must seek to find a new way of affording original journalistic effort. Well we must if we think it’s important, and I think it’s important.
