Posted: Apr 26, 2010 11:09 AM
March 29, 2010 - Robert Niles is a geek (smile when you say that), a math whiz, an entrepreneur, and a journalist. He's won awards for his themeparkinsider.com and worked as a Web editor, editorial writer and reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald and the (Bloomington, Ind.) Herald-Times. If you recognize the picture and the name, however, it's likely due to his work as writer for the University of Southern California's Online Journalism Review, a job for which he was called "one of America's top media academics" by the UK's Guardian newspaper.
Niles is a steady voice in the world of online news, and his essays are among the Web's most valuable. If you want to stay up with the evolving world of online journalism, you need to read Robert Niles. His RSS feed has been a part of my RSS reader for many years, and I doubt there is a better mind out there that's trying to grasp all of the changes we see and turn them around for the rest of us to understand.
I caught up with him recently, and here are 10 Questions for Robert Niles:
1. You've been observing and writing about journalism for many years now. What do you see as the biggest changes in the profession during that time?
The Internet has reduced to barrier to entry into the news publishing business to next to nothing. The only investment you need to make to become a news publisher with global distribution is your time. Obviously, know what to do with that time, how to spend it, continues to separate the successful from those who are not. But an established brand name, huge bank account and access to credit provide no guarantee that anyone with decision-making authority within an organization will be smarter about how to compete online than some person with a blog somewhere.
2. A lot of people view "online journalism" as oxymoronic. The Web, after all, is the seed of the disruption to the press. What is your definition of the term? How broadly do you define the word "journalism" in surveying the landscape of the Web?
March 29, 2010 -
Since when did the "press," i.e. the news industry equal "journalism." I don't see the two as the same and I welcome the fact that so many people now share that view. Journalism is simply the act of reporting fresh, accurate, non-fiction information to a public audience. People don't need to be employed by a news company to do that. Now, folks who weren't employed by news publishers did not in the past have a medium to deliver their reports widely. With the Internet, now they do.
3. What do you think is the biggest challenge for professional journalists today?
With such disruption in the field due to Internet competition, journalists can no longer count on the career path established in previous generations. A big-name newspaper might not survive another five years. Reporting and writing skills that were in high demand even 10 years ago probably wouldn't be enough to get a would-be reporter a job today. Journalists have to think in an entrepreneurial way, either to craft their own jobs, to at least to better analyze whether a potential employer will survive in the market. Then, journalists must do more than they have had to in the past to retrain themselves, to remain fresh in managing social media and technology.
Of course, journalists are not alone in enduring these changes. Many occupations are going through the same thing.
4. Is there such a thing as an "amateur" journalist, and how would you differentiate that from the pro?
Same as I would in any field: money. You get paid, you're a pro. You don't, you're an amateur. The money doesn't need to come from an employer, though. If you're making bank with network ads on a blog, you're pro now.
5. Do you separate journalists from the institutions of professional journalism? In other words, do you see a world of personal media that includes journalists as opposed to journalists who work for institutions using social media or personal media for the benefit of their employers?
"Journalist" is a job title. Obviously, people who work with that job title ought to be able to use electronic communication for socializing with family and friends when they're off the clock. Heck, newspapers didn't keep reporters from having home telephones in the past.
Anyone can do journalism if they report fresh, accurate non-fiction information to a public audience. I like to illustrate this using a big Venn diagram. You have a big circle for "journalism", then a smaller circle toward the side for "journalists" - it's mostly in the big circle, but hangs out a bit. Then there's another, larger circle to the other side, for "other social media users" - that one's mostly outside the journalism circle, but overlaps inside it a bit.
6. Do you believe Lisa Williams' statement that "Journalism will survive the death of its institutions?" If so, how do you see that playing out?
It will survive the death of *these* institutions. But journalism will, like other industries, develop new ones. You'll always have someone making enough money with journalism that he or she builds it into a large business, with employees, managers, buildings, PR campaigns and all the other stuff associated with big business these days.
7. Given the data from Gallup and others that shows a decline in trust of the press, do you think journalists carry with them "the public trust" as they go about their work? In other words, does the press have "credibility," or is that just an assumption?
Report accurate information. Journalists working at major newspapers have blown so many big stories over the past decade - the 2000 election, al Qaeda, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, the financial crisis - that I don't blame people for not trusting journalists. Heck, I consider most of what runs in my hometown Los Angeles Times these days to be naive and poorly-reported. Most working newspaper journalists don't know enough about their beats to add very much intelligence to the public conversation.
Credibility is earned by being right, over time. Whatever credibility the newspaper industry had, it's pretty much blown that over the past 15 years. And TV and radio cashed in its credibility before that.
8. People like Michael Smith of Medill's Media Management Center believe that we're working with new values in journalism today. He cites speed, transparency and authenticity. David Weinberger at Harvard feels that "transparency is the new objectivity." What are your thoughts on this?
Too few journalists ever studied science, so most used the work "objectivity" incorrectly. Transparency *always* has been an essential component of objectivity. Objectivity never should have meant presenting reports with disguised assumptions and no explicit conclusions, the way it's been presented by journalists. Objectivity should mean in journalism as it does in science, that we work to isolate sources of bias in our reporting, that we note the conditions under which we work, and that we open our work to examination by others.
9. Among your readers, what do you find are the most popular and least popular types of pieces that you write today?
People read and respond to items that put forward a well-argued opinion about something in which they have personal experience. But people don't click to read pieces that don't personally affect them, or that they don't see why or how it affects them.
10. We see a lot of media executives talking about pay walls these days as a way to help pay for the "kind of journalism" that they've traditionally done. Do you think the public will ever pay for news, and if so, how so?
They pay for journalism with their most precious asset, their time. Not just the time that they give us, but the time that they give to our advertisers, as well. I find it supremely arrogant to declare that the public is getting its news for "free." People will pay subscription fees and single-use fees for content that they believe valuable enough (or delivered in a format useful enough) to be worth the payment. That hasn't changed, and won't.
The public's telling us that they don't find much value in most of what the current news industry produces. *That* should be the message that publishers are hearing. Instead, consumed by arrogance developed over a generation of running monopolies, they choose to believe instead that the public is a bunch of deadbeats. Forgive me for not shedding any tears when these publishers fail and their publications go out of business.
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