Journalism is Community-As-A-Service (Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard)
Great read. There's a link to many other authors and their thoughts on what journalism will be like in 2017 at the bottom of the article and here:
JOURNALISM IS COMMUNITY-AS-A-SERVICE
By REBEKAH MONSON - Dec 2016
PREDICTIONS FOR JOURNALISM 2017
“Sure, Facebook’s standardized display and positioning of content doesn’t help users make informed choices, but journalism can’t shirk responsibility for cheapening the product offering.”
News organizations are reeling. The 2016 election upended a lot of our ideas about our work — most disturbingly that reported, factual journalism is valued and trusted less than a cheap, clumsy imitation of itself. But the problem isn’t Macedonian teens or the fake news that made them rich. The problem is that we’ve forgotten what media businesses actually are. And 2017 brings a challenge and an opportunity to correct that mistake.
To borrow a popular framework from the tech industry, media companies are and always have been community-as-a-service businesses. It’s time we start acting like it again.
At the peak of mass media consolidation, media had the luxury of operating as a widget business. In oligopolies, media could easily sell an exclusive inventory of ad units and fill the spaces around them with journalism (or crosswords, horoscopes, comics, newscasts, sitcoms, etc.). In a market of limited competition and inaccurate measures, we were allowed to forget that our primary value is actually contingent on a community trusting and acting on what we publish.
~snip~
We can start with radical transparency. Our communities don’t actually understand our businesses (neither do most of us, to be fair), and the lack of clarity leads to mistrust. At WhereBy.Us, our journalists in Miami and Seattle have been working on clarifying our business practices for users, laying out specifics about how we make money, who makes what, and how we present what we make. We’re seeking feedback from our community about these distinctions and how we might improve upon our practices. This isn’t a one-off project, but the start of an ongoing conversation, one that we consider deeply important as we experiment with new revenue models. We’ve all avoided the uncomfortable conversation too long, and now we have to talk about the business to build community trust....
