Adam Dylewski: Splitting the AdamIt's 2014, and the New York Times has become a newsletter for the elite and the elderly. A merger between Google and Amazon.com has led to E.P.I.C.—the Evolving, Personalized Information Construct—which filters the massive ocean of news online to each reader's taste. Journalism, as we know it now, has ceased to exist.
Along with Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, creators of the much-discussed flash video that presents the E.P.I.C. idea, an increasing number of journalists are worried about their livelihoods. While I'm decidedly more optimistic about journalism's prospects, the implications of E.P.I.C.—the marginalization of objective reporting and journalistic ethics, content that reinforces each reader's existing beliefs—are scary.
Fortunately, journalists have the opportunity to adapt in ways that will maintain the integrity of the news while reaching out to the Internet newshounds everywhere.
For starters, content producers need to embrace the newly fragmented audience.
The next wave of media is to unleash the power of serving people's special interests,\ said John Hendricks, the chief executive of Discovery Communications. ""Every time I walk into a Borders bookstore, I spend a lot of time looking at the magazine rack—because staring at you are all the passions of America. The bride who is about to get married, there is a magazine for her. And for the person who is a little older, there are wonderful travel and leisure magazines.""
In other words, no matter how obscure the article or narrow the niche, if it maintains a certain level of quality, there is a market somewhere out there for it.
I don't think the New York Times is going anywhere—the importance of hard facts is not going to go away. Blogs and podcasts democratize publishing and broadcasting, but very few actually present new information. They're completely reliant on the old media to report the stories they analyze. Most newsreaders know this, so the savvy ones don't rely on the ""new media"" for the truth.
Andrew Heyward, former director of CBS News, spoke about the future of journalism in a recent keynote address. According to Heyward, ""In the case of every new medium that has historically been heralded as the downfall of an old one, both are still around. Each of the outlets still has an important place and the new media relies on the old ones for their viability.""
""There's a temptation to say that to be sexy you have to have point of view,"" Heyward said. ""There's lots of opinion out there; there aren't a lot of hard, dug-up facts.""
According to Greg Downey, a UW-Madison journalism professor, ""the news reader has to have a sense of trust and faith in certain news producers."" Jayson Blair and other scandals aside, the New York Times has, for him, ""still managed to keep a baseline level of trust.""
This trust, Downey suggested, could be attached to newspapers or individual reporters. In the case of the latter, the emergence of military blogs, or ""Milblogs,"" written by soldiers on the front lines, demonstrated the reporting power of bloggers who actually leave their houses.
For somebody whose career was built on the ""old media"" of network news, Heyward was reassuringly optimistic about the future of journalism.
""A new platform will be built on rigorous adherence to fact; fairness will be important; transparency will be more important,"" Heyward concluded. ""There has to be a new credibility based on honesty. Embrace this new world order without being intimidated by it. Our bosses are intimidated by it. They don't like that the tectonic plates are shifting. There's plenty we can do and contributions we can make. This is a jittery phase. Anxiety will spark creativity.""
Adam Dylewski is a junior majoring in genetics and life science communication. When not writing about the ""blogosphere,"" ""milblogs"" or the ""new media,"" he goes through buzzword withdrawal. Send him new ones at adylewski@wisc.edu. \
