Jeff Jarvis digs into the act of journalism, and in so doing provides analysis from the media side that is worth some thought from the business point of view. Jeff extracts these components:
- Witnessing
- Asking
- Editing
- Commenting
- Distribution
(I will suggest that he forgot one: Writing. It's one of those fish-doesn't-perceive-the-water kinds of things. I've watched Jeff write. I'm not even sure it's a conscious act at all times. I'm awed, but incapable of emulation.)
What's the business point to this? As I've suggested before, and as the angst among the ranks substantiates, the legacy media bundle is unraveling. Revenue sources, trust, and coverage areas are all under successful attack or self-inflicted attrition. The word is 'disaggregation' - when values formerly associated by chance of technology or market no longer cohere. What Jeff lays out are the raw bones of the disaggregated profession and business formerly known as journalism. They are therefore the rudiments of an analytic framework for describing new models of newsgathering, writing, and distribution that will grow into its place, and they propose that the transform will be more profound than merely destruction of the distribution oligopolies. The seething Cambrian broth of bloglines, del.icio.us, blog storms, participant bloggers, and all the rest, suggests that the fundamental acts of journalism will also be rearranged.
The Jay Rosen piece that provoked Jeff asks whether the managements of newspapers are "laying them gently down to die". I suspect so, at least in part. The economics of a subscription business are not complex: reader count, gross margin per head, churn (turnover) rate of readers, costs of acquiring a new reader. When the costs of acquisition exceed the present value of the new reader, the business model collapses. Renewed profitability - without changing the model - rests on cutting expenses and/or curtailing the marketing costs of acquiring new customers to replace those who are leaving. Bloggers on one side, on the other, rabid new competitors willing to accept lower profits and fight for territory neighborhood by neighborhood. Whether decisions are the product of inarticulate fear of unknown alternatives, or a rational decision to manage the business as a dwindling cash cow, the results are the same. If one could hear the gored ox speak, it might sound like this.
There is another side of this. If the media owners have skated by for years based on their oligopolistic control of the distribution function, then so have the practitioners of journalism. Swaddled by the lack of competition, a J-school degree and an attitude have become a substitute for knowing the beat. How long have we suffered with technology reporters whose knowledge is as deep as a showing of Pirates of Silicon Valley? Or business reporters who substitute leftist politics for Econ 101? Reportage will now be held to account by both audience and those reported upon, and it's high time. Welcome to competition, lads.