The press realizes where it’s failed and starts to change

What follows is less a prediction than a hope: that the press will begin in the next year to finally recognize the true nature of its failure and begin to change the nature of the journalism it offers the public.

The most common explanation for the crisis in journalism is that the advertising revenue that once financed news has largely gravitated to a few internet platform companies that produce nothing. This was made worse by federal deregulation of electronic media under, which legalized the partisan propaganda that today pervades the American journalism landscape and eroded trust in the press. Weakened newsrooms are now in caught in a death spiral.

This explanation isn’t wrong. But it is dangerously incomplete. And in important respects it describes the symptoms of the news industry’s failure, not the causes.

The root of journalism’s collapse is not largely, or even fundamentally, economic or technological. It is intellectual.

Thirty years after the development of the public internet, journalism is still offering a largely 20th-century product insufficient and ill-suited to the 21st century. And blaming that failure on technology only encourages the news industry to avoid making the deeper conceptual changes required for a responsible press to reconnect with a skeptical public.

Here is journalism’s deeper problem: Much of what made the press indispensable in the 20th century — that helped people navigate their days, live their lives, and improve their communities — was not the journalism but what surrounded it. You couldn’t know what movie to see or TV show to watch without the listings. You couldn’t sell a bike or buy a house or rent without the classifieds. Or be sure if it might rain without the latest TV or radio weather forecast.

Today, people can find nearly all that elsewhere.

Meanwhile, journalists thought little about how their stories actually helped people. We over-romanticized monitoring the powerful — a job we do not do nearly as well as we imagine — and malnourished the broader but more valuable role of helping the public live their lives. As media scholar James Carey put it: “We developed a journalism that justifies itself in the public’s name but in which the public plays no role, except as an audience, a receptacle to be informed.”

We made money by getting people’s attention through alarm and the bizarre — and then renting that attention to advertisers. We can do that no longer.

In the 21st century, a free press can only survive by creating enough value for its communities that people will recognize it, pay attention to it, and in growing numbers subsidize it — through subscriptions, membership, tax breaks, or donations. We cannot survive by replacing a product that failed in the marketplace with the same product.

To revive itself as an institution, the press must begin to make the public the focus of its work, not a bystander to it. That means we must provide a more useful, complete, less random and less alarmist account of the world. And that requires that we understand, measure, and track how each piece of content actually helps people — the job we are actually doing — not define news largely in incremental updates about the establishment. We must begin to live up to the digital promise of making journalism more a collaboration and less a narrative lecture. We must, in other words, begin to recognize that the future of news depends on our fulfilling the responsibilities of the past, but not the routines.