Rusty Todd: The fate of civic information as the media fragment

Picking up where Wanda Cash left off, figuratively and literally, UT journalism professor Rusty Todd posed a question during his lecture Wednesday: Does democracy really need the press? How central is a good and honest and effective news media—a news media focused on public affairs reporting and civic information—to the preservation of freedom and maintenance of government?

The answer, he suggested, may be more complex than we think, and it might challenge our dominant idea—indeed, the very starting point from which we consider journalism’s purpose and place in the public sphere—that good democracy is dependent on good journalism. “This bothers the hell out of me because I spent most of my adult life thinking the answer is yes,” Todd said.

Why such worries? As he has studied journalism’s past, Todd has found that “some of this country’s ‘finest moments’ came during times of irresponsibility on the part of the press.” So, even as hard news goes soft, and Britney Spears and Michael Vick drown out reporting about schools and the environment, Todd sees the present spike in political participation as evidence that, well, maybe public affairs news doesn’t matter like we thought it did. Perish the thought. What’s more likely, however, is that we have more “drones,” as he calls them: uninformed folks who get involved and vote.

But what of the future of news? (It’s worth mentioning here Rusty’s definition of news: “Stuff you need to know, but you don’t know you need to know it.”) First and foremost: “Newspapers eventually will die, and they will die when their readers die.” He cites as the National Observer, a smart weekly paper around during the 1960s and 70s; it had one of the highest subscriber-retention rates around, but it also had one of the lowest new-subscriber rates because its high cost. So, as its older readers eventually died, so did the paper.

Next: “We’re going to gather news all the time. The news cycle is dead.” Think of news as one continuous RSS feed, although there will still exist “structured” products—such as story packages—that appear on, say, TV broadcasts. But the trend will be toward a fluid, always-updating flow of information, aimed toward increasingly specialized audiences.

Speaking of which, an obvious point from Rusty: The mass media are scrambling to figure out to reach the increasingly fractured audience. Consumers are cracking, cracking, cracking into ever-smaller niches, so in the future information will be gathered once and sold many times via multiple media to multiple audiences. (Something like this has happened in the past with specialized financial news wires, but it’s becoming more apparent in media convergence today.) It’s the Long Tail at work in news: “If you can find a tail that’s profitable, you don’t really care about the big bulge.”

In the future, he said, the market for national public affairs news will shrink but remain viable. One interesting twist has been the way in which news media today are turning Election 2008 into an “American Gladiator” style contest of this character vs. that character. Rusty considers this framing of politics as sport an entertainment as a last-ditch—and possibly successful?—attempt at hanging on to a mass audience for public affairs news.

The puzzle, he said, is getting civic information to these mini-audiences without resorting to gladiator-style reporting, even as aggregation online (think of Google and Yahoo news personalization) make it easier than ever to avoid public affairs journalism. Perhaps the upshot to all this “new” media, ironically enough, is a return to something akin to the “old” news media of the 1800s: fragmented, partisan, and hucksterish. “I’m afraid where we’re headed is back to the pre-mass media age where public affairs journalism is only read by the elite,” Rusty said.

Is that any way to run a democracy? I guess we’ll find out.

("Disclaimer" of sorts: I am the teaching assistant for Rusty's copy editing class.)