Image via WikipediaMindy McAdams comes through again today with a post titled The Survival of Journalism: 10 Simple Facts.

Let’s see if I can condense them down (although it’s worth going over there and reading her entire post):

1. Free content isn’t wrong.
2. Newspapers ≠ journalism
3. Journalism  = $$$$
4. Citizen Journalism won’t replace “Big J” Journalism
5. NewsPAPER is a fading delivery format.
6. There’s no monopoly on trust on the Internet
7. The next generation will not read newspapers.
8. Democracy fails without a strong fourth estate.
9. No, we don’t know how we’ll pay for it yet.
10. Don’t count on newspaper companies to be the first to figure out No. 9.

Agree or disagree, Mindy suggests these 10 postulates should be accepted as given, so we can skip over those “ground rules” when discussing the future of journalism.

Of course, I think Mindy’s points were summed up poetically by another great mind:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

It’s time to stop worrying about the medium and focus on the idea.

As a recent graduate of a mostly print-oriented journalism program who is more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it and sitting in the crowd than standing in front of it, some find it odd that I just couldn’t care less about the future of newspapers.

I’m not crying “print is dead.” I’m saying the decline of newspapers is a skirmish; there’s a bigger war to fight. I’m saying that engaging in good journalism is more important than the medium you contribute to.

Rather than trying to save newspapers or broadcast news, can we focus on saving journalism?

Not a day goes by that I don’t hear complaints - from the audience, not the peanut gallery - about liberal media, sensationalism, or cover-ups.

My neighbor declares daily that news should be positive rather than negative. OK, a man killed his neighbors - but the police caught him.

My best friend’s mom says there’s only one good news show on TV - The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Even though fewer stories are presented, the depth of the stories is much greater than the traditional “news at 5.”

Our readers, watchers and listeners aren’t sheep. They can and do think for themselves. They know what they want, and they’ll get it - somewhere.

So we need to pick up the pace.

Video won’t save journalism. Blogging won’t save journalism. Podcasts won’t save journalism. Databases won’t save journalism.

These are all parts of doing journalism.

Journalism is the discipline of gathering, contextualizing and presenting facts which have “impact, timeliness, prominence, proximity, conflict or weirdness” within a community.

Think of a community as any group of people who identify in some way with one another.

Now serve them, dammit!

Jim Killam videos a panel discussion of the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association. here are the videos:

Part 1

Part 2

UWire just announced their UWire 100 - a list of 100 college journalists nominated by peers and professors and chosen by the staff of UWire. Check out the entire list here.

Some of the names are familiar to ICM readers, as they’ve been readers, commenters and had their work showcased on the site: Sean Blanda, Kyle Hansen, Greg Linch, Chelsea Otakan, Whitney Rhodes, David Studinski, Megan Taylor.

I haven’t had time to read through all the listed journalists yet. I’m sure there are others who are doing exciting things with new media and online journalism. Perhaps in coming days I’ll have more time to do so. Still, it’s good to see web folks getting their due in a list like this.

When the UWire 100 nominations were launched, I thought about each one of these folks who deserved nomination for their new media work. Congrats to them all, and to their peers in the UWire 100.

Leonard Witt writes about the first experiment he’s conducting in Representative Journalism. It’s a good idea for college media types to follow this experiment, as it may be a crucial part of the future economic puzzle for journalism. Or not.

I’m signed up as the keynote speaker at the Iowa College Media Association awards program for tomorrow night. I’ve got a presentation prepared, but I’m throwing it out to the audience - as a sort of crowdsourcing experiment - any suggestions for things I should mention to these college journalists about the future of journalism?

Drop them in the comments.

A few weeks ago when Bryan interviewed me, he mentioned that I should post more often here, because apparently a few people found my prior post on Facebook to be quite useful or at least intriguing to read. Hopefully, my posts will continue to spark discussion and be helpful to both advisers and students.

This week: creating a brand with your byline. It’s something that’s occurred to me in recent weeks and I think should be in the forefront of young journalists minds as they enter what’s a tough job market and trying to figure out ways to get ahead of the pack.

+++++

“You don’t go into journalism to be rich.”

I can’t recall an accurate number of times I’ve heard that phrase or some variation of it. From the moment I took my first introductory journalism course up until a few days ago speaking with a friend, this idea that there’s no money to be made in journalism seems to be hammered into stone tablets that we carry with us.

But I disagree. There’s money to be made in journalism. The problem is that we’re probably not wired to think about how we can leverage the hard work we do and start using that to our advantage — or at least protect our jobs from being cut out from underneath us.

Journalists need to start thinking like advertisers, brand makers, or marketers about themselves and the product they produce.
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Meranda Watling posted a comment on an earlier post that I wanted to highlight:

I’ve heard peers say they didn’t get into journalism to blog, to take pictures, to come up with multimedia, to do whatever. They want to write. The other stuff “isn’t that someone else’s job?” or today, another reporter (23-yo recent grad) commented, “why don’t they just hire TV reporter to do the video?” *sigh* Me? I want to hand them a white towel and tell them to surrender now and get out before they get left behind.

I have a confession to make: I was one of those kids. When I was in college - John Tisdale at TCU can attest - I didn’t learn photography because “I want to be a writer.” I focused on editing, writing and gathering information. I neglected the business aspects of the news media. I diligently sent photo requests to the photo department in my first job.

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If students and advisers weren’t inspired by the passion and conviction of Rob Curley’s keynote at the CMA/ACP convention, then something is seriously wrong with them. Here’s an excerpt from Curley’s speech that contains practical advice for students - skillset and mindset are both important if you want to keep working in the 21st century journalism field.

What’s even cooler is that Rob invited numerous students down to wapo.com to spend time with him on Friday. He didn’t have to do that, but he shares generously, because he’s passionate about the future of journalism.

Click here to hear Rob talk about students and what they need to succeed. (mp3 file - if it sounds a little distorted, it’s the MacBook Pro mic effect. Better some audio than none at all, right? - ed.)

I have the business sense of a squirrel, but even I can see a disturbing financial trend for our student media here. We’ve been looking at our quarterly income statements today, wondering how to stop the bleeding. Ad revenue looks to be down 20 to 25 percent from last year at this time. We had hoped that the problem was local – that we were doing something wrong and could find a way to fix it. But after hearing from business advisers from around the country, it looks as though nearly everyone’s in the same boat. National advertising appears to be the primary culprit, but local has been tough, too.

We’re finding areas to make cuts, but really, personnel is the only place to make a significant dent. So we either hire fewer reporters, photographers, designers, etc., and ask more of our already-overworked editors, or we reduce all staff and start printing smaller papers with less local content and – gasp – maybe even less frequently. And in the process, we sacrifice part of our educational mission.

So my question for Innovation in College Media is this: Are college media nearing a point where we need to invent new business models to sustain ourselves? Of course new media is part of that mix, but it’s still not a major source of revenue (at least not here). The print product still pays almost all of the bills. Meanwhile, fewer people read newspapers.

Do we look for revenue aside from advertising? What might that look like? Do we publish a printed newspaper less frequently, and attempt to drive readers to an innovative Web site in hopes that they won’t give up on us altogether? Will advertisers support that? Do we create niche publications?

And, can we get good advice from professional news media, other than “Welcome to the real world?”

I don’t know any of these answers. I’m hoping some of you might.