Many young, aspiring reporters despair that traditional print journalism is dying rapidly. For longtime reporter and editor John Nichols, however, this is the most exciting and promising time in journalism yet.
Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times, said that while the print journalism industry is quickly dying, it needs to die to create a new, healthier and more uplifting field of journalism. He spoke to a conference at UW-Madison devoted to consider the connection between democracy and journalism.
"As we look forward on political coverage, we have to really think hard about where it's going to come from and how it's going to exist," Nichols said. "I think that's great. Big media became lousy and dysfunctional, and now we are going to be forced to go back to creating media and journalism in new and refreshing forms."
Nichols said that creating and evolving this new journalism will be a struggle because journalists have a tendency to defend and cling to traditional media. Instead, he said, reporters need to "rush rapidly into the future" while recognizing that Americans want journalists to be serious and deeply engaged in the political process.
"If we do this responsibly and well, we're going to be fine," Nichols said. "Our future is great. Our future is better than if we had maintained old media in its traditional form. We have the potential to go out and create uncontrolled, unrestricted, real journalism."
Beginning his reporting career as a young boy, Nichols said he became interested in journalism because he believed it could alone protect and make functional the American experiment of democracy. He now laments journalism's fallen state.
"I criticize it because I see it so frequently falling short of what I was inspired by when I was 11 years old," Nichols said. "It shouldn't be anything different than what inspired me because I believed in it fully as a craft that made functional democracy."
Nichols said that the 2008 presidential campaign made him hopeful about journalism's future and its relationship to democracy. While reporting was in an extraordinarily terrible situation at the beginning of the election, Nichols said it came out better than it should have.
Two interlocking factors made the media's coverage, which started at an absolute low, rise to the level of a well-respected craft, Nichols said. The first is that this year's election was the most exciting presidential election in America in almost 100 years.
"Why was it so exciting and great?" Nichols said. "Because it wasn't written the day it began. Both leading candidates were totally unexpected."
In the past, he said, many people knew exactly how things would turn out before they even started, and they always knew what the media would do.
The second factor that tied into the election was the fact that journalism was in a crisis. Nichols said reporters had the best campaign to cover, and unfortunately, journalism was in the worst circumstance imaginable.
"It has always been a newspaper-driven media in America, but now newspapers are completely gone, and they couldn't even cover this exciting election," Nichols said. "The newspaper industry is dying, and it's dying faster than we ever expected."
Nichols added that young, hopeful journalists coming into the field with good instincts are told by consultants not to cover important issues because "the people don't want it."
"For the last 25 years we have had consultants march into newsrooms telling journalists to stop doing journalism," Nichols said. "They succeeded by telling us the biggest lie, that people don't like process and meeting stories."
The media were completely dumbed-down and shoved up against the best campaign yet, Nichols said. Even though people were asking deep process questions about the election, the members of the media were not covering it, he said.
"Journalism was unprepared for this campaign," Nichols said. "It struggled with race and gender in the election, and it was downright irresponsible."
The collapse of the economy changed all this, Nichols asserted. The economic crisis forced journalists to get serious, ask tough questions and make the candidates talk about the issues at hand.
"There was a lot of triviality about the election put aside with the economic crisis," Nichols said. "That was really healthy. Journalists had to become serious, and it made them act like real journalists, which prompted the seriousness of the election."
In the end, Nichols believes that the media closed out the 2008 campaign the best he had seen it in many years. They finally delivered serious coverage, he said.
Even though journalism is at a low point right now, criticism of reporting will only make it better, according to Nichols, who considers this low point an exciting time for the Fourth Estate.
"I love this crap, and I love newspapers!" Nichols said. "As harshly critical as I am of this craft, it is the criticism of someone who adores it."
And is there a place in the Greater Blogosphere for to contribute to the New Journalism?
