“the days of judgment coming from a citadel of judgment may be drawing to a close”

Every single paper along the I4 corridor is losing reporters, editorial staff, and positions from every other department. Are Central Florida readers turning away from the news, or did newspapers lose a quality relationship with their news organizations?

That stems from a question asked 14 years ago during a panel on “The New Economics of Journalism.” Seated at the head table were Esther Dyson (Forbes columnist), Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (New York Times, Publisher), Walter Isaacson (Time, New Media Editor), and Frank Daniels III (Nando.net publisher).

The question was from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen…

I’m Jay Rosen from New York University. And I’d like to address a comment to something that we’ve heard repeatedly throughout the Conference, and a lot in this Panel, which is that what journalists sell us, or the value they add is judgment.

That’s something that I hear a good deal of at conferences like this, and what the conversation never gets to beyond that is: What are the grounds for that judgment? Where is that judgment coming from?

There are a lot of ways to judge the world, and if what “The New York Times”, or any other news medium is doing is providing the information that a human being needs to function well in this society, there are a lot of views of human beings,- there are a lot of ways to function well; there are a lot of views of what’s going on in this society.

And the question becomes: On what grounds are those kinds of judgments made? Now, if we take Esther’s metaphor of mapmaking, which is also interesting, there are a lot of ways to map anything. If I take the State of Connecticut, I can map the river system; I can map the transportation system; I can map the demographics; I can map population shifts. All of those things will produce maps that are accurate, credible, potentially valuable, but there are different ways of mapping the world.

So when I read “The New York Times”, I don’t get just information, and I don’t get just good judgment. I get a vision of what culture is about in the culture pages; I get a vision of what politics is about and for in the political news,- I get a vision of the local community in local sections. And I think one of the questions that’s beginning to be raised in the online area is: Where is this vision coming from?

In the years when “The New York Times”, for example, saw culture a certain way and didn’t include rock and roll as part of it, I wasn’t buying your judgment. I was waiting for your judgment to catch up to the way the world is. Do you see?

So it seems to me that the challenge of online world, which incidentally, is also the challenge of public journalism, is: How can we create grounds for judgment that arise out of interactions with people and relationships with people?

And it seems to me that the days of judgment coming from a citadel of judgment may be drawing to a close. And now, it’s the quality of our relationships with people that will determine the quality of our judgment, and the ultimate grounds for making those judgments that add value in journalism.

Rosen had the right idea in 1995. Newspapers have long labored under the belief that their institutions provided the trust that people had in the news. While there might have been a day when people followed select newspapers like they follow favorite sports teams today, there has always been a number of readers who were waiting for their “judgment to catch up to the way the world is.” I believe the Internet greatly accelerated that process.

So now, it is up to the newspapers we read to re-prove themselves. They have to come, pressman’s hat in hand, and improve the quality of their relationship with their readers. Those readers no longer want persons in Ivory Towers who explain All the News Fit to Print. They no longer expect their letters to reporters go unanswered. They want neighbors who understands the subtleties of their community; a trusted analytical voice who is in the same traffic jams, travels the same potholed streets, and lives in the same brown grass dream homes they do. That’s why many readers turn to writers that offer two-way relationships — be they bloggers, mainstream reporters, or or alternative publishers. It’s those people they trust, not the institution where they work.

The I4 community newspapers will eventually reach their equilibrium of staff and news output. They’ll return to printing the news of our neighbors. We won’t become isolationists. We’ll still get our national, and international news. Just not from our hometown newspapers. We’ll get the news from people we know. And some will even work at the newspapers.