I read those words written by the public editor of a major newspaper in Kenya, on her own LinkedIn page, where she commented about an article she had written about World News Day (October 1st) on the website of a global news marketing organization’s website. You can read here much of what she wrote.
As the world’s Mass Media industries (and particularly their news sectors) decline as a an effect of the introduction of personal computer-mediate technologies into the media environment during the past 30 years, she hopes that ‘performing journalism better’ will or can reverse the declines.
I’ve heard that stated perennially during for the past 30 years. It is well-intentioned. It is myopic. And it is wrong.
My favorite incantation of it was during 2005 when the American Press Institute (‘API’), a newspaper sector ‘think tank’, blew a reported half-million for Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christiansen (1952-2020) to formulate what the API termed ‘a new type of business strategy’ for newspapers. ‘Do what they’ve always done but to do it better,’ was that strategy said. As if nobody in the newspaper sector had ever thought of that before.
How journalists might solve the continuing decline of their industry sector is a ever blooming topic at journalism conferences and workshops worldwide. After all, journalists consider themselves to be the experts, the engineers, the doctors, even the high priests, of news. And therefore who better to solve the problem than them?
“A doctor who treats himself has a fool for a client,” is an adage attributed tothe Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919). He noted that physicians lose their objectivity when diagnosing themselves and frequently underestimate serious conditions and over-treat minor ones. That is similar to a maxim apocryphally attributed to physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Indeed, whenever the problem be solved is grave or even epochal, the dire need from to expand perspective becomes unequivocal.
“If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) wrote. Consider that two of every three new restaurants that open in American go out-of-business within their first two or three years. The major reason why is that managing and marketing a restaurant are different skill sets that is cooking. Should a journalism class be taught by a business school professor? Probably not. Yet why do so many journalism professors mistakenly profess that they’ve the expertise to teach media management and media marketing, two specialty skills that combine expertises in media creation and media business? Unfortunately most journalism schools don’t teach the business of media business management.
And don’t get me started discussing media school that teach the pseudo-topic called ‘journalism entrepreneurism’, the idea that if journalism jobs are evaporating at news corporations, then all journalist need to know to sustain themselves without corporate employment are magic entrepreneurism beans. If a journalism professor (or, for that matter, an actual media management professor) can’t unequivocally define why journalism jobs are evaporating at news corporations, then it is inexcusably stupid for them to profess that such work can be truly sustainable. It is professing to practice medicine without actually knowing what causes the rampant disease your teaching hopes to prevent. I know many journalism or media professors who’ve advanced their careers with such quackery.
What Osler, Maslow, Einstein, and others have forewarned against is something called the Einstellung Effect, a hidebon form of industrial myopia in which an industry tends to misapply old, obsolete, or superficial solutions to solve new and novel problems upon which they’ve no effect.
Thirty years ago, the news sector of the Mass Media industries implemented such an mistaken strategy to adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies. The news sector decided to make website the ‘digital’ equivalent of their printed editions or broadcast transmitters, webpages the doppelgangers of story pages, and streaming media their new form of broadcasts. It was probably an appropriate adaptation strategy for the personal computer-mediated technologies of the late-1990s, which were years of dialup telephony connections to the Internet on narrowband lines. Yet by within ten years that was no longer appropriate. The technological dynamic know as Moore’s Law had broadened bandwidths and computer processing capacities to the fifth exponential power and has since to the 15th power. Yet the news sectors continues to cling to its 30-year-old strategy as if the world—and personal computer-mediated technologies—hadn’t changed since then.
The glaringly obvious results are the news sector’s fiscal decline, massive losses of loyal audiences and advertisers, and decimated ranks. The problem isn’t journalism and so doing journalism better won’t solve those declines. The solution takes more than journalism and journalists, however well-intentioned, to solve.
If your only tool is journalism, you tend to see every problem as something better reporting can solve. I regret to report that that has been and is demonstrably not true. If you are a journalist, please understand that your journalistic expertise will be invaluable in solving the problem, just not in diagnosing it.
So, what is the overall solution? I’ve been working full-time since 2007 about that question. Since a few years, I know the answer. Were that it could be stated in as few words as this newsletter. So, too, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Molecular Genetics, or a variety of other now everyday things that also can’t be stated that simply but have been proven true. The solution to how the Mass Media industries can successfully adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the world’s media environment. is, by comparison, much easier.
Next week in Macau, I’ll be at the annual meeting of the International Media Management Academics Association’s annual conference presenting it. The Mass Media industries won’t like the solution because it involves change: abandoning those industries wildly unsuccessful mid-1990s strategy of ‘shovelware’ and, before it’s too late, if not already, restructuring themselves take advantage of the major media trend that the exponential progress of such technologies has created (which isn’t ‘convergence’ or ‘digitization’ or ‘digital first’). So, stay tuned until next week. Twenty-three years ago, the Poynter Institute, another American newspaper industry think tank, published an article headlined ‘Does Vin Have THE Answer’. I never said I did then, but I do now. And I’ll bet my career on it.