Arianna Huffington and The Laid-Off Journalist, the yin and yang of Western journalism
Raju Narisetti -
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 8:21 AM
I Want Media, an online media resource, recently named Arianna Huffington co-founder of the online news and opinion site, The Huffington Post, as the 2008 Media Person of the Year in a poll that saw her easily trump the likes of Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, Tina Fey, the dead-on US television impersonator of Sarah Palin, the Twitter trio of Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, and Sam Zell, who has driven the Tribune Co. into seeking bankruptcy protection.
Huffington, whose website capitalized on the US elections, to record traffic, is a well deserved winner for pretty much reinventing the business model for journalism (as Craig Newmark of Craigs List says in nominating her) and is the vanguard of what will likely reshape the American media industry in coming years.
What was interesting to me was that the finalists also included "The Laid-Off Journalist" a clear sign of what else is happening in the Western media world. The sharp job cuts and shrinking of the newspaper industry, especially in America, this year is unprecedented and, come to think of it, has just begun. At last count, some 15,157 job cuts have been documented by one account and, as I predict, it is only beginning.
The juxtaposition of Huffington's rise and the demise of print (and television) newsroom jobs is quite interesting to this Romantic Realist in the sense that they are, in some ways, the yin and yang of the state of western journalism. Rapidly falling but still large advertising revenues for print coupled with significant news gathering infrastructure (read costs) on one side, and rising but nowhere as profitable (in terms of revenue per reader/subscriber) revenues for digital news dissemination on the other. Speaking of layoffs and the future, do read Tina Brown's angry piece on how media organizations are actually not using layoffs to "kill the media zombies" on her new web media site, The Daily Beast.
There aren't too many editors and publishers left in the US who don't think that the print-only newspaper model is broken. The problem is that costs of news gathering, be it for a web site or for a newspaper, still remain very expensive and will be, until there is some rethinking of what constitutes journalism and who is solely incharge of creating content. The mainstream media company's dilemma was well articulated in a National Public Radio interview by Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, who said:
"Good journalism does not come cheap. And, therefore, you're not going to find a lot of blogs or nonprofit Web sites that are going to build a Baghdad bureau," adding that at the same time "there's a real shortage of the kind of information that I would call quality journalism." (Read transcript or listen to the interview here)
In India, the newsroom layoffs have started to come in bits and pieces, with the likes of Saakal Times cutting dozens of jobs (Read more here) and some magazines shutting shop. And I predict more will come (should come?) if the current advertising downturn lasts, as it looks it will even if there is some overall growth. The much more interesting question for me is when and how fast will India's own Arianna Huffington and The Huffington Post take root?
PostScript: A colleague sent me this interesting link after he read this post: "Y
ou may find this interesting. a son on the death of the newspaper his dad works for...(read post here)