Dynamist Blog

How Journalism Is Changing

In an interview with Jay Rosen, John Harris, who recently left the WaPost for a startup venture, exactly identifies how journalism is changing:

We live in an entreprenurial age, not an institutional one. That's been true of many professions for quite a while, and increasingly (and perhaps somewhat belatedly) it is true of journalism. The people having the most satisfying careers, it seems to me, are those who create a distinct signature for their work--who add value to the public conversation through their individual talents--rather than relying mostly on the reputation and institutional gravity of the organization they work for. In your own way, you are an example of this with PressThink.

There are certainly examples of people fashioning this kind of entreprenurial career within the Post. Woodward is the most famous, but more recently Tom Ricks and Dana Priest are good examples, as are talented writers like Laura Blumenfeld and Dana Milbank.

But in general organizations like the Post or the New York Times have been insulated from the spirit of the age--precisely because they were secure and prestigious places to work. Once people got a job there, they tended to stay for years and even decades. Most of the people in those newsrooms are creative, and in my experience they tend to think of themselves as individualists and even iconoclasts. But the reality for many (including me until two weeks ago) is that they have careers that are more reminiscent of the 1950s, when people got hired at General Motors or IBM and stayed put. I believe that for people who want this type of stability, journalism is not going to remain an attractive profession for much longer. But people who adapt will thrive and end up having more fun than in the old days.

The WaPost has adapted better to this shift than the NYT, which desperately wants to deny it. The interview is full of such truths and worth reading in full.

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