The news media landscape resembles Berlin after the Russians had gone through it during World War Two. The burnt hulks are failed Main Stream Media; the burnt cars and empty boots are failed attempts of online news media to take their place. It now seems pointless to try to rescue that world. Yet, the Western democracies worked mightily to restore Germany and defend its new democracy. They succeeded in building back better. A good analogy? We hope so.
Not all of the old media died.
Some survivors of Main Stream Media (MSM) have partially adopted Journey’s vision and practices and have adjusted to the dominance of online news. And there were a lot of mergers that led to smaller newsrooms.
Whereas before MSM’s practices were anti-religious and out of date, some have learned how to bring their greater resources to bear on the creation of more effective religious reporting and online news. Of course, most of MSM have perished or hung on like the last emaciated famine survivors.
A few MSM survivors have assigned immense resources to online data presentations. The leftovers of MSM online winners include The New York Times, the New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly. Their religion coverage has improved, though it is often undermined by former bad practices.
The New York Times hired Emily Bell, the pioneer digital content editor of UK’s Guardian, to advise on their digital/data-reporting units (she is now at Columbia University School of Journalism.) She and CW Anderson and Clay Shirky published an interesting essay in 2012, “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present.”
They concluded “if you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models.”
However, it is a bumpy road for everyone. Various online media like Vice News, Vox, BuzzFeed, and the original religion news site Beliefnet have also declined.
Now, there is a new wave of online religion news media. The trend is internationalization, politicization, niching, training and mentoring, events, influencer-, audience-, and AI-generated content, podcasting and video, and long-form interpretative pieces. The long-form pieces are often streamed via various subscription services like Substack (which started in 2017). This has the advantage of making content more visible, discoverable, and fundable than through an email newsletter.
Previously, our online religion news reporting was able to beat MSM to many online modalities, which they noticed, and several reporters actually rode with us for several years to see what was going on. Need I say, they converted to sympathetic objectivity. Additionally, we have also held training sessions for groups of reporters.
We are glad for the continuing operations of the MSM survivors, which was partly our purpose, and the new start-ups. But much work remains to be done. The battle for sympathetic objectivity in reporting on religion is not over. Moreover, we are moving into new reporting modalities not yet utilized.
We have added some items to our strategy and goals: “Documentation,” “Discoveries and innovations,” “Communities for the democratic good,” and “Leadership for tumultuous age.” We were already practicing these goals but hadn’t really codified them into our thinking. This has led to not following up on some of the successes in these areas.
Our number one strategic goal is still the visiting and reporting on every religious site of every religion on every street and alleyway. More strategic thoughts on this next time!
Emily Bell et al on Post Industrial Journalism
