I like to follow the words and writings of Jeff Jarvis, and not because I buy everything that he writes, but because I want to buy it.
His main thesis is that news organizations (he spends a lot of time writing about local TV news) needs to stop thinking about news as a product and think of it instead as a service to our audience.
This rings true to me, so I continually wait for him to explain what he thinks this means in terms of now newsrooms should actually be structured and run…and how it would better work to pay for news.
In a recent writing, Jarvis delivers a line that summarizes his ideas nicely:
Only when we reconceive of journalism as a service rather than as a factory that churns out a commodity we call content, only when we measure our value not by attention to what we make but instead by the positive impact we have in lives and communities, and only when we create business models that reward quality and value will we build that quality and value.
See what I mean? This is a great idea, but where’s the business model?
Still, as we think of the long term survival of digital news, I think Jarvis is promoting the correct paradigm.
Can you envision a future where broadcast journalism is funded by a model that rewards quality and value delivered to users, instead of pageviews?
Source: https://kylegeissler.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/rethinking-the-news-product/
