Clay Shirky is fast becoming one of the top thinkers on the future of journalism and if you listen to a talk he gave at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, you will understand why. The Nieman Journalism Lab has an mp3 (here) and the transcript (here).

Some of the major points he makes if any of you want to discuss:

The marriage of advertising and accountability journalism was an accident – “There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”

Advertisers were overcharged and undeserved– “Not only did they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn’t even get to say: ‘And don’t report on my industry, please.’”

Consumers want to aggregate their own daily media lineup – “he New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”

The immediate future is not good -“Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top.”

Newspapers will not survive – “So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”

The solution or at least his thoughts on what the future holds for journalism is that the bulk of what newspapers do in regards to the public good will be taken up by a multitude of smaller entities that are crowdsourced, commercially funded or non-profits. Basically all media will be broken up into many vertical channels with all kinds of different business models. The idea that an advertiser has no influence over a media company that reports on their industry is total BS so much of the accountability journalism will shift to crowdsourced and non-profit business models. Commercial works as long as the advertiser is in a different industry than the media company is reporting on and so it works really well in the smaller vertical channels. Overall–I’ve said this many times before–content providers are not in trouble it’s the content packagers who are going down.

Photographer Jim M. Goldstein is looking to compile data on how photographers are currently using and receiving benefit from social media web sites such as Twitter, Facebook and others. Won’t you help him out by filling out his survey:
2009 Photographer Social Media Survey

Data from this survey will be shared by Jim M. Goldstein (www.JMG-Galleries.com) October 22 at PDN PhotoPlus Expo in NYC as part of the “Twitter Revolution: Changing the Photographic World, 140 Characters at a Time” (http://bit.ly/3FHUl) discussion panel with Seshu Badrinath, Jack Hollingsworth, and Rosh Sillars. The data from this survey will also be made available later to all who are interested.

I discovered this guide book for journalists–compiled from a series of blog posts by Mindy McAdams, Professor of Journalism at the University of Florida–that teaches reporters how to become more multimedia proficient (download here or visit the download page). I’m sure the section on “How to Shoot Decent Photos” will draw plenty of snickering but there’s good stuff for photographers on audio, video and blogging. Certainly this is a look into the future of journalism as many reporters in small to medium markets will find themselves writing, shooting stills, shooting video, recording audio and then putting it all together on the computer back home and this is what’s being taught in journalism school apparently.

A must read series of posts on Revolutions in the media economy by David Campbell (here) tackles photojournalism today:

We can’t approach this issue via some misplaced nostalgia for a golden age that if it did actually exist certainly no longer survives. Photographic stories or documentary have always been difficult to fund directly. If there was a time when the majority of photojournalists simply waited for well-paid commissions to produce important work, that time is no more. We have to doubt though whether the past was like that, because in reality few if any photographers have been able to sustain a career entirely through editorial projects they chose to do. Even Sebastião Salgado had to do corporate and advertising work to cross-subsidise work on the social issues he wanted to explore, and Simon Norfolk sells his prints to a wealthy clientèle through a fine art gallery in order to support his visual critique of the US military.

[..] If some of the great photojournalists had adhered to [journalism dies the moment one enters into a partnership with the subject] we would have been deprived of great pictures – think, for example of how a Larry Burrows needed the US military to get around Vietnam, or a Tom Stoddart required assistance from MSF to travel in Sudan. Of course partnerships vary and anyone concerned about integrity will have to work hard to maintain independence, but that applies in all situations. Aside from the fact the old editorial paymaster model is all but gone, the idea that taking money from corporate media funded by advertising, so that one can create content which will attract more viewers for that advertising, is free from all moral issues is…well, rather daft.

More (here).

I have long felt that the second people start making serious money online the competition will get fierce and we’re back to where we were before. My only fear is that some of these codgers who run the media companies will not get punished enough to either rethink their relationship with content providers or lose their shorts to someone who understands the value of high quality content.

Most Internet companies are alive only because they are propped up by cheap venture capital financing that is in the process of drying up. On a straight up basis, a traditional media company with a strong brand and digital product should be able to out-compete all but the best Internet-only companies. In the past, traditional media companies were weak online out of fear of cannibalizing the offline revenue and cash flow that sustained their valuations and debt loads. They will soon have a great deal less to lose, likely under fresh ownership and management. It’s time for traditional media to rise up and exact its revenge.

via Forbes.com.

One important thing to point out as well and this is where I disagree with the author on “re-booting” of media, is that owning media companies may not be as profitable as it once was. That doesn’t have to mean the contributors and employees get paid less either. It’s just that the owners need to love the product more than the greenbacks it delivers. That’s more of a re-booting of corporations which it feels like we may be in the midst of.