Context

Ever since the Internet became a public platform, there have been pundits to tell us what it all means. If you were an early Internet adopter, you might remember people speculating that this would be a great educational and information-sharing tool, but it would never become a commercial medium. In fact some were adamant that this would remain non-commercial.

Then corporations woke up to the potential and everything was going to be on the Web. Many books and hundreds of magazine articles predicted the demise of brick-and-mortar (do we even use that phrase anymore?) retail. E-commerce had evolved to the point where you had a choice of online providers for exotic items such as kitty litter, delivered to your house, free! The ratio of weight to value to shipping cost didn’t seem to phase the venture capitalists or anyone else. Until the companies went bankrupt. So much for those pundits.

Just as an aside, does anyone remember a company that was just going to sell just BBQ equipment online? They got funded for about $75 million and were on the verge of going public. Went up in smoke instead.

I read the news today, oh boy

Today the big chatter is about newspapers, magazines and virtually any media that isn’t the Internet. It’s about free news versus paid, citizen journalists versus professionals, atoms versus bits.

Everyone acknowledges that the newspaper websites are not paying for themselves with advertising, and so a straight atoms-to-bits switch doesn’t seem plausible. Of course the insta-pundits are predicting the demise of any atom-based media – maybe not tomorrow, but soon. This time they may be right.

Citizen journalists? How about citizen doctors?

However, only a few of them seriously contemplate the quality of the new online, amateur-driven news. Will this really serve us as citizens in a democracy? Hmmmm.

Who will fund the expensive investigative work? Dunno.

Who will hold our governments and other institutions accountable, not with rants and opinions, but with well-reasoned arguments supported by research? Who knows, but how about that Lady Gaga, girl or boy, or a bit of both? That collective ADD sure comes in handy, doesn’t it?

Mitch Joel caught my eye in his column in the Montreal Gazette. He quotes Persephone Miel, who wrote a study for Harvard where she stated most citizen journalism deals with electoral politics, popular culture, technology, and little else. She worried that “more nuanced and weighty topics such as public policy” would be ignored.

At a conference Miel said, “The question is not the survival of the newspaper. The problem is who is going to produce the kinds of journalism that isn’t getting produced by online publications.”

What serves the public good?

I’ve heard this question before and it’s a worthy one. Unfortunately, there’s never been a serious, well-reasoned answer. Everyone seems to shrug and shuffle away or come up with an airy off-the-cuff notion.

Joel suggests, “The answer might be that news which serves the public good needs to be funded much in the same way education, healthcare, libraries, the police, etc., is handled, and that news doesn’t, necessarily, have to be a media format that has both revenue and advertising dollars tied to it. It can simply be something that is supported by the public for the public good.”

Stop for a moment and re-read that. So, is Joel suggesting that government will fund the news? Really? Ask yourself about the depth of investigative journalism that you could expect from any government. Who will decide what news “serves the public good”?

WWBMD?

For models, you could look to present day China where they quite freely admit to censoring anything that doesn’t please them (Hello Google?). Russia isn’t much different. Let’s bring it closer to home, and implement the made-in-Canada moral test. Simply ask yourself, “What would Brian Mulroney do?”

If it’s true that a flourishing democracy depends on an independent media, where are we headed? Government media? George Orwell time? Straight to hell in a hand basket?

It’s not a trivial issue. It’s hardly the same order of magnitude as to where you buy your kitty litter or BBQ accessories. And yet, few people are asking the hard questions, and the ones who are, don’t have good answers. We’re living in interesting times. That much we do know.