Josh Quittnor has a very good article posted on CNN about the iPad and the future of reading:

“The more I thought about it, the more I decided there was good news for the evolution of the publishing industry here—and better news. The good news is that 12-year-olds, just like their parents and their parents before them going all the way back to the publication of the first magazine in 1731 (the year Charles Darwin’s grandfather was born), still enjoy the medium. But they want it delivered in an exponentially more useful way.

“Raised to expect instant, sortable, searchable, savable, portable access to all the information in the world, these digital natives—tomorrow’s magazine subscribers, God and Steve Jobs willing—could well become the generation that saves the publishing industry.”

In the article, Quittnor addresses five key questions about the future of reading and the advent of tablet computers, including whether people will be willing to pay for online content, advertising and whether reading is dead. (No, it’s not. “Isn’t the idea of a magazine irrelevant in the atomized, buy-the-single-not-the-album world? If that were so, we’d expect to see fewer people reading magazines. But according to the Magazine Publishers Association, 174.5 million people paid to subscribe to magazines in 1970; that number has steadily and consistently risen over the years, to 324.8 million as of 2008.") I recommend you check it out.

"Often recounted, like the tales of Agincourt, with advantages, they present the reporter as a roguish knight-errant, a dashing adventurer with a streak of rat-like cunning. The stuff of countless Fleet Street memoirs, they are also the essence of the Watergate story and of newsroom dramas such as “The Front Page”. Today, however, such derring-do is rare, not just because telephones and live television make it unnecessary to rely on steamships and trains, but because the whole idea of news as a commodity owned and purveyed by journalists is slipping into history.”

So writes Brian Cathcart in More Intelligent Life, Winter 2009 issue. “If news, as a commodity purveyed by reporters, is coming to an end, when and how did it start?”

I enjoyed this essay and I thought I would pass it along here on my blog. It’s written by one of my favorite reviewers, Michael Dirda, a reviewer for the Washington Post and other sites. Here he writes about the nature of his reading habits (voracious to say the least) and the changing nature of today’s literary culture. I especially liked this paragraph, where he writes about a moment he felt he was at the crossroads, seeing his profession evolve while he had to make a decision about his future.

“Of course, I didn’t count on the now ongoing crises in print journalism. Nor that Book World itself would cease to be a separate section in 2009 (my pieces now appear in the Style pages on Thursdays). Neither did I pay enough attention to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s comment about being a professional writer: “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” Still, a long career in newspapers, combined with a workingclass background, does teach resilience. Any journalist I’ve ever known figures that he can cover just about anything. It’s part of the cocky charm of the field.”

For many year’s Medill’s School of Journalism at Northwestern University has conducted a wonderful investigative journalism program for undergraduates. As part of the program, undergrads researched criminal cases where convictions may have sent innocent people to death row. Now the program is (wrongly) under fire. From the New York Times:

“Since 1992, Prof. David Protess at the Medill school at Northwestern University has worked with undergraduate journalism students to investigate cases in which prosecutors appear to have taken aim at the wrong people. That might be about to happen again, only this time the students themselves would be the targets.” The students’ work has always been considered journalism, and has received its due protection under the law. Yet, now with journalism weakened both economically and politically, the professions enemies are emboldened to take it on.

From the Times: “And because of that investigative work — and perhaps work on other cases, which has led to the exoneration of 11 people, 5 of whom had been sentenced to death — the project and its students find themselves in the gun sights of Cook County prosecutors ... The prosecutors are seeking access to investigative materials, e-mail messages, course outlines, syllabuses, training materials and, yes, even grades, to explore the “bias, motive and interest” behind the students’ work.”

I encourage you to read the entire story. This is what I most fear as journalism undergoes its transition from print to digital, from professional to crowd-sourcing.

"The hard truth about the future of journalism is that nobody knows for sure what will happen; the current system is so brittle, and the alternatives are so speculative, that there’s no hope for a simple and orderly transition from State A to State B.” So says Clay Shirky in an interesting analysis of the future of journalism published at CATO Unbound. The economic model for journalism is changing to be sure, yet nobody is sure where it will lead. But Shirky makes some good points in his essay that can help as we begin to plan for the future.

“We can expect changes in journalism to be linked to changes in subsidy. There are many shifts coming, but three big ones are an increase in direct participation; an increase in the leverage of the professionals working alongside the amateurs; and a second great age of patronage,” writes Shirky. He examines each point in a bit more detail, so I encourage you to read the entire essay.

Neither the simple preservation of the old system of journalism, nor a full replacement of the current journalistic model will happen, writes Shirky. Instead the future is open for something entirely new and different. “The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.”

Joel Achenbach has a good piece in the Washington Post that tackles the question of text in a modern age head on: Is there less time today for the finely crafted narrative? The Web offers no way to read a narrative, argues Achebach. But does that mean that long-form journalism or fiction is dead? No.

“There’s endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google’s citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn’t merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this,” writes Achenbach.

“They know that the story is the original killer app.”

A colleague forwarded along this link to me the other day. It’s an essay about the state of journalism today--not so much about the economic conditions they face (according to this article in the latest Atlantic, they’ve never been very good) but rather on where journalism’s sense of mission and role in today’s multimedia world should be. It’s time to take a stand.

The Minn Post essay summarizes this more detailed analysis of the profession, written by Brent Cunningham in the latest issue of The Columbian Journalsim Review. It’s worth the read. Reporters have their place in society. Their job is more important than ever. Having been a daily newspaper reporter before, I speak from experience in that some of the assumptions highlighted in the Atlantic article can no longer go unexamined.

I recently cam across this interview with the great creative nonfiction writer Gay Talese. He talks about his way of writing, and his typical “day at the office,” which is more typical than you would think. He gets dressed as if he is going to the office, including the tie--even though the office is in the basement.

TALESE
Yes. I dress as if I’m going to an office in midtown or on Wall Street or at a law firm, even though what I am really doing is going downstairs to my bunker. In the bunker there’s a little refrigerator, and I have orange juice and muffins and coffee. Then I change my clothes.

INTERVIEWER
Again?

TALESE
That’s right. I have an ascot and sweaters. I have a scarf. 

An interesting piece from the Economist’s More Intelligent Life: We Are All Writers Now. Twitter, Facebook, blogs like this one--they are all assumed to be “cheapening the language” according to this recently published article. Is it true?

From the story: “The chattering classes have become silent, tapping their views on increasingly smaller devices. And tapping they are: the screeds are everywhere, decrying the decline of smart writing, intelligent thought and proper grammar. Critics bemoan blogging as the province of the amateurism. Journalists rue the loose ethics and shoddy fact-checking of citizen journalists. Many save their most profound scorn for the newest forms of social media. Facebook and Twitter are heaped with derision for being insipid, time-sucking, sad testaments to our literary degradation. This view is often summed up with a disdainful question: “Do we really care about what you ate for lunch?””

What does the future hold?

John McIntyre, copy editor for the Baltimore Sun and former president of the American Copy Editors Society, has created his top 25 rules of editing. These are great. I can certainly relate to number one on his list, McIntyre’s Ratio: The project will require three times the planned time to achieve one-third of the desired result.

(Another good one: 12. A thesaurus in a reporter’s hand is like a pistol in a toddler’s.)