Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America’s Appetite for News. Rachel Davis Mersey. New York, NY: Praeger, 2010. 167 pp.
There is a considerable and growing body of literature about the future of journalism. Most of it paints a bleak picture, for a variety of reasons. Audiences appear to be shrinking for both print and broadcast news. Resources are being reduced—nationally, daily newspaper newsrooms have been cut by nearly 25% during the past ten years. Many mainstream news organizations are losing money on their legacy operations, and they have yet to figure out or embrace alternative business models that could lead to profitability online. The problem is the result of two major simultaneous changes in the business environment of news organizations—emergence of digital technologies and the increased diversity of communities.
Rachel Davis Mersey’s new book, which asks, Can Journalism Be Saved? is a valuable and important addition to this conversation. In very clear and compelling prose, the assistant journalism professor at Northwestern provides a review of existing scholarship and available data in a way that makes clear that, in large part, the issue here is a conceptual one—there is a need for news organizations to think differently about what it is that citizens want and need from them in today’s world. She then lays out the case for a new approach to conceptualizing journalism, one based on the construct of identity, which serves as an intermediating variable between individuals and news use, and follows the logic that when journalists understand their audience and how members of that audience connect to their communities, they can engage them with important and relevant news.
In doing so, Mersey addresses three important deficiencies in the existing literature in a way that will help guide future research on this topic. The first, and most important, of these deficiencies involves what kind of “journalism” a democratic society needs today. The conventional view assumes that the public is engaged and that the job of the press is to provide citizens the necessary common body of information that can provide the basis for a rational public discussion of issues of common concern. Those who advocate this view work from what is called the “social responsibility” model first enunciated by the Hutchins Commission shortly after WWII. It also assumes that the audience can be treated as a single mass, and that it is entirely the job of the journalist to determine what is necessary, or “relevant,” for this audience.
Working from a more pluralistic view of democracy, Mersey effectively critiques this social responsibility model and offers an alternative, which she labels the “identity” model. Getting citizens “relevant” information is also a key news value in this alternative approach, but what is “relevant” has a very different meaning—the individual, and his or her “identity,” play a central role. As Mersey makes clear, the problem with the social responsibility model is its implicit assumption that residence per se is what makes someone a member of a given community and determines what is relevant. She argues that news organizations must know how and why people are attached (or not attached) to their geographic communities to understand how best to communicate with them. Simply recognizing audiences as residents is not enough.
In developing her alternative model, Mersey is careful to draw a distinction between her “identity” concept and the so-called “market” model of simply giving people what they want. Years of journalistic accepted wisdom and scholarship claim it is wrong, even dangerous, to give people “what they want to know”; journalism should give them only “what they need to know.” Mersey’s identity model is not about giving people what they want, but about “creating news products that connect individuals to topics that matter broadly in a way that matters to them personally.”
A second deficiency of the social responsibility framework is that it conceptualizes the work of journalists, or journalistic organizations, as a single, integrated activity that involves three steps: gathering, editing, distributing. In fact, what the Internet has done is to break these three steps apart, so that the citizen/consumer can play a different role in each, and in so doing help determine the “relevance” of a given story for themselves as well as others.
This is Mersey’s primary concern, but she doesn’t stop there. She goes on to address a third deficiency of the conventional model: the relationship between journalism per se and the business of journalism. Typically, these two are treated as distinct topics, in part reflecting an adherence of many authors to the social responsibility model. That is not only a “mass” model, but it also assumes implicitly that the practice of journalism is somehow distinct from the business of journalistic organizations. Journalists talk about the “wall” separating the newsroom and advertising, and publishers talk about “the need to make money so that we can continue to do quality journalism” (as though the journalism is simply a byproduct of the business). Mersey, herself a former Arizona Republic reporter, makes it clear that to reconceptualize the practice of journalism, news organizations also need to reconceptualize their business model, and to do so in a way that makes the individual citizen more central to it, thus revitalizing America’s appetite for news.
This is a book that is aimed at both practitioners and scholars seeking to help those practitioners respond effectively to this new environment. And it is a book that both will find extremely valuable.
DAN SULLIVAN
University of Minnesota