January 31, 2013

The Fall of Journalism

By Theodore Dawes
In the past 30-plus years I've interviewed dozens of candidates for jobs in journalism.  Among the questions I always posed is this one: Why are newspapers published? To date, no journalism school graduate has known the answer, which is, of course, to make money for the publisher. Last year I participated in a get-together with journalism students from the local college.  I asked my question and received the same b.s. answers as always ("To... uh... provide the community with a voice?") When I told the students the answer, the instructor disagreed and repeated the same nonsense his students had already provided. Mine was a common sense observation, gently delivered.  As a friend of mine recently wrote, "If you want to see heads explode, try explaining to people that they are not the customer and the newspaper is not the product... advertisers are the customer and reader attention is the product." If you were to run that past your typical journalism school faculty, the...(Read Full Article)