Jay Rosen on Online Journalism: It is time to ask questions?

Today, I listened to an interesting talk on “journalism in the Web Age” by Jay Rosen. In his talk he focused on the “crisis of the press”. He first talked about the problems that the old press media is facing today and he summed it up very nicely in three words – “sustainability, puzzled, unsolved.” The real problem the old school journalism is facing today is of “sustainability”. They can’t sustain themselves if they keep on doing, what they were doing. He said that the press industry faces five crisis -

1. Crisis of Adaptation – the real failure of print media is in it’s inaibilityto adapt to the new system. If they had, they wouldn’t be in this state.

2. Crisis of Advertising – In the earlier system, 50% of the advertising money was wasted. The internet has solved this problem and advertising has become more efficient. 

3. Crisis of Authority – Newspapers had authority and they have let the people down.

4. Crisis in teaching, learning and training – The Journalism training needs to change as technology is changing very fast. New training models need to evolve.

5. Crisis of accountabililty – The internet is holding press accountable.

I found his talk very interesting and thought provoking. His insights on why old system of journalism is at it’s decline, provides a starting point to start thinking.

After the talk we had a very engaging discussion on how journalism schools can adpat to this changing environment and what needs to change. One very important point he made during the discussion was that right now, the way things are changing it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen and how things will shape up. As the industry is in a state of flux and the new system is evolving. At this time, the best thing would be to reflect and see what went wrong and to analyse what is it that is going to remain of the old system.

It is time to seek questions, answers will evolve!!!