Bob CollinsThe most influential man in American journalism today declared that the future of journalism is bright.
Speaking at an FTC conference on the state of journalism, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said news editors are more concerned about winning prizes for journalism rather than giving the people what they want. “I can’t tell you how many newspapers I see have a wall of journalism prizes and a declining circulation,” he said during the Federal Trade Commission-hosted panel, “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”
According to Business Insider, Murdoch said that newspapers have prospered because the communities that they serve trust them to hold governments accountable and to provide their readers with pertinent information.
You know, like this:
Most of these breast-beating panels on the future of journalism miss the point. It’s not a question of whether journalism will survive. It’s a question of whether good journalism will survive.
On many days — and with the war in Afghanistan about to be escalated, this is one of them — it becomes a question not of whether journalists are giving the people what they want. It’s whether the people are right in the journalism they want — for many, that’s the latest on Tiger Woods and the gate crashers at the White House — at the expense of journalism they need.
