There’s one more idea from “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” that I’m going to discuss before closing out what’s become Downie/Schudson week.

• Journalists can solve the problems with the newspaper industry.

And we believe that managers of news organizations, now awakened to the severe economic challenges they face, are best positioned to shape and test responses to them. pages 74-75

To be fair, I might be incorrect in my assumption that Downie and Schudson are referring to journalists here. It’s hard to say because the report’s authors never define “managers of news organizations.”

Still, most public proposals for the industry’s future have come from journalists and those with journalism backgrounds. This makes sense, as we’re among those most affected by the decline of the industry and we have the training to discuss that decline with a wider audience.

But we shouldn’t assume that we alone have the right answers or that we’re best equipped to save the industry. It breeds an arrogance that could cause us to miss a good idea coming from outside our field.

Instead, we need to do more to put our egos aside and seek out and listen to ideas coming from other fields, because – and this needs to be emphasized:

The problems with newspapers aren’t just about journalism.

They’re also about business and economics and markets and sociology and supply-and-demand and all sorts of other financial, political and social concepts. Some of the many reasons for the industry’s struggles include changes in the priorities of Americans from one generation to the next; the evolution of American culture caused by television and the Internet; and the fact that the structure of our industry may not allow for a quick enough response to those changes.

Journalists don’t have the expertise to address all of those issues. They tend to throw out ideas on the future of the product – journalism – without first determining if those ideas are desirable in the market, if they’re financially viable or if they’d have as much allure for a newspaper’s shareholders as they would for readers.

Interestingly, Downie and Schudson – who’s a sociologist – allude to the need for outside input when they pitch ideas for the industry’s future.

For example, newspapers should develop detailed information about their
digital audience to sell more targeted, and higher priced, advertising to accompany
specific digital content, while protecting individual readers’ privacy. They also
should experiment with digital commerce that does not conflict with their news
reporting, such as facilitating the purchase of books they review. page 75

Journalists wouldn’t be responsible for creating a database of online users; that would fall to a newspaper’s Internet, advertising and business departments. The business department also most likely would deal with additional online commerce.

Instituting changes such as those begins with bringing representatives from those departments – and experts from other fields – into the discussion about the industry’s future.

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