Journalism is the process of helping a community near its truth, as I defined it at a conference last year.
Though it’s common among media innovators to talk about newsrooms not being in competition with each other, the central reasons why aren’t as readily addressed. Legacy business models are running on fumes. Those leading them just might close enough to retirement that they don’t feel the need to adapt. The rest of us must.
Earlier this fall at a small gathering of newsrooms from across the country and then again last month at Klein News Innovation Camp, I gave presentations that again hit upon this theme. I took a new approach to the theme.
Journalism is a set of values, not an industry of competitors.
The business model that developed over a couple centuries was so successful that we ended up with a monoculture but that was no inevitability. We must understand that what journalism practitioners share is a belief in how the world should operate. We believe journalistic standards and its related approaches are effective at building a kind of community that has power. That’s a worldview; it’s a philosophy that could be brought into many different circumstances, organizations and campaigns.
My slides can be found here
