Opinion: The only difference between old and new media is efficiency

David Simon’s on a tear again about the news. Newspapers, specifically—he wants the Times and the Post to put up a pay wall.

It might be a good idea. I mean, I doubt it, but even though I’m counting my pennies these days I would probably throw five bucks into the pot to pay for the Times. They do good work, and deserve to be paid for it.

But like most arguments about why old media organizations are worth saving, Simon implies that if the Times and Post were to collapse that online-only outlets wouldn’t be able to pick up the slack—no beating feet to proverbial city council meetings—calling online outlets a “vague suggestion of a better [product].”

Journalism is a craft, and a rather elemental one at that. You cultivate contacts. You pick up the phone. You search records. It’s masonry, not sculpture. Go gather up another trowel of information and slap it on the pile; scrape off the bits that seem to ooze needlessly and move on to the next column. Incidentally art is made.

Sure, there are tricks and shortcuts and subtleties that take years to learn. (See the essential The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft to discover how varied and even opposed those methods may be among different reporters.) But our archives are filled with decades of perfectly serviceable, worthwhile journalism created by average newspapermen following the hand-me-down tenets of the craft.

The difference between old media and new, to me, is not whether citizens can practice journalism as well as full-time employees, but whether they have the time to do so. Most people have day jobs; Until every town gets a wealthy playboy Bat-blogger, there’s still a role for full-time journalists.

Newspapers had in the recent past been pretty profitable businesses, allowing the largest to support reporting staff of thousands. The Times currently has around 1,300 newsroom staff. (A staff that won five Pulitzer Prizes in 2009.) When Simon talks about the importance of the Times, those 1,300 people are who he’s talking about. No doubt they matter.

But the Times isn’t just a newspaper, it’s a sprawling business, owner of several papers, a radio station, and an investor in web companies like Federated Media and Automattic (the people who make the blogging platform WordPress). And that business is as a whole bleeding millions of dollars a year.

Thirteen hundred employees really isn’t all that many people when you think about it. And if the Times can’t figure out how to run their entire business profitably and ends up having to lay off its content creators—the core group of people who the rest of the world perceives as the New York Times—then it’s not difficult to imagine another company of 1,300 reporters rising up to take its place. The same goes for the Associated Press—their work may be essential to the health of a society, but that work can be done by other, more efficiently operated companies.

I suspect the media landscape five years hence won’t look as drastically different as the faltering media companies today say it will. There will be big media companies; there will be small media companies; there will be citizen journalists. We’re going through a familiar market shake-up. When the dust settles, the leanest businesses will still be standing, selling gossip, enthusiast and niche coverage, and traditional, essential reportage in whichever manner is best suited for their audience and the advertisers who want to get to them.

There is no such thing as old media—only old business models.

Image: Jer Thorp, who is doing some lovely visualization work with NYTIMES data and Processing.