Jeff Jarvis

Author, Journalist, Blogger and Associate Professor, City University of New York

Resistance is Futile

by Maureen Tuthill

Journalist Jeff Jarvis finds himself entrenched in a field that is incredibly resistant to change. In its refusal to reinvent itself, the legacy newsroom (á la Woodward and Bernstein) is dying off, he says.

 
“The world changed in front of our eyes and we didn’t do a damned thing about it,” says Jarvis, who blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. “The industry was protecting what they thought was a good thing. They had monopolies. They believed their own press releases.”
 
There are certain “eternal verities” in the newspaper business, Jarvis says: “fairness, accuracy, timeliness, completeness—as best as you can define that in a process world—ethics.”   A good reporter will always have a sense of what’s newsworthy or know how to write a strong lead. But he finds that journalists today must also be collaborators, curators and educators.
 
As collaborators, reporters need to resist the tendency to work alone, to break a story and get the byline, especially when a well-reported story requires different forms of media to tell it well. The best journalists are also curators of the immense amount of information available on the Internet. Sometimes curating means watching blogs and “adding journalism” to them by clarifying or substantiating facts. 
 
The traditional reflex of the reporter, according to Jarvis, is to “get” the story and pitch it to the editor. But the best reporters today are diving into their communities and helping people to report on themselves. “If you look at journalism as a process more than a product, it’s a wonderful way to bring together knowledge,” Jarvis says. “And if we’re not part of the conversation, we won’t be distributed. The myth in the past was that people had to come to us. But witnesses are going to be able to see and share what they know as it happens.” 
 
If the collaborating and curating are done well, the new reporters are also educators. They provide a service to the public in a way that differs from the Walter Cronkite era of news authority. There is no longer one, trusted source to turn to for news. Or as Jarvis points out, “The world doesn’t need us anymore to tell us that Michael Jackson died.”
 
The rising journalists of the new generation are the ones who will make the difference. “In my day, youth was something you got over,” says Jarvis. “Now, it’s an asset.” Students embrace the new media in all its forms. They have a different concept of what news is and how to distribute it.
 
Despite the obvious freshness that the Internet can bring to journalism, Jarvis says the maelstrom of information that reporters sift through on a daily basis is daunting. A dose of humility goes a long way towards maintaining journalistic credibility under these conditions, he says: “We have to be just as good in this instantaneous world of journalism at saying what we don’t know as what we know. The ethic of the link says, don’t take my word for it—here’s the provenance of this. The ethic of correction is about how we correct. We are told not to erase our mistakes, but to cross them out and show that they were there.”
 
Jarvis’s new book, What Would Google Do (HarperCollins 2009), examines issues of change in the business world. He says it is not a book about one company as much as it is about people who “look for the unusual answer, the counterintuitive answer.” Google sells performance, he says. It is not stuck in the industrial age mentality that believes in producing a single product that will serve everyone equally well and will be sold by clever advertising.
 
“I’m not sure they even know why they see the world the way they do” Jarvis says of Google, “they just do.”
 
As he has found in the field of journalism, Jarvis suggests that success in the current business atmosphere means thriving in “an ecosystem of many players operating under different motives, means, and business models.” Mostly importantly, businesses that make it will admit that the world has changed and will rush toward that change.
 
“The title of the book I’m not going to write is Resistance is Futile,” he quips. “The change is coming—you just have to find the opportunity in it.”
 
www.buzzmachine.com