Thank you to Samara intern Grant Burns for writing the summary on the inspiring and fascinating Samara/Massey seminar by Ellen Weiss, VP News for National Public Radio. Edited videos of the talk will be available soon.
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Hearing news executives talk about the future of journalism is pretty standard these days. But hearing them talk about why the future’s bright for journalism is far less so.
Much has been written about the crisis in the news business.
Newspapers have cut their staffs. Some have closed their doors. Circulation is declining, and the web has destroyed advertising revenues. Unsurprisingly, pessimism reigns. The Pew Center’s Tom Rosenstiel shares an excellent overview of the state of the news media in his recent Samara/Massey lecture.
On Tuesday evening, Ellen Weiss, National Public Radio’s most senior news executive, delivered the final Samara/Massey seminar with a more optimistic message that stems from NPR’s relative stability through the ongoing crisis in journalism.
Speaking to an audience of some of Canada’s most respected journalists and news executives, Weiss said NPR is the only traditional media outlet in the United States that is growing. NPR has 28 million radio listeners, 13 million online readers and is a leader in podcasting.
However, Weiss tempered her hopefulness with a challenge. The threat to news outlets due to a lack of revenue is obvious. The more important threat is to a healthy democracy. Though many media outlets are struggling, Weiss told her audience that doesn’t absolve journalists of their duties.
Journalism’s enduring challenge is to find ways to get their stories to the public, said Weiss. Democracy depends on journalists. Without free inquiry, free speech becomes little more than public relations.
To that end, NPR will not be standing still, in spite of their relative health. NPR has been experimenting to avoid the losses suffered by the print media.
What has NPR been doing?
First, they are retraining their journalists. What was formerly a radio-only outlet now has a significant online presence. Weiss claimed NPR is committed to “owning audio,” rather than simply “radio.” To accomplish that, NPR has been training their staff to translate narratives from radio to podcast and from audio to text.
Second, NPR recognizes that their audiences are no longer passive recipients but are instead collaborators. Weiss said that the biggest challenge is changing from a producer-centric model to an audience-centric one. To do that, NPR became the first news organization to make all of its content (audio, text, images) publicly available through an API, or Application Programming Interface. “Now, if you’re a blogger, you can use our content for the public good,” said Weiss. By appealing to an online audience, NPR is hoping to attract a younger audience. Right now, the median age of NPR radio listeners is 55 but the median age of NPR.org users is 48.
Third, NPR understands content is king. Weiss told the audience that NPR is aiming to become one of the most important sources of investigative journalism. As news outlets have cut their budgets, it could be argued that investigative journalism has suffered the most. It’s time-consuming and expensive. But NPR has had recent successes. In September 2008, a day after government regulators took over investment firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, NPR launched Planet Money, a blog and podcast designed to explain the ongoing financial crisis to the average American. Within two weeks, Planet Money was the top-ranking podcast on iTunes. Since then, NPR created a new investigative team, NPR News Investigations, largely from within its own ranks (although Weiss admitted this did at the expense of two veteran CBC Radio reporters who NPR hired away). That team has already broken major stories, including a recent one on the size of the Gulf oil spill and the ongoing problem of sexual assault on US college campuses.
Their revenue model has helped them weather the storm. Their largest single source of revenue (40 percent) comes from membership fees, and those contributions rose slightly even during the recession. As Weiss noted, they have 40 years of experience in doing what the internet may force others to do: ask the public to pay for something they can get for free.
As Weiss showed, some of NPR experiments have shown promise and are reasons to be hopeful as journalism inexorably moves toward its uncertain future. However, journalists must continue to “come to the public square of the world with questions,” and continue to tell their stories.
Weiss quoted from Clay Shirky’s apocalyptic essay, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” telling her audience that what we’re seeing in journalism is “what real revolutions are like.” But rather than submit to the pessimism that what’s broken can’t be fixed, Weiss told her audience that, like NPR, journalism must keep trying.
“We will continue to fail until we get it right,” said Weiss.