Journalism’s Old Paradigm: Resistance and Denial
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“No one has been ‘caught up in this great upheaval’ about the fall of print business model. This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move.” —Clay Shirky
Technological innovations have been changing the game for over a decade. The current monumental shift is nothing new. However, there is a difference between knowing that significant change is coming and recognizing how best to react, which is a process that can take many years.
First of all, it is difficult to anticipate the full consequences of a broken system until after it breaks. Before the levees broke in New Orleans, it was obvious to many people that a flood was inevitable. It was not as clear, until the city flooded, what the many complex effects would be.
Second, the leaders of independent media organizations still have very rational apprehensions about changing their practices and are uncertain about how significantly they would need to change. For example, in response to utilizing “crowdsourcing” in reporting, which is typically a broad or targeted “open call,” in contrast to the more integrated cooperative activity of the “open source” movement, one member of The Media Consortium (TMC) wrote: “I’m not sure I like this idea because it takes away from individual ownership (both outlet and writer) for a story. But it might be the way things are going.” (For more information about crowdsourcing, dowload Vol. 2.)
Business historian Richard Tedlow has studied the role of denial in undermining leaders’ ability to steer their companies through industry shifts. He pointed to the U.S. automobile industry as a good example. The music industry is another classic illustration. Tedlow explained that denial involves many issues, “From ignoring external forces such as technological innovation and demographic change to overestimating a company’s own capabilities and resources.”
One of the biggest barriers to changing an organization or field is leaders’ inability to shed the paradigm from which it arose, which is a deeply held set of shared beliefs and practices about how the world works. Donella Meadows, a pioneering environmental scientist and respected systems thinker, ranked the twelve most effective “leverage points” to change any system. Her second most powerful lever was changing “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system— its goals, structure, rules, parameters—arises.” Interestingly, Meadows noted that the greater the leverage point, the more the current system will resist changing it.Therefore, those who face a completely new paradigm may also face the strongest denial.
The history of failure in the railroad industry illustrates the paradigm-shifting lever’s significance for journalism. James Surowiecki described the parallel in his New Yorker article “News You Can Lose.” If railroad owners had focused on customers instead of products, they may have recognized that they were in the transportation business, not the railroad business that was quickly losing customers to automobiles and airplanes. Surowiecki wrote, “By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.”
Perhaps we are facing a paradigm shift that runs even deeper than Surowiecki suggested. If journalism organizations view themselves as a community-building or conversation business, not just the information business, they might rise to higher ground with their customers instead of drowning with an old paradigm they believe “should” still work.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
[...] “big thaw” of media’s old paradigm is drowning many traditional journalism outlets. If everyone—in the public, private and [...]