My brother is an old-style print journalist. He works for a regional print newspaper that serves the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. His job hasn't changed much in the past twenty years. In fact, his job isn't very different from the way that journalism has worked for sixty years.
Chris and his editor decide on the article topics for the week. He goes to meetings. He talks to local officials. People call him to tell him local gossip. He goes to crash sites. He visits the growing conservative Jewish community to hear about their conflict with the old-time locals. He writes things up at the end of the day using the traditional journalism format of ledes and clean, sparse prose. Any opinions that he might have about a topic are hidden away.
I called him during the week to vent about the state of digital journalism. He didn't know anything about the discussion on the Internet about journalism, because he NEVER reads Twitter or blogs. He doesn't even have a Facebook account.
Digital journalism is another beast from the journalism that Chris does. Most of the job happens in front of a computer screen -- monitoring hit counts, reading the gossip on the Internet, figuring out the next hot topic, turning a new study into a short, graphic article, writing as much as possible in the hopes that one of the articles/posts will go viral, and nurturing the article on social media to nudge those hit counts upwards.
Ezra Klein thinks that expert bloggers have undermined traditional journalism, because the sources now have their own medium. They don't have to wait for that phone call from the journalist. They can go to their own blogs to get their research and opinions heard. Or they can get a free gig at a digital journal that still has the reputation from its print days.
I think that Klein has part of the story. I made that same point in a comment section on another blog last week. There's more going on than that.
In the meantime, it's good news that old-style journalism still exists. It's still happening at the local, regional newspapers, which are surprisingly thriving. There is a demand for this kind of news, at least on the local level. Why are national papers and journals not able to replicate this success?