One thing, for example, that I look forward to is the day when police departments put daily reports online. Currently, newspapers hire journalists who call the departments every hour or so and waste someone’s time finding out what crimes have been committed and what major accidents have happened. I think eventually they’ll realize that it’s easier to put this online and let the journalists recopy it.

This will, hopefully, free up journalists to do more analysis of data, investigative journalism, and other things that take more time and involve real research.

But the pessimist in me thinks it’s more likely that newspapers are going to become even more cut-and-paste/stenography than they currently are, encouraging even lazier journalism and accelerating their downfall with greatly reduced quality.

Leaving journalism strictly to free market forces (money, popularity, etc.) will mean more marketing-as-journalism, more fluff, more lazy reporting, more copyright infringement, more fake news and less of the kind of serious reporting that newspapers are known for.

I’m not necessarily arguing that investigative journalism (i.e. journalism that involves a lot of work) is the ticket to economic success for newspapers. I’m arguing that this is all newspapers have left to set themselves apart, and they’re shooting themselves in the foot by cutting it.

And if newspapers don’t do hard, serious, expensive journalism, who will?

So just like groceries are cutting down on “grocery baggers”, big medias are cutting on staff. They have to compete with a “free model” so how can they win in the long run? I’d like to know but I guess it involves burning a lot of money followed by a face plant.

The current model doesn’t (and cannot) work. If you take a look at the IT world, when good people get laid off, they become consultants. The “bad ones” move on to something else. They even take easier jobs just to stay afloat.

My advise (for what it’s worth..) is to be in a niche and be damn good in it. The old saying of “jack of all trades, master of none” always applies.

I work in the financial domain and some analysts pay big bucks (you’d be surprised how much they pay) for very specialized content. So there is money to be made as an independent journalist. Perhaps not by covering fender benders but by doing niche reporting. Leave fender benders to citizen journalists / crowdsourcing. It’s inevitably the future in my opinion (at least for local stuff), but hey, I could be wrong.

The main issue now is that independent journalists don’t have a place to go “on their own”. They have no where to go and starting a blog is not a sure way to become wealthy. It’s a nice marketing tool, but you need to sell your content, right?

Think about Radiohead. They dropped the top layer to go directly to users. Same will happen with news. There is no decent platform right now, but I bet you a drink that it’s coming soon! :)