Brilliant insight into what ails the journalism industry

Megan Garber sells her recent essay short by calling it a “modest entreaty.” It is, in fact, a brilliant, must-read call to action that says the lofty rhetoric about journalism as a sacred enterprise is hindering the preservation of journalism as a viable industry:

In our haste to elevate the theoretical, we sometimes forget the obvious: that good ideas are normatively so only insofar as they lead to good results, and that ideas more generally are useful only to the extent that they serve action. Theories are a means, not an end; a clever hypothesis that no one ever bothers to test might as well never bother to exist in the first place. Belief may create the actual fact, as William James had it; but when we fling about fanciful Monetizing Journalism proposals, as if we were characters in a bubbly Broadway musical—micropaymentsendowmentsandsubsidiesfromUncleSam, even though the sound of it won’t make the market give a damn—we serve little save our own egos. …

… The net effect of articles that rely on creative conjecture, and little else, to propose solutions for journalism’s woes is to enforce a kind of preemptive defeatism about the possibility of solving those problems. Our fanciful flings with speculation belie the true gravity of journalism’s current crisis. Each verging-on-glib proposal—stimulus bailouts for newspapers! wheeee!—serves, above all, as a subtle sanction to glibness itself. …

… It is no little irony that our thinking about journalism and its future is often compromised by our own esteem for it—by transcendental thinking about journalism itself. By the general presumption that journalistic organizations are endowed, as it were, with certain inalienable rights—enshrined socially, politically, legally—and that Journalism in the Service of a Free Society is not merely a commodity, but rather, in fact, Something More. …

… But it’s worth remembering that even transcendental thinking has roots in journalism’s terra firma—the professional culturation of the Progressive era, the pop-culutral mythologies of the post-Watergate era, the newspaper monopolization of the ’70s and ’80s, etc.—and thus is itself secular as much as sacred. And in a larger sense—in, specifically, the Venn merger of journalism’s editorial and business identities—an ethical mindset enables as it ennobles. It enforces the chasm between what we rationally know about The Role of News Organizations in a Democratic Society (that they are fallible human institutions) and what we often culturally, and therefore instinctually, understand about them (that they are, somehow, more than the sum of their secular parts). Such thinking discourages us from applying scientific principles to journalism, under the assumption that journalism is not, in the end, a thing of science. It seduces us, above all, into applying moral assessments to problems that are, in the end, amoral.

This is but a sampling. Please take the time to read one of the best-written, most instructive pieces on the current state of journalism published this year.