This week’s edition of my Columbia Journalism Review column takes a historical look at the issue of accuracy. I suggest that today’s changing media landscape is just the latest in a series of major shifts to hit the profession. Excerpt below. Click on the headline to read the full column.
The News Business Is Changing. Again.
Walter Isaacson began his recent Time essay about the news business by declaring that “the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions.” He suggested that a micropayment system could help encourage people to pay for online news. For all of its faults, Isaacson’s argument did micropayments proud by inspiring many people to give their own two cents on the matter.
Setting aside the micropayments issue, we’re left with Isaacson’s declaration about the news business. Whether or not you share Isaacson’s view that journalism is in a state of crisis, these are undeniably interesting times for the profession. A wave of change is crashing over journalism and the business built around it. By my count, it’s the fourth such wave, at least in terms of accuracy and quality.
The first wave occured in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe during the birth of the newspaper. Prior to that time, printed news came in the form of “newsbooks.” These were one-off publications containing a mix of commentary and news that was gathered by word of mouth, from ship captains, or simply by copying from other newsbooks. Their ephemeral nature—a newsbook might appear one day never to be seen again—meant that most publishers didn’t have to worry about someone complaining about an inaccuracy in a previous issue. That changed when publishers started adhering to a set production frequency. The newsbook became the newspaper …
