Journalism needs innovation to survive

Image (c) initially-tag www.deviantart.com

“Injo” is so hot right now. No, it’s not a new flavour of Shoreditch tw*t or the name of Brangelina’s next baby, but the portmanteau of “innovation” and “journalism”. And it’s going to save the industry.

Looking on the bright side of the current clime, the recession has done for the media what needed doing a long time ago. It’s revealed the costly parts of the system and forced organisations to refine and refocus on the way news is produced.

In my mind, the industry is now locked in a creative struggle over its classification. Will it become an example of “modernist” (make it new) or is it moving more towards “postmodernist” (recycle it)? Happily, either outcome of this battle results in injo.

Everyone’s talking about it. Take goateed and gleeful Guido Fawkes for example. He’s come up with a genius solution to the problem of The Independent’s falling sales:

A back of an envelope calculation suggests that the Indy could abandon the printed edition to go digital only and, for some £20 million, give everyone of its 215,000 average daily readers an Amazon Kindle or iPhone type device.  Users would be given the device free with access to the Indy site hardwired in.  Users would only be charged for using the device to surf other sites.

“Crazy?” he asks? Not at all. They laughed at Steve Jobs Galileo, remember? Innovation within a hundred-year old industry doesn’t seem silly now we’ve run out of ideas. Even the people who really matter are becoming less frightened to say it.

Speaking at the annual New Media lecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Kenneth Lerer, the co-founder of The Huffington Post, spoke the problems facing traditional newspapers. He lay the blame squarely at the door of companies who were “able to grow without innovation.”

One of his suggestions which strikes me as particularly interesting is the packaging of news for a system of “micro payments”. Taking the principle of iTunes (where the consumer buys a single song for a small 79p) users would be able to access a pay-as-you-go form of news.

Of course, Lehrer speaks about innovation from a cosy perspective. The Huffington Post is a solely online operation. And a very successful one too.

But indeed, why wouldn’t you want a slice of the pie? Look at it another way – do you really want to continue eating from a crumbling table? Warren Buffett was quoted on CNBC this week talking about just this:

If Mr Guttenberg had come up with the internet instead of movable type back in the late 15th century and for 400 years we had used the internet for news and all types of entertainment and all kinds of everything else and I came along one day and said “I have got this wonderful idea we are going to chop down some trees up in canada and ship them to a paper mill which will cost us a fortune to run through and deliver newsprint and then we’ll ship that down to some newspaper and we’ll have a whole bunch of people staying up all night writing up things and then we’ll send a bunch of kids out the next day all over town delivering this thing and we are going to really wipe out the internet with this” it ain’t going to happen.

And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, the related paraphernalia of innovation can brighten our days here in the UK as we wait for the media to implement it properly. Call it schadenfreude, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading “Columbia J-School’s Existential Crisis,” in New York Magazine:

The media bloodbath hasn’t made for happy days at Columbia Journalism School. When the Times recently announced that its new, hyperlocal blog experiment “The Local” would be assisted by journalism students not from Columbia but from the City University of New York, you could practically hear the collective gasp echoing in the hallowed halls uptown. CUNY? Since when does CUNY trump Columbia? Well, since digital journalism became the single ray of hope on an otherwise dark media horizon, and Columbia’s vaunted ability to train students as print reporters began to appear obsolete.

See? All of those fabulously qualified US journalists don’t have it so easy after all. More constructively, it shows how “skilling up” in the field of injo could really make the difference between those who get the jobs and those who become PR.

Innovation is consistently illustrated by a lit lightbulb. It therefore makes sense to see it as the light which can guide us towards a brighter future of media. Remember Lerer’s message to those in the print world contemplating change:

“Stop arguing and just do it.”