Podcast: It's just good business? The growing debate about America's news-silo culture

Yes, this is another post about my new essay at the Religion & Liberty journal published by the Acton Institute. The headline: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.”

Part of me wants to apologize for yet another GetReligion look at this topic. But I’m not going to do that, for at least three reasons.

(1) For me, it’s most important thing I’ve written about journalism since my 1983 essay for The Quill — “The religion beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets,” which helped spark a national debate about religion-news coverage, including a Los Angeles Times series by the late, great media-beat specialist David Shaw.

(2) It demonstrates (think “technology shapes content”) that Internet culture and commerce have either killed the American Model of the Press or are poised to do so. That’s hard for me to say, since I have spent my career defending old-school American journalism from enemies on the right and, now, the illiberal left.

(3) The Acton piece (there’s no way we could have planned this) came out just as several other important articles raised similar issues about journalism’s future and the role of niche/advocacy journalism in splintering American public discourse.

Such as? Click here for a recent GetReligion podcast-post that includes discussion of “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust,” by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr. Also, see this new Bret Stephens op-ed in the New York Times: “How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility.”

As a result, GetReligion readers will not be surprised that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast focused on these themes (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

The key: My essay is not another hot-take on media bias and religion-news coverage.

RIP American Model of the Press? It appears that online financial realities killed it ...

From Day 1 here at GetReligion, just over 19 years ago, our primary goal has been to defend religion-beat reporting rooted in what has long been called the American Model of the Press.

You know, that’s the old-liberalism brand of journalism built on accuracy, fairness, balance and respect for the views of citizens involved in debates about issues in culture, morality, religion and even politics.

Some people include the word “objectivity” in creeds about this kind of journalism, which tends to fuel philosophical discussions about whether it’s possible for the minds of journalists to remain “blank slates,” or words to that effect. In my teaching days, I attempted to define objectivity in terms of fair-minded professional standards for newsroom work.

This brings me to an essay that I recently wrote for the Religion & Liberty journal published by the Acton Institute. The headline: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.” I don’t want to cue waves of weeping violins, but writing this piece was painful and involved about a month of involuntary 3 a.m. brainstorms.

The bottom line: I didn’t want to write another essay about media-bias issues, because discussing “bias” implies the existence of shared, common professional standards for journalists. My goal was to describe the emerging digital-marketplace reality — news that preaches to niche choirs makes money. It produces faithful, paying subscribers, which is what matters now that news organizations cannot depend on mass-market advertising.

Are you reading the stunning four-part Columbia Journalism Review series by Jeff Gerth about elite newsrooms and Donald Trump? It’s crucial that “The press versus the president” was published by a journal at the heart of the old-liberal journalism establishment. Here is a crucial passage, right after Trump commits to his “fake news” approach to press relations:

In the days after Trump’s declaration, the Times surveyed its new digital subscribers, millions of whom flocked to the paper during his presidency, to better understand their motivations: the administration’s “vilification of the press,” one subscriber replied, in a typical response, according to “New Digital Subscribers Survey” data provided to me by a Times staffer.
Trump would often call the Times “failing,” including the day after the controversial story about Russia-Trump ties, but in fact the soaring digital-subscriber base throughout his presidency offset the steady fall in revenue from print subscribers and advertising.

What does this have to do with my Acton essay, which focuses on a timeline of events that begins long, long before Orange Man Bad?