ABC World News Tonight anchor Charles Gibson entertained several hundred college journalists and their advisors in New York yesterday. He was witty, warm and engaging (see poor iPhone photo).
Unfortunately, he was also dangerously out of touch. The sky is falling and it’s your fault, he told the audience. But you can still make up for it if you buy printed newspapers while pursuing a career in journalism. (After all, “there’s no better career,” he said.)
Gibson began with a somber rehash of newspapers cutting jobs and going out of business. “The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is gone — gone,” he said with dramatic effect.
After blaming young people for getting their news online for free, he went on to blame Google (and his “good friend Eric Schmidt”) and even threw citizen journalists under the bus at one point.
Fortunately, during the Q&A, a couple of students resisted the star-struck approach of other questioners and asked him to account for such statements. One even asked Gibson to respond to Clay Shirky’s suggestion that we don’t need newspapers, we just need journalism. Gibson replied that Shirky is “full of crap” and that we are a “long way away” from any web site being able to provide the complete package of news and information in the form of a financially sustainable business like newspapers of the past 30 years.
Gibson is looking for an exact replica of the New York Times online that generates the same revenue as the print product did 15 years ago. He wants the complete package on one web site, apparently only able to recognize greatness by largesse. What if that same quality journalism found on different sections of the Times web site today were actually separate web sites that were each profitable in their own right? How is that less important, effective or trustworthy than one organization that offers all of them?
I see a future where foreign reporting, local news, political coverage, business news, sports, arts coverage and more will thrive on separate sites, possibly under separate ownership. And this won’t be a problem for the user since aggregation makes it easy to get this as one package.
You have heard of RSS, haven’t you Charlie?
“The problem is we have to figure out a new way to report that will be remunerative to the point that it will support local journalism,” Gibson replied. “I’m afraid newspapers let the genie out of bottle when they put things on web for free.”
(He went on to say that Time magazine’s piece on micropayments “seems to be the most promising idea.”)
Disruption is not pretty. I have several friends who lost their newspaper jobs this week. But standing in front of the next generation of journalists without delivering at least a glimmer of hope for the future is simply irresponsible for someone of such stature.
Gibson had an opportunity to paint a picture of possibility, like Shirky, Johnson, Jarvis, Yelvington and Anderson recently did. Instead, he basically said “it sucks” and “it’s your fault.”
The students in the audience, who will cherish their snapshots of the famous newsman and were hanging on his every word, needed hope and possibility, not blame and regret.
There is no time to look back, only forward.
Mark Briggs 
Posted in 
HA! Gibson is a tool. Did he look down over his glasses at the kids like grandpa gibson in his palin interview?
The real issue is the epic failure of leadership, Charlie Gibson included. These aren’t the people that should be leading panels or giving advice.
It’s hard to believe that someone like Charles Gibson would even be saying such an asinine statement: blaming young journalists for the problems the news business is facing right now. The problems newspapers in particular face go far beyond getting the news for free.
Mark,
Thanks for being a voice of hope during the radical transition from print to online. Your post is right on the nose. People need to realize that journalism is not dying, but it is changing format (and a lot more). But buying papers is not the answer.
Julia
Funny, I remember 15-20 years ago hearing about moochers who were just taking the work the newspapers for free while stealing their audience.
Lets see, who was it they were talking about again? Oh yeah, TV news.
Epic fail. Can’t be bothered to grow with the times, so sit back and bitch about it.
‘Gibson replied that Shirky is “full of crap” and that we are a “long way away” from any web site being able to provide the complete package of news and information in the form of a financially sustainable business like newspapers of the past 30 years.’
Which, of course, conveniently glazes over the fact TODAY’S NEWSPAPERS are a long way from being able to provide the complete package of news and information in the form of a financially sustainable business like newspapers of the past 30 years.
Nice one, Charlie.
Poor Charlie,, he & many @ ABC News have to ‘sweeten’ their delivery and turn journalism into a popularity contest laden with cuteness and assumed familiarity.
He just threw out a boatload of his ‘authority’ with the ‘Shirky comment’, then again does he really have his ‘finger on the pulse’ including any real ‘authority’ to begin with?
The Old Guard’s still stuck in a now obsolete paradigm. Note that he’s offered few substantial reasons why the /readership/ should prefer paper news to online news.
Weird that he’d blame students, but do you think that he meant that the journalism in newspapers is valuable (ie worth paying for)? This whole post relies on a lot of assumed truths to get to outrage.
does anyone know if there’s video of this??
It didn’t appear to be recorded by the folks who organized the conference (at least I didn’t see anyone with a tripod set up). But there were many cameras in the audience and I suspect some of them were shooting video. A quick YouTube search didn’t turn up anything, however.
Gibson has no idea of the financial disaster that journalism is in. Buying newspapers is like using scotch tape to repair a leaking roof. It’s ADVERTISING that’s sinking the ship, both in print and online.
Newspapers relied on classified ads for the bulk of their operating revenue. When Craig’s List came along, out the door went all that money. Display ads only bring in so much. Online ads are the least valuable of all.
So, who’s going to pay the reporters? And all those bright young kids sitting out there?
Gibson has a lot of nerve castigating students who probably wasted four years of their lives getting a degree that will become meaningless. I was a reporter for 25 years and I see what journalism has become it ain’t pretty.
@bastet – ‘students who probably wasted four years of their lives getting a degree that will become meaningless.’
There’s no time for regressive thoughts like that and those, from what I’ve heard, of Charles Gibson.
Those kids in that room were the future of journalism and there’s plenty of reason for excitement and optimism about that.
Take a look around the Web, see how passionate most college journalists are about progressing journalism. I hope it’s an infectious optimism.
The deep irony is that newspapers have been giving away journalistic content in print FOREVER, just like TV and radio news outfits do, and if web revenues were as high as print revenues used to be, they wouldn’t be complaining now.
What’s on the way out is the lucrative advertising subsidy. And to be clear: Newspaper prices cover the cost of producing and distributing the physical object, not the journalism. There is no physical object to deliver over the Web.
We cannot figure out what journalism is worth in the monetary sense so long as its production is financed primarily by advertising. It warps the market. And to suggest — as the mass-media voices seem to be suggesting in unison this month — that the Web is the problem is to miss the point entirely.
Remember: The goal creates the values system, and the goal of modern mass media isn’t quality journalism but double-digit profit margins funded by inefficient 20th century advertising models. In that system, journalism ultimately bends to whatever draws people’s attention. Traffic trumps quality, and shoddness is the business plan.
If people actually paid for journalism, would they want something different? Would a change in the way we pay for journalism improve it?
Magic Eightball sez: “Signs point to YES.”
For more on the future of the business:
http://xark.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/news-futures-a-whats-next-overview.html
By addressing Clay Shirky’s accusation about the fate of newspapers, Gibson completely missed the point. Shirky wasn’t suggesting that “the web” or some variant new technology would replace newspapers (although it’s entirely possible it will); his point was that the newspapers are dinosaurs who will die, whether or not there is something out there to take their place. The assumption that the likes of Gibson have been making, falsely, is that there cannot be a vacuum. Unfortunately for them (and perhaps, for all of us, for a while anyway) this might be exactly what happens, until somebody invents something that both pays for itself and gives us consumers what we want. Certainly there are no signs to indicate that *that thing* will come from within the existing publishing infrastructure.
Most telling of all, out of this dialogue, is the needless ad hominem against Clay Shirky. This speaks volumes about the feelings within the traditional establishment and their resentment about being called out on their likely path to failure. In a way you can say ‘who blames them’, as they obviously don’t want to fail, but at the same time you can’t help but feel such a reaction just shows who’s on the ball and who’s just watching it.
“More Americans get their news from ABC News, than from any other source.” – slogans like this are ok though??
I tend to agree with what you are saying here. That said, I’m wondering if you can comment on one of the issues raised in this video discussion between two editors of Macleans magazine (http://devinjohnston.ca/blog/2009/03/01/re-coyne-v-wells).
They argue that the fragmentation of the media market as it moves online is a bad thing because even if multiple smaller sites can each be profitable, none has the resources required for the level of research, investigation, and fact-checking that print and broadcast media giants currently provide.
I’m of the view that this is probably untrue because smaller niche news sources can focus their resources within their particular niche in order to achieve the same or higher level of research.
Devin, I tend to agree with you. I would even go so far to suggest that many bigger sites that have enjoyed those resources focused too much on “journalism for journalists,” instead of on true accountability reporting that was important – and interesting – to regular citizens. If you look at newspaper circulation numbers over the past 40 years, they start to decline after Watergate created an award-driven celebrity journalism culture. The Internet came later and only exacerbated the decline.
Free market competition should be a good thing for investigative journalism. I think it already has for political coverage when you look at what Politico, HuffingtonPost, Talking Points Memo and others have done.
I have been a long time viewer of Mr.
Gibson and his newscast. I like the
way he gathers his information on world
and international news. I think he is
the top journalist in his field. I
just want to congratulate him for a job
well done, and give him A BIG THUMBS UP!! And I hope future journalists can
do as well as they learn from this
man of great talent, knowledge and
passion for his work and others. God
Bless Charles Gibson and God Bless
America !!!!
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Thank you all for your deep feelings. I am sure that he has touched everyone’s life in his own way. .What hurts me most is that we have been together since we were four years old; we went to school together for about twenty years and even left Iraq together and worked together since then, but I did not have the chance to be in his funeral. This was the only trip that we did not take together because I could not leave work here in Sudan. I should have been there with him. .Kassakhoon, .You are right. His death should not silence his voice, we shall be his voice. .He was killed for seeking the truth. We should not let his death go for nothing. .I do not recall the name of the office he was talking about regarding the corruption cases. I remember him telling me the location of that office in Baghdad. Its a small office that is funded by USAID. This office finances small projects for Iraqis. The few people who managed the office were americans, but the actual staff on the ground is completely Iraqi. The problem is that the monitoring is done by corrupted Iraqis, and about 90% of the projects are false. And the documents that were supposed to be delivered to Ahmed were to prove that many false projects in many conflicts areas in Baghdad were only a scam and some of the money was used to finance terrorists. .As Ahmed said, these terrorist-financing projects were mostly in Adhamiya, Sadr-City, Jamiya St., Shu’la, and few other areas. This office has spent over 250K USD for a single cleaning campaign in Adhamiya, for instance. And, as I have said, the problem is that the people monitoring the execution of these projects on the ground are corrupted as well. .However, the only lead to this case was the guy who was murdered with Ahmed. I will certainly try to find another insider.
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