Philadelphia Inquirer.
There are few cities in America where traditional journalism runs deeper than in Philadelphia. This is where Benjamin Franklin almost 300 years ago bought the Pennsylvania Gazette, considered the most successful newspaper in the colonies. Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer is the third-oldest surviving newspaper in our nation, and its staff has won 18 Pulitzers. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed watching the Philadelphia literary scene flourish and change, and have been particularly attuned to the ways the journalism market has morphed to better accommodate the realities of an increasingly Internet-based society.
Eric Newton, Vice President of the journalism program at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, explained some of those journalistic changes very well in a recent article, “Innovating to Save the News,” where he reports on the results of research conducted by the Foundation, and prepared by the Knight Commission, on the Information Needs of Communities in Democracies.
Not surprisingly, the report found that journalism as we’ve known it – news delivered on a system from “tree to paper to press to truck to your driveway” – has been thrown into chaos by the Internet. But the benefits of the mass media in the Internet age– to communities, schools, business, our environment and democracy – are more apparent than ever before. And the journalism required in this digital era in which we live must continue to adapt to meet the changing needs of our communities. In the words of Newton, “journalism does not need saving so much as it needs creating.”
The Knight Commission offers 15 ideas, from making public libraries centers for digital training and access, to championing news literacy in the public schools; creating public broadcasting that is more local and interactive, to building city hall Web sites that make public information easy to understand. And I, like Newton, believe that “America needs universal, affordable broadband access. Everyone, no matter his age, race, income, or neighborhood, should be able to go online to get whatever he wants – video, audio, photos, and text – from anywhere in the world as fast as anyone else can. In the digital age, countries without high-speed broadband will become second-class nations filled with second-class citizens, able to vote, but not knowing why they should; able to work, but not knowing how to find a job online.”
I actually made this same point a few weeks ago while attending the annual conference of the National Newspaper Publishers Association in Charlotte, North Carolina. There I sat on a social media panel focused on providing new insights into the ways that journalism and the news media should be adapted to better accommodate the needs and interests of Americans in the Internet age. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1,000 times – the revolution will not be television, but it will be digitized and placed online. And to secure our successful transition to the digital age, we can all work together within our communities and with our local, state and federal governments to ensure that all Americans are adequately prepared for, and have more than ample opportunity to adopt and use, the Internet as our primary engine of communications, economic and global success.
