Emily Anne Epstein

Journalism?

My mentor Marci Alboher just announced today after working as a blogger for NYTimes.com for over a year, she was givent the axe.  She of course blogged about it on her column, remaining poised and confident.  It’s a slightly strange post, as the blog (and column) were about “slash” careers- how to create and manage being more than one kind of a professional.  Read her post here.  Read my comment here!

Marci,

I remember the first time you asked me “do you have a blog?” and I was confounded. It was the future of journalism, of communication and information. This was the information age, after all, so one would imagine that like the stone age, bronze age and so on, information would be the most valuable commodity. Newspapers were being challenged by this innovative force, where information was free, the medium unregulated, populist opinions expressed and there was just no way to compete. Media outlets slowly began experimenting with the form, trying to go online, but the advertising revenue was simply not there. Readership was going down and businesses were not keen on investing in such an experimental form. Creative destruction. The same thing that happened to polaroid. New outlets would prosper while the old monopolies would either wither away or reinvent themselves, but the industry would go on. But how could this news be reported? The New York Times could report on the Star Ledger, or the LA Times, but it’s hard to write objectively about your own financial woes. And who wants to read bad, self-reflexive news?

And then you think, how could the crisis really be such a shock? If businesses around the country couldn’t afford to advertise in newspapers… it couldn’t be just the newspapers’ fault. Something bigger has been going on, not just on Wall Street, on main street, as they say, for years. Maybe it was optimism, but while many people anticipated that the fall of the newspaper would be by the invisible hand of creative destruction, it seems more evident that the very collapse of the a capitalist market was first experienced through the newspapers themselves.

That’s what I think, anyway.

Best,
Emily

Comment from Suyeon - December 10, 2008 at 7:57 PM

hey emily! i read this comment of yours on marci’s times blog, then i was happy to see you on fb, and now i’m here! yes, i think you’re right that the crisis in journalism is a symptom of an even larger systemic problem – with capitalism. but i think that with people on the ground like u, the solution can be found.

that’s what i think anyway. :D