American Journalism after ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction‪’‬

In a 2009 report, titled “The Resurrection of American Journalism”, Leonard
Downie Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson,
professor of journalism point out: “American journalism is at a transformational
moment in history.” (1) They both argue that the era of dominant print journalism
in the United States of America is ending and rapidly giving way to digital
journalism. A range of major regional American newspapers such as the Seattle
PostIntelligencer
in 2009, for example, have gone out of business in recent years.
Even nationwide institutionalized newspapers such as the New York Times are not
exempt from this overall development.
In the digital age there will be a steady rise, not a decline in the general
demand for news – yet the quality, the long established business models, and the
distribution of media are drastically changing at this point. Jeff Jarvis articulated the
most severe change that is currently happening recently in his blog Buzzmachine, in
which he outlines the revolutionary transition from a print to a Link Economy:
Those old companies still operate in the content economy, begun 570 years by Gutenberg, in
which the owner of content profited by selling multiple copies. Online, there needs to be only
one copy of content and it is the links to it that bring it value. Content without links has no
value. So when search engines, aggregators, bloggers, and Twitterers link to content, they
are not stealing; they are giving the gift of attention and audience. Indeed, publishers should
be grateful that Google does not charge them for the value of its links.6
In this thesis I will follow Jarvis’ line of argumentation that the nature of journalism
will change in the Link Economy in many ways, thereby opening a wide range of
discussions among scholars from many different fields.