I’m a Proud Digital Furry Mammal Living in the Trees
Someone was just asking me about this, so I’m publishing this amusing exchange I had on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Newspaper Division list serv about one year ago, when the division was debating changing its name to something a bit more digital friendly, which did, in fact, ultimately happen: It is now the Newspaper and Online News Division.
The list serv was afire with passionate defenders of print - NOT, mind you, newspapers as organizations, but the actual printed page.
Here’s one typical comment:
If there were no print newspapers, I would invent them and become rich because a newspaper is cheap, portable and disposable.
If there were no newspaper division at AEJMC, I would propose that a newspaper division be developed. It may not be the largest division, but it would be one that people would join because they loved newspapers.
I’m sorry. But newspaper journalism is not multimedia or online. It is paper and ink and people who love news. “
After about five or so of these, I finally decide I just have to weigh in.
Me: Just a quick two cents. I personally don’t care passionately about the name - as I believe Phil Meyer said, it’s not so much about what the individual division is named but about the overall organization of AEJMC.
But the passionate defenses of newsprint on this listserv do, with all due respect, convince younger faculty members such as myself and folks in the industry of our increasing lack of relevance (e.g. http://www.digitaldeliverance.com/2010/07/31/aejmc/). Regardless of the high esteem we may place on newspapers, my research partner and I have collectively spent months actually visiting them and conducting well over 100 interviews in the past two years, and what they are desperately in need of from the academic community is forward-thinking research on how they can change, build a business model, and enhance the core values of journalism using the many tools the Web makes available to us. I’d like to see the same level of passion and interest in THAT kind of discussion as I so frequently hear from this division about how sad or scary change is and how we must continue to venerate newsprint.
The response:
“I would rather be an older, sustainable dinosaur, than an unsustainable tiny, furry, cutting-edge mammal living in the trees. I appreciate that the academic community is doing forward-thinking research on how they can change news, “and build a business model…” etc., etc. Let us know when you have a business model that pays for Web site news. In the mean time, we newspaper dinosaurs will continue to subsidize the new social media with our print income. I am all for a schism: Dinosaurs remain in the Newspaper Division. Tiny, furry, cutting-edge mammals go to the New Digital Microblogging Looking-For-A-Business Model Division.”
To me, this aptly symbolizes how academia can slide toward irrelevance and become utterly out of touch with developments in the industry it is supposed to understand and serve. I am always grateful to those that question assumptions, and I’ve gone on-record more than once saying that those of us who are future-of-news thinkers have to avoid building up orthodoxies that we don’t like to see challenged just like the defenders of print-at-all-costs have done, but these responses were coming from the Wayback Machine and do not bear any resemblance to the reality I hear on the ground from actual working journalists, not those sequestered in the Ivory Tower, every day.
However, I’ll wear the Digital Furry Mammals badge with pride. I think we did outlast those dinosaurs in the evolutionary race. ;) I still think I should get some furry mammal T-shirts made up.
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