Is the Fourth Estate terminally ill?

I remember the first time I was harangued for being a journalist. It was Christmas Eve 1982 and I was home from college for a gathering of family and close friends.

A family friend asked what I was studying. In that budding era of Ronald Regan and three-piece, pinstripe suits, it seemed every promising young man was studying business. So he seemed incredulous when I answered “journalism.” I spent the next 45 minutes defending journalism and a free press as he sputtered on about press biases and inaccuracies.

He was not alone in his concerns regarding the press. A 1985 Pew Research study found just over half of Americans thought the press of the day got its facts straight, and only a third felt journalists dealt fairly with all sides.

I the years since then, I’ve worked as an award-winning journalist and a consultant helping organizations interact with journalists. Those years have served only to solidify my belief in the vital importance of the Fourth Estate.

And yet, those years also served as a time of significant erosion in the publics’ trust in journalism. If the 1985 Pew Research study raised concern, the 2009 iteration – Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low – should have sounded civil defense sirens across the nation. And yet, news that only 29 percent believe the press gets the facts straight, and a shocking 18 percent believe journalists deal fairly with all sides, got hardly a glimmer of coverage in the nation’s newspapers.

Adding to the alarm is the economic state of the press and its direct impact on professional journalists … the engine of the Fourth Estate. According to the American Society of Newspapers Editors, American daily newspapers have lost 13,500 journalists since 2007, including 5,200 jobs last year.

Growing economic pressures on the companies that own newsrooms put the very future of many news organizations in doubt. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that fewer than half of America’s newsroom executives are confident their operations will survive another 10 years without significant new sources of revenue. And, nearly a third believe they are at risk in five years or less.

If looked at from a marketing perspective, the for-profit model of the Fourth Estate is floundering. Today, newsrooms generate readers or viewers, then sell that audience to advertisers. Viewed as a consumer marketing study, the Pew research regarding press accuracy points to a loss of a market (audience). The organization that loses its foundation of readers or viewers is sure to lose its economic support from advertisers.

Add in the Great Recession and its affect on available advertising dollars, and the result is a perfect storm for news organizations.

This economic pressure brings an unhealthy pressure on newsrooms to find an audience through any means, including hype. For television news, this means packaging dramatic reports timed for the Nielsen sweeps, while spending significant sums on radio and billboard advertising aimed at getting viewers tuned in just in time to be counted.

In their book The Elements of Journalism, authors Kovach and Rosenstiel warn of the pressure to hype.

“At moments when the news media culture is undergoing rapid change and disorientation, there seems to be a pressure to hype and sensationalize. You might call it the principle of the “naked body and the guitar.”

If you want to attract an audience, you could go down to a street corner, do a striptease, and get naked. You would probably attract a crowd in a hurry. The problem is, how do you keep the people? How do you avoid audience churn? There is another approach. Suppose you went to the same street corner and played guitar. A few people listen the first day. Perhaps more the second. Depending on how good a guitar player you are, how diverse and intriguing your repertoire, the audience might grow each day. You would not, if you were good, have to keep churning the crowd, getting new people to replace those who grew tired of repetition.”

In our government, an unhappy electorate will vote out incumbents and vote in fresh faces. When it comes to the Fourth Estate, consumers will vote with their feet and their wallets. To revive the Fourth Estate, professional journalists, and the companies that employ them, must flee hype and rebuild public trust the old fashioned way … one solid news story at a time.

So, is the Fourth Estate terminally ill? I hope not. I believe it will emerge from this illness looking quite different. The question is, will it be stronger or weaker when the malaise has passed.