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This interview is part of the Future of Journalism interview series.
Interview with John Yemma , Chrisitan Science Monitor editor
 Why has the Monitor decided to focus primarily on its web site, and cease its daily print publication? What benefits have you seen?
JY: Primarily, we are making this move because we recognize that our reach is greater online than in print. We, therefore, want to concentrate our journalistic resources where they have the most impact. While we won’t initially save significant money by ending our daily print publication (costs of printing, distribution, etc. are halved, but subscription revenues fall as well, making the move a wash in the first year), we are able to free most of our editors, reporters, photographers, and designers to continuously update our website, CSMonitor.com. That should bring us more readers.
Our aim is that over the next five years, our online readership will grow fivefold … from 5 million page-views at present to 25 million … and that that will provide the revenue to sustain our operations. The official end of the print daily is scheduled for March 27. A week later, we’ll have produced our first print weekly and we’ll have our web-first operation running at full strength. So it will be a little later in 2009 before we see how effective this strategy will be.
What advice would you give newspapers and publications that are experiencing financial problems?
JY: Every news organization is dealing with different circumstances: Some are locally focused, others are national in scope. Some have big debt to deal with, others are in competitive markets that are shrinking. Whatever the differences, however, news organizations are all dealing with the same macro problems: disruption to their business model because of the Internet; a generational shift in media preferences; a dismal economic environment. The key is to try to get costs out of the system as quickly as possible without damaging the core journalistic function of the organization.
Everyone in the business knows this, but those differing circumstances constrain flexibility and speed of transition in different ways. A radical move such as the one the Monitor is making may not be possible right now at many organizations. The best these operations can do is to manage through the crisis and continue to shift their emphasis to the web. I would not presume to advise them beyond that fairly general point and beyond saying that the Monitor might be a useful case study for the future configuration of their newsrooms if not their business models.
We are right now developing our new workflow, reorganizing our staff, and acquiring enabling technology (primarily a new CMS) to execute with our new product mix. We’ll be constantly adjusting, and along the way we’ll be happy to share lessons learned with other organizations.
What will the future newsroom look like? What will future journalists look like?
JY: I think the newsroom of the future will be a less bustling place than the old newspaper newsrooms I grew up in. They will mostly be places for collaborative projects. More and more journalists will work remotely, although editors probably will still work in the same location for a while longer as the central managers of a news operation.
While all journalists will have to think multimedia in the future, some will naturally be more skilled at one medium than another. A photographer may be especially good at web video, for instance. An investigative reporter might excel at databases. A graphic artist may be drawn to mashups and interactive applications such as Flash. And one of the most valuable new skill sets is the hybrid journalist/developer who can build new storytelling tools on the fly.
But the core function of the news operation will still be reporters who dig up information and present it to the public. As online tools such as content-management systems become more WYSIWYG, reporters and editors can continue to concentrate on journalism, which is where the real value is in a news organization.
Do you think that the overall article/information quality will be better or worse as we transition to more online formats?
JY: Individual reporters will still produce high quality work, but because this transition is painful and is resulting in the downsizing of journalistic jobs, there cannot help but be a decrease in quality in general. Fewer journalists = less coverage. I think that will be bad for our society. Sure, the big national organizations will still be covering the White House, Pentagon, and Congress, but there will be state legislatures and county commissions and city halls and businesses and other organizations all over the country that no longer have an independent watchdog hawking them.
This will prove to be a big problem. Gifted amateur bloggers will attempt to fill the gap, but their ability to warn the public over corruption or self-dealing or laws and policies that may not be in the public interest will be constrained because they don’t have as big a megaphone as big media has had.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe the development of online formats has been a good thing. It enables everyone else to publish quickly and at very low cost. The Internet has democratized information. It has opened the door to exciting new forms of storytelling (video, podcasts, mashups, blogs, user-generated content, searchable databases, etc.). And there is no going back. So we have to work out new business models that support journalism in its new form.
What are your views on citizen journalism, and the effects it has had on our society?
JY: Citizen journalism is full of promise, but it has not yet proven itself. I believe in a pro-am type model in which dedicated professional journalists work with citizen journalists to perform watchdog functions, to do crowd-sourcing, and to surface higher quality citizen journalists (the better citizen reporters, writers, investigators, etc.) so that they have more reach and impact.
Any other thoughts you would like to share?
JY: As you can tell from my responses above, I believe this is both a difficult and exciting time in journalism. The old paradigm is dying. The monopoly/ologopoly that news organizations once enjoyed is breaking apart. Amid all the disruption, something new is being born. The new paradigm is more democratic and comprehensive than the old one. The key is to make sure that it has substantive journalism.
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