Conversations on Journalism and Democracy

(Madison, WI) -- What better time to talk about the role of journalism in a democracy than right after the most exciting presidential election in a century. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Journalism and Mass Communications convened a post-election mini-conference on Journalism and Democracy on Friday, November 7, 2008. But while the democratic process seemed to work well on November 4th, journalism is struggling.

"Newspapers are technically dead," said journalism professor Lewis Friedland, a member of one of the panels of journalists and educators convened for the conference. He said the newspaper economic model doesn't work anymore.

Mark Katches, the assistant managing editor of Projects and Investigations at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel disagreed. "Newspapers are in trouble, but they're not dead yet," he said. Newspapers and newspaper chains with a heavy debt load are in the biggest trouble, but newspapers without a lot of debt are still healthy. "We make a ton of money with out Sunday paper," he said, "and online revenue makes up only ten percent of our ad dollars."

John Nichols, Associate Editor of The Capital Times and Washington correspondent for The Nation, recalled that it wasn't that long ago that an extra press plane had to be chartered by the Clinton campaign because of all of the newspapers and other media that wanted to cover the campaign in person. This year, despite the excitement generated by the Obama campaign, there were a growing number of vacant seats on the press plane because newspapers couldn't afford to send anyone. "By the next presidential campaign many of those newspapers will be closed," he predicted.

Nichols, in remarks at the conference, said that the performance of the news media frequently falls short of what he was inspired by when he started his writing career at the age of eleven. He suggested the demise of the newspaper behemoths might actually be a good thing. The appetite for news is not disappearing and the new media that arises to feed that appetite may actually accomplish better journalism than the present model. "Instead of clinging to the past, rush rapidly to the future," he advised. "The future is bright and the people want it."

UW-Madison journalism professor Dhavan Shah gave the media in general better grades for covering the election than journalists because of the growing trend of media interactivity. "Even intolerance breeds participation," he said. "A lot of people were really engaged with this election."

He observed that the perception of press bias seems to increase with every election cycle, apprently fed by the passionate partisanship of the election season. "We need to do a better job of telling our story and looking at ourselves," he said.

Fellow panelists agreed. "We need to explain to people why we do what we do," said Jason Stein of the Wisconsin State Journal. Bill Lueders, news editor of Isthmus magazine, suggested that teaching media literacy needed to become a higher priority in school.

photo: left to right, Rep. Spencer Black, Bill Lueders, Chris Long (wisconsineye), Jason Stein, Dhavan Shah.