RSJ News
Rethink journalism, Salon.com CEO advises
11-14-2009
Richard Gingras speaks to Reynolds School graduate students at lunch Nov. 5.
By Tammy Krikorian
New technology is not going to save an old business model, said Richard Gingras, CEO of Salon Media Group who gave the keynote address Nov. 5 at the Convergence and Society conference.
Prior to joining Salon, Gingras served as a strategic adviser to the senior team at Google in 2007 and 2008.
Speaking at the Silver Legacy Thursday, Gingras said it's an exciting time for journalism and the key is to embrace change, re-think the role of the journalist and re-think the forms.
"When you're looking at technology, it's about embracing it, thinking how it changes your model," he said. "Taking risks and making mistakes is crucial."
Watch streaming video of the talk here.
Gingras acknowledged that trying new things can also be painful.
Launched in 1995, Salon emerged from a culture resistant to change.
"When you think about traditional news ... the magazine hasn't changed in 100 years," he said. "Online isn't like that - it's always changing."
Quoting A. J. Liebling, Gingras said: "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one."
The Internet puts a printing press into everyone's hands, he said.
This means that more people are producing journalism, even though they may not work at a traditional news organization. And that can be a good thing.
"The truth is, a lot of good muckraking comes from outside the mainstream," he said.
Social media has also changed the landscape, Gingras said, and every few years there will be another new technology to replace what's new today.
"When you're looking at new technology, it's about embracing it, thinking how it changes your model," he said.
Gingras said some in the industry are wrong to think that micropayments or Kindle will save journalism or newspapers.
But while the model will change, some things will remain: The openness of networks, access to distribution and free speech.
"The openness of the Internet broke the core distribution model newspapers are based on," Gingras said. He said Google is not to blame for killing newspapers; it is simply a search product.
"To me, Google is promotion," he said.
In the networked age, he said, it's important for news organizations to be more transparent about who they are - who the writers are, who the editors are.
"I'm a big fan of transparency and I don't think we do enough of it," he said.
Readers trust the organization when they trust the people that are involved.
Wikipedia is an example of what can be done with proper organization and management, he said.
Salon, he said, has been able to build a sense of community and has 35,000 bloggers writing on its site.
"Salon has a lot of personality and I think it represents a set of values," he said. "A lot of good writers are willing to do stuff with us."
Earlier in the day, Gingras spoke to graduate students and Reynolds School seniors in magazine writing.
What news organizations didn't grok, he said, was that online media needed to be more than more than an "ephemeral stream of stuff."
"We need to build deep resources of information," Gingras said. That doesn't happen over night. And the beauty of online media is its malleability. "I don't let perfect be the enemy of the good."
"Convergence and Society: The Changing Media Landscape" at the Silver Legacy Nov. 5. He's the keynote speaker for the conference that runs through Nov. 6.
The conference, now in its eighth year, was co-sponsored by the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of South Carolina.
The event offered a scholarly forum for the presentation of theory, research, and practice related to media convergence.
