Garfield: There's No Future Model for Online News

Howdy, readers. Today I'm blogging at you from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where I'm attending a conference called Consumer Revolution on the Web: Opportunities and Dangers for Journalism.

David Cay Johnston, the inimitable former tax reporter for The New York Times and author of Perfectly Legal, is optimistic about the future of investigative journalism on the web -- mostly because he thinks traditional media do a pretty shoddy job of it.

What we need to be doing, I believe fundamentally, we need to be telling people that which they do not know. We need to stop listening to company PR people. If you're an editor or producer, you need to be telling reporters to get off your ass and go out of find out new things....I just think we'd have much better reporting if instead of thinking there were these huge, expensive things we need to do, we just got off our tails and wrote about the things that are right before our eyes.

Johnston said he's also hopeful because his eight children (!), who range in age from 18 to 42, are all sophisticated and avid news consumers.

On the same panel -- the nominal topic was "Are consumers the right watchdogs?" but the discussion was all over the place -- Bob Garfield of Ad Age and NPR disagreed with Johnston, arguing that investigative journalism can't flourish on the web because there's no one to pay for it.

The model is not there. It's never going to come, ever. Yes, there's an increasing demand for news and information, but newspapers have never been in the news and information business. They don't sell news and information. They sell audience to advertisers. And now that news and information is given away on the web, it's over.It's not going to happen, probably ever. Certainly not in the next 10 years.

A lot of smart people with a lot to lose think about this all day long and they haven't come up with anything yet.

One form of content that will continue to thrive online, said Garfield, is aggregation: "Eventually there will be an aggregation of the aggregation of the aggregation website. You'll only get one story a day, but it will be fabulous."

Garfield also talked about the success of his consumer ax-grinding website, Comcast Must Die. "As maybe the most significant result of this effort, I have the most delicious cable service in the United States of America. If I just dial the number 1-800-comcast a fleet of trucks will descend."