Is the Web changing journalism?

Important journalism developments rest between two seemingly unrelated events.

Editor & Publisher magazine reported earlier this year that The Bakersfield Californian unveiled a new Web site. There was no spot for national news. The people who run the site said local users displayed almost no interest in it.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post offered a fat buyout to its veteran journalists.

Variations on these events could be coming soon to media outlets near you.

Why?

For many years, Internet news operations were tiny incubators off in the corners of big American media institutions. There was a faux robustness on the scene in the late 1990s, but it didn’t last.

Companies that had invested millions of dollars in Internet news efforts generally cut back in 2000 after it became clear that the venture was not going to produce solid, dependable returns.

They were too early to the market.

There were some sparks left in the ashes.

Fortunately, they were fanned back to life, not by the journalism arms of big media in many cases, but by the marketing and advertising divisions.

They sensed opportunity and had already warmed to the Internet model.

They constructed a new model aimed at building products that would be consumer-driven and immensely responsive to local audience interests and needs.

The Internet is the ideal place to do that because people vote constantly with their fingers. You can watch that process in real time and respond by giving people what they want. Audience numbers can drive everything from the overall tone of what happens on the Web to the placement of individual stories.

One might argue that media have always searched for what would draw audiences. But the capacity for measuring audience response has never been this effective and the technology means the reaction is almost instantaneous.

A consequence?

In Bakersfield, it means local news will get almost all of the attention because the numbers say that is what people click on. One might make all the flowery arguments about the public’s need to know about the world and the nation. You will have to go elsewhere to find that, unless you enjoy blogs, which is where national news will be pondered in Bakersfield.

The change is not a matter of guesswork or opinion. It is fact-driven.

Local news drives Web traffic (which drives advertising rates).

On the other side of the country, another story was playing out.

In Washington, declining circulation led the Post to put a very juicy offer on the table aimed at veteran journalists. Hundreds upon hundreds of years of experience decided to head out the door.

One might argue, “Well, that gives the youngsters a chance to move up,” and that makes some sense. Journalism has been encouraging expensive graduate education programs for years now, and it makes no sense to stick these talented, intelligent people on entry-level beats and let them sit there forever when what they really want to do is cover the big stories.

But what that implies is that there is no value to experience, nothing that can’t be replaced with a greener (and presumably cheaper) candidate.

You wouldn’t feel that way about picking a surgeon, would you?

It is apparently OK to think about journalism in that context.

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Put these two different things together and what do you get?

On the one hand, a set of values has evolved that is so market-driven that it supports abandoning a fundamental journalism obligation, telling people what is happening in their world, from the front porch to the most distant corner of the Earth, whether they are comfortable with it or not.

Bakersfield’s decision, a smart business decision, might well be an augury.

Customers are now editors.

Where does difficult, important, unpleasant and complicated news fit in that formula?

Audience dynamics led to “If it bleeds it leads” decisions on local TV news shows a few decades back.

It was why, in some places in America, you could conclude based on news reports that black people in the city spent most of their time killing one another because the local news emphasis focused so heavily on crime, an impression that was exactly wrong, in addition to being ethically wrong.

And in the Post case, the world is turned on its ear as experience becomes a disadvantage, not an asset.

There is an old business saw that change is good.

That may not be the case when you measure what is lost in the process.