Journalism organizations are factories.
I don't mean the manufacturing and distribution process of newspapers (printing), but rather the way news is handled. It's shuttled along a Henry Ford assembly line through reporter through copy desk (subeditors to you Brits), handled by a series of specialists, processed by automated machinery, combined, reorganized and shot out the door as a unitary product, whether it's print or online.
In Savannah there's a cobblestone lane called Factor's Walk behind former cotton warehouses along the river. In the old usage, a factor was a broker: one who buys, sells, arranges transactions. In preindustrial England, factors arranged for wool spinning, weaving and sewing work to be performed by individuals in cottages. Eventually, industrialization moved that work into buildings that came to be called factories.
Our information economy has unfolded along industrial lines. As Jay Hamilton has documented, the expensive but efficient rotary press led to an economically driven transformation of journalism itself by industrializing the process. Seeing tremendous economic opportunity (and faced with high capital expenses), publishers abandoned partisanship in order to chase the largest possible audiences with a “one size fits all” product.
Some newspapers were left with names echoing the past, like the St. Louis Globe-Democrat or the Waterbury Republican, but they no longer functioned as party organs.
Fast forward to today. While newspapers are struggling to become 24-hour Internet news operations, they're still fundamentally factories.
But the Internet makes it easy for any individual to publish, and we're seeing all sorts of new kinds of journalism emerge. Some of it, like the maligned "bloggers in pajamas," looks like commentary. Some of it looks like conversation. Some of it is about aggregation and presentation. But some of it is old-fashioned report-and-describe journalism, yet conducted by individual entrepreneurs.
Concurrent with the many forces undermining the traditional news business model, we have a rising set of competitors for time, attention and public service.
In Minnesota's Twin Cities, two giant journalism factories are looking a lot like rust belt relics. Around them swirls a host of new-model alternatives of radically varying tone, content, organizational structure, journalistic focus and political tilt.
Former factory workers like Eric Black, Jeremy Iggers and Steve Perry are involved in Web-based projects ranging from highly personal to loose aggregations of collaborators. Expats from the Star Tribune and other traditional media are working on what looks more like a piece-rate, cottage-industry model for Minnpost.com.
When anyone can self-publish, do we need factories? Or factors? Do they add enough value to justify their continued existence?
I won't rush to pronounce factory journalism dead; the world doesn't work that way. We don't get replacements. We get displacements. Large-scale, industrial journalism giants may wane, but I think we'll have various forms of factory journalism coexisting with new forms -- individual, small groups, entrepreneurial or nonprofit-charitable, all with varying degrees of decentralization -- for a long time.
The smart factory manager will look for ways to connect with the independent operators.
Related: New York Times: Entrepreneurial Journalism in the Facebook Age.