“The Panic is Over”; these were the words of David Plotz, gravel-voiced editor of Slate.com and personal (anti?)-hero of mine.  It has to be said that, as he leaned back in his chair and sized up the three be-suited euro-dudes who had unaccountably pitched up in his premises (actually the meeting was in Slate’s kitchen), Plotz looked anything but panicked.

The question he was answering, having taken his time to work out that our questions were indeed worth answering, had however nothing to do with his personal demeanour. One thing we were in the States to try to work out was what we could expect to happen to the trade of journalism in coming years, and consequently what an institutional press and media service should do about it.

No money, no journalists, no journalism.

The doom-mongers have had the upper hand for some time. Officionados of US TV series The Wire, a category including at least two of us, will know from the fifth series in particular that US newspapers are gradually going under, and taking quality journalism down with them. Without rehearsing all the arguments, there has undoubtedly been a prolonged crisis in US newspaper journalism, with massive downsizing and innumerable papers going out of business, as advertising revenue, not to mention sales income, collapsing as both readers and advertisers switch to online news sources. What we had heard, and continued to hear throughout our visit, was that the economic model which had supported journalism had fallen apart, that “real” journalism has a cost and that, if the money to meet that cost dries up, then that’s the end of the line for quality reporting. No money, no journalists, no journalism. And the trend is heading our way.

1. You can make money online

Not palatial - but it makes money

This was the “panic” Plotz was talking about, the panic that is now over. Let’s be clear, he wasn’t saying that there wasn’t a great deal of pain still in the pipeline, and that venerable publications, even such as the Washington Post, would still have a pretty tough time making it through the next few years. What he was saying that a new economic model was coming hazily into focus, one that offered a serious prospect that, whatever might happen to newspapers as we know them, journalism – good journalism at that – would survive and even flourish.

Slate.com, for the uninitiated, is an entirely online publication, free to the consumer. It is owned by the Washington Post, but operates as an independent entity. It has has an intelligent, witty, liberal (according to the US definition) editorial style, with a focus, though by no means exclusively, on politics.  It specialises in analysis and comment, generally quite long-form content. As Plotz said (everyone just calls him Plotz, by the way), Slate is kind of “old media new media”.

And yet, it makes money.

This fundamentally is why the panic – at least for some – is over. It is possible to make money from journalism online. In Slate’s case, it does not seem to be any new magic formula, but good old-fashioned touting for advertising business. It may be the case, as was averred at another point in our visit, that “print advertising dollars are being replaced by online advertising pennies”, but it seems that those pennies are enough to keep Slate at least afloat. Let’s be frank, Slate doesn’t to the untrained eye look like it has huge overheads. It doesn’t maintain staff correspondents in world capitals, it doesn’t run the kind of expansive newsroom we saw, for example, in the Washington Post, it’s premises have a kind of shoestring look to them. There were yesterday’s chocolate cake crumbs on the kitchen table. (Find out why here.) But these guys are doing serious journalism.

Is it just Slate? Well, maybe not. Plotz pointed us in the direction of other publications, not at all like Slate, which seem to be pulling off the same trick. The people he named were those we heard cited again and again, the likes of Politico, the National Journal, and other niche players. These were the guys who were still in the business of the scoop, being the first with the news. If our later visit to the National Journal was anything to go by, these were still classical news operations, with all the usual paraphernalia of a newsroom, but news operations which did not seek to occupy the broad news agenda which was the domain of the old generalist papers, but focused really tightly on specialist news of interest to a comparatively small number of people (in this case, politics). Not only can they pull in advertisers, but, trading on their reputation for being first and (generally) being right, they command very substantial subscription rates from from the kind of people who stand to make or lose millions if Congressman X or Y tips this way or that on a bill.

Perhaps this is the model: atomised journalism, niche players carving out small, high-value corners of the market and leaving the mass news to “free” sources: Twitter, blogs, loss-leaders for media conglomerates.

Those twenty minutes, earned over decades, but sustained day by day, must be one of the most valuable properties in journalism.

So what do we make of the one newspaper everyone we met said was “still in the game”, the New York Times? Perhaps yet another niche, albeit a big one with room for one big paper, that of the quintessentially authoritative source. This idea is perhaps illustrated by a nice description we heard of the modern news cycle. News, went the story, is broken very early, usually on Twitter, notwithstanding the ferocious (and seemingly incomprehensible) competition by media outlets to “break” the story, and gets the place buzzing. “About twenty minutes later” most people go to the New York Times to find out if it’s true and get the real story. In other words, the NYT brand gives it twenty minutes to bring proper journalistic values to bear on a story, some basic fact-checking and, most importantly, some context and explanation. Those twenty minutes, earned over decades, but sustained day by day, must be one of the most valuable properties in journalism.

2. You can still get a job in journalism

In another city, New York, and in a different kind of environment, Colombia University, we met Sree Sreenivasan, professor of journalism. Looking back, we should have recorded this meeting, for the man spoke in wall-to-wall soundbites and aphorisms for a straight hour. It was, frankly, astounding, and so densely packed with guru-esque utterances that we struggled to note down even half of them. One of our number saw in the professor his dream job made flesh and that’s not something I would be prepared to contest. We will be back to this man at greater length in a subsequent post, but for the time being just one tidbit from the meeting will suffice.

The huge majority of students get jobs with organizations which did not exist two years ago

Prof Sreenivasan not only teaches journalism, but is also what I would call the journalism course “admissions tutor” and “careers tutor”. In other words, he sees the students through, as he put it, “not from cradle to grave exactly, but from selection to placement in a job”. So he knows what happens to the students. What he told us was really interesting, namely that as many students go into gainful employment as journalists as ever did, but that the huge majority of his students get jobs with organizations which did not exist two years ago. Another, more literal meaning for the term ‘new media’, perhaps.

These were not the jobs of yesteryear, mind you, said the professor. No-one was going into a big newsroom, equipped with notepad and half-chewed pencil and expecting to work their way up the organization. His students were heading out into the world with Twitter accounts, hand-held video cameras, lightweight laptops with video montage software, Tumblr accounts, 3G connections and, yes, somewhere in the backpack, a pen and notepad. In other words, learning journalism and getting a job thereafter means not only knowing how to gather facts and tell a story, but how to be a web savvy multimedia producer gathering facts and telling a story.

The implications for the likes of us are huge of course. How do you supply this kind of journalist with information? What kind of information, what formats of information, are most useful for this journalist? What does it mean to give access to such a journalist? What, indeed, is a journalist?

But this post is about panic and its ending. The big questions for us are for another time.

Bonus lesson: why 40-minute podcasts are a Good Thing

Before leaving this post, however, back for a moment to David Plotz in Washington, and incidentally an explanation of the remark earlier about him being an (anti?)-hero of mine.

One of Slate’s old-media-new-media characteristics is its commitment to the podcast format, sometimes video, more often audio. There is a wide range of podcasts on offer, but the flagship has to be the weekly “Political Gabfest“, essentially a conversation on two or three political themes between chief editor Plotz, Slate’s chief political correspondent, John Dickerson, and senior editor (focusing on legal and women’s issues), Emily Bazelon. It’s about 40 minutes of urbane, witty, intelligent, sometimes irascible, sometimes opinionated, sometimes anarchic discussion of the week’s hot issues. (Plotz plays up the irascible, opinionated bit – hence the anti-hero thing, part of the Gabfest community’s running joke.)

So what’s my point? I asked about the podcasts, because it somehow doesn’t seem to chime with the soundbite-driven, short-attention-span world we so commonly associate with the internet.

If we said: “go rob a bank”, they’d do it for us

Well, said Plotz, the thing is, “we like doing it and it has given us an almost insanely loyal audience. If we said on the podcast: ‘go rob a bank’, they’d do it for us…” It was at this point that I was outed by Tibo as just such a fanatically loyal Gabfest fan (though I am yet to rob a bank). The fact is, as I can testify, that a format like the Gabfest gives Slate’s consumers a sense of connection, a sense of knowing these individuals. Like so much else in the seemingly alienating world of the internet and electronic interaction, the key to the success of the format, and the reason it works so well for Slate, is that it provides a sense of human connection, the sense of dealing with real people. The Slate people know this very well and reinforce it with, for example, a Gabfest Facebook page, increasingly frequent and successful live Gabfest shows (largely organized with the voluntary help of Gabfest fans, if I understand aright) and even social events – meet-ups in a bar before and after the live shows.

So a bonus lesson. Don’t make too many assumptions. Digital media doesn’t always mean shortening, dumbing-down. It means thinking about who you’re connecting with and what will work for them. You might even make money out of it.

A final word

Thanks a million to Slate, to David Plotz and to John Dickerson (to whom, having been outed, I was introduced). I am still listening and if there is ever a bank you need raiding… By the way, if, by any mischance, the Panic is Back, don’t tell me, it would definitely spoil my thesis.

Next time: Life beyond Facebook