Member-only story
Judgment Day for Journalism
As legacy news organizations falter, digital upstarts are scaling to meet demand
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a powerful exchange of ideas between Pierre-Elliott Levasseur, president of La Presse in Montréal, and Canada’s foremost media critic, Jesse Brown.
The exchange reaches an unexpected moment around the 23-minute mark, when Brown presents an emerging trend:
“The percentage of journalists who practice written journalism, who are employed by smaller digital companies, is going to go up and up and up. And the number of journalists who are doing it for newspapers like La Presse is going to go down and down and down.”
Levasseur responds by emphasizing the role large newsrooms have traditionally played in producing enterprise reporting and investigative journalism. We often overlook the importance of this role, he says, when we compare traditional newsrooms with small digital operations.
And this is where things get really interesting. Brown paints a passionate picture of major changes in journalism production underway across the globe:
“Smaller organizations are getting increasingly able to do that kind of deep-dive, enterprise journalism at the same time that, unfortunately, newspapers are becoming…
