A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

so, too, will business‐side staffers need a better handle on how digital advertising differs
in strategy as well as technology from sales to legacy platforms.
Jennifer McFadden, a business analyst for CUNY’s new business models for news
project, stresses the importance of training. McFadden, a Yale MBA who also worked
briefly as a product marketing manager at The New York Times, says the need ranges
from staffers at smallest start‐ups to fellow MBAs struggling to grasp the technologies of
online ads at The Times. 168
More fundamental issues are at stake as well. Harvard professor Howard Gardner
and two colleagues, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, authored an unusual
2001 book called, Good Work, that examined the attitudes of geneticists and journalists
about their work lives.
The geneticists reflected enthusiasm and ideals about ways they might change the
world. The journalists sounded mostly discouraged, consumed with the problems
threatening their livelihoods and professional aspirations.
Assessing the tensions faced by journalists in addressing journalism’s commercial
and civic goals, the authors argued: “The danger is that the increased focus on business
ends will lead to a loss of focus on journalistic ends, the noble purposes or mission that
workers entered the field to pursue.”
Not Just Staying in Business, but Staying in Journalism
They turned to the noted British editor, Harold Evans, to frame the issue: “The
problem many organizations face is not to stay in business, but to stay in journalism.” 169
The struggle to stay in both was also a concern of the late James Carey, described by
Jay Rosen as “the country’s outstanding journalism educator.” 170 It was just over a
decade a ago that Carey addressed the topic with a group of journalists and media
executives meeting at Harvard University. 171
Carey discussed Schumpeter’s creative destruction theories, forecast the end of “the
age of modern, independent journalism” and explored what “the new relation between
news and business” might yield in the future.
Carey died eight years to the day after delivering those remarks in 1998. But he had
another story he liked to tell, one that’s still recalled by former colleagues and students.
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