Journaux papier et universités: même destin?

Scott Carlson, journaliste senior au Chronicle of Higher Education lance un cri du coeur dans le bulletin hebdomadaire qu’envoie sa publication à ses lecteurs universitaires : “Ne faites pas les erreurs que mon industrie a faites. N’attendez pas qu’il soit trop tard pour innover.” (Don’t make the mistakes my industry made. Don’t wait until it’s too late to innovate.)

Tout son argumentaire est basé sur le parallèle qu’il fait entre les journaux et la formation universitaire : deux institutions qui ont bénéficié pendant longtemps de publics qui n’avaient pas d’autres alternatives. Force est de reconnaître qu’il y a des similitudes…

[T]he parallels between journalism and academe are striking: We both deal in knowledge and have public service at our core. We have legacy institutions (Harvard, The New York Times) and upstarts (Coursera, Vice Media). Smart, intractable, and often underpaid people — professors and reporters — form the foundation of our industries, taking complex or specialized information and breaking it down for an audience. For many of those people, their academic or journalistic professions are all they ever imagined doing with their lives. To watch their industries crumble is a source of great heartache.

À partir de ses échanges avec Jeremy Littau, professeur de journalisme à Lehigh University, Carlson retrace l’histoire de ces deux institutions. Littau rappelle que les patrons de presses ont investi dans la technologie mais pour produire davantage à moindre coût… Les grands journaux se sont endettés pour acheter les plus petits tirages. Ils étaient convaincus que le produit (l’objet physique “journal”) était éternel. Peu d’investissements dans les nouvelles elles-mêmes, donc.

Mais l’Internet est arrivé:

“Prior to the internet and self-publishing, newspapers had a lock on the production of local news, Littau explained, and they were wildly lucrative enterprises, with profit margins as high as 40 percent. Even though newspapers’ audiences were aging and slowly starting to drop off in the 1980s, journalists still weren’t prompted to scramble for readers or revenue, or to consider how to innovate.

[…] Senior administrators and professors grew up in a world that was much more comfortable than it is today, and many are reluctant to change. Many institutions also accumulated serious debt loads, expanding and putting up infrastructure during the boom years. Littau points out that colleges, like newspapers, focus on traditions and trappings that appeal to an aging audience: their older donors and alumni.“

Plus intéressant, me semble-t-il, c’est la perception interne de la valeur des nouvelles en rapport avec la valeur des diplômes:

What’s more, both journalists and academics “have these gauzy ways of looking at what we do,” Littau says. Journalists liked to think of themselves as defenders of democracy, when most people were going to newspapers simply for the weather, the box scores, and the lifestyle pages. Academics think of themselves as discovering and distributing knowledge, when people really just want the credential and a job. “We pin our value,” Littau says, “on things that I don’t think the audience is thinking about.”

Carlson évoque la perte de la mainmise des universités sur les diplômes – il pense notamment aux badges – et le fait que certains futuristes entrevoient la possibilité que des employeurs évaluent les jeunes en amont de leurs études universitaires et leur permettent d’accéder directement à l’emploi.

Son cri du coeur sera-t-il entendu?

Source: Carlson, Scott, “The Edge: What Higher Ed Can Learn From the Newspaper Industry“, bulletin courriel hebdomadaire The Edge, 19 février 2019