In the gloom before the storm it is tempting to be nothing but depressed. There are many reasons to be sad or sorry. Each friend who receives a call for an appointment with the HR director is another reason. But there are also reasons to be cheerful. Here are five mutually reinforcing points, unscientifically presented.

One

Why we should be cheerful: There’s a growing public demand for serious journalism.

What’s happening: There are signs, real signs, that people are getting more demandingly curious about the world. More people want to understand; fewer people want to be titillated. We need meaning, not just information. This might be because when things go wrong, you look for wisdom. But it might also be a reaction against the past 20 years during which we fell in love with the technologies that undid our capacities to think. In the West we became a trivial culture, preoccupied with the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. Many people became addicted to being constantly amused; and if they were not, they sulked.

Evidence?  Intellectually, not only the uncanny truth of some of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but also some of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death.  The essay Overload in the November 2008 issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism. Empirically, the success of The Economist, The Week, The Spectator and Alain de Botton’s  School of Life. Also, the galloping sales of non-fiction books that in some way or other “explain the world”.

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Two

Why we should be cheerful: In the next three years media owners will start to support “good” journalism. They’ll have to.

What’s happening:  Media owners are at different stages but they are all going to have to take the following four steps 1) Stare mortality in the face. This is happening everywhere from Wasilla to Lugansk and from Porsanger to Brownsville. 2) Realise the future’s with the web - whatever platform you use now 3) Work out that the only journalism that will flourish on the web will be networked 4) Discover that networked journalism has to be better journalism because a post-modern, post-industrial, multi-faith, neoEnlightenment world demands it. Journalism that remains even a little bit out of touch, cumbersome, prejudiced or inaccurate won’t survive and a business that can’t take these four steps is heading for the turn-off to Valhalla.

Evidence? Intellectually, Charlie Beckett’s book SuperMedia which is the text for networked journalism. The more you peruse it, the more it emerges as a very good book indeed. Empirically, which would you put your money on: Huffington Post or the LA Times?

Three

Why we should be cheerful: It’s an open field. Anyone can be the next Joseph Pulitzer.

What’s happening: In the next few years being a big media company is going to be beyond grim. Costs are going up. The most important source of revenue, advertising, is going down - probably by 25%. The only way to survive is cuts. Shrinking not only hurts, it disfigures. Shrunk businesses are tomorrow’s dead businesses. Meanwhile: the media business models that work are a) cheap to start and b) baffling to mainstream media. If you have been working in TV or newspapers for 20 years and got to the top, you have not had time to pay attention to the new media ecology. It is a great time to be young, to be daring, to be unafraid of failure.

Evidence: A site such as Glam - already huge and based on (relatively) little funding.

Four

Why we should be cheerful: Attractive populism is a real possibility

What’s happening: Populism is good for journalism. It connects journalism to large audiences. It is good for society; it keeps powerful people honest. It balances the pervasive curse of elitism. What interests the public is, in the end, in the public interest. We must learn to love our Daily Mails. But, historically, populism has been so damned ugly, mean, spiteful and nasty. Now, however, there’s a sign that a new populism might catch fire in the West that’s highly attractive: the populism of hope, of reason, of tolerance and of confidence in human ingenuity. Behind this lies a massive cultural shift to a post-materialist sensibility in which values replace stuff and happiness is only tenuously linked to wealth. Did anyone else notice Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair writing this month: “The media business is about the glory of stuff-stuff to buy, stuff to envy, stuff to dream about. But for the first time in modern media memory, stuff is now the enemy. The consumer is in retreat from consumerism.”? What a  manifesto for a new Beaverbrook.

Evidence: Barack Obama

Five

Why we should be cheerful: Print has a great future.

What’s happening: It’s just a matter of getting it right. This doesn’t contradict the four steps mentioned above. When I say the future’s with the web and journalism will be networked, I don’t preclude that journalism being published in print. The best newspapers of the next 10 years will create powerful online networks and use them to help create the words and pictures that they put into print. Print is not just a technology to be replaced by a newer one. Print is a genre with a soul of its own. But to survive, it must change. There’s no future for 126 page papers filled with a mix of heavy, light, UK, foreign, business, arts and sporting news. Papers will have to focus ruthlessly on what they do best and leave the rest to others. What they do best is to edit. (Some use the word “curate”). It boils down to this: taking a huge heap of confusing stories and reducing them to a package with meaning.  Distilling, synthesising, explaining, designing - that is what papers must focus on. They will have to do it with fewer pages and far smaller staffs. But when they do it right they will usher in another golden age of print. Of course printing machinery may evolve to the point where we have digital paper or e-paper. In my view that still counts as print.

Evidence: “Unlike the doom-and-gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights,” - Rupert Murdoch last week.

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