Want some to see pompous, new-school media criticism dissected? I’ve got your candy
Belgian information designer Stijn DeBrouwere wrote the following in a blog post Monday:
Last month, I wrote a guest piece for Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog about how, sometimes, it’s really okay to give readers what they want. The piece got some interesting comments from, well, old-timers in the craft.
It’s fascinating to see how media criticism has evolved into two strands, each as committed to good journalism as the other, maybe even in agreement on some of the finer points, but each strand with way different priorities.
Let’s go through them step by step:
- The old school reads about the current state of journalism in their union newsletter, while youngsters are browsing the Nieman Journalism Lab.
I’m old (I’m 51). I don’t belong to a union. I work online for a local TV station. I read NJL posts on a regular basis. Does that make me old-school or new-school?
- The old school complains about how we’re not covering justice and national politics the way we used to, while a new generation is upset that so many journalists look down on regional and local news. So much potential in hyperlocal.
Hmm. No links at all there. Where did the information designer get his information?
- The old school is shocked when a journalist takes sides, while most of us will nod when Jay Rosen says that it’s only fair for journalists to be transparent about where they come from, rather than faking objectivity and pretending to be neutral when they’re not.
Who is “most of us”? Is there a difference between fake and real objectivity? Is aspiring to objectivity and failing better or worse than than aspiring to nothing more than bias confirmation amongst your readership? If all you are doing is engaging in bias confirmation, then are you really in the journalism business? There’s no indication DeBrouwere has given these matters even the slightest consideration.
I would note the remarks of one colleague from the early 1990s (when he was in his 20s) about how could he possibly not take sides at the Saskatchewan legislature. The gist of his response was that when one sees the political sausage being made there, one found it easy to stay neutral.
And simply put, if one is covering politics, all sides are trying to control the message — and that leads to some nose-stretching at times. If you’re trying to serve your audience as a mainstream news outlet, is it not your job to try and determine where the truth might be found within the posturing?
Is it also not your job to consider multiple points of view on a given issue and (within the constraints of time and space) to give fair, accurate representation to those various points of view — regardless of your personal views?
Or is your job to advance the lies of your team — while being transparent, of course?
I’m such a woolly mammoth. Where’s the tar pit?
- The old school laments the decline of investigative journalism, while the new school is thinking up new ways to hold people in power accountable, and to catch them when they’re lying.
Again, no link to this broad claim about the “old school” — the absence of such links usually drives Rosen nuts. I wonder if he’s weighed in on DeBrouwere’s post somewhere.
In any event, holding people in power accountable and catching them when they’re lying is part of investigative reporting. Who is actually against new ways of doing it better?
Question: Does DeBrouwere consider Clay Shirky to be old-school? Because Shirky thinks the United States is headed towards a dark period in accountability journalism as a result of the structural disruption to the news business caused by the Internet.
Here are some Shirky-related posts on this blog:
- Oct. 3, 2009 – What’s next for the future of journalism?
- Oct. 3, 2009 – ‘Rescuing the reporters’
- Sept. 25, 2009 – Shirky in a nutshell: Let newspapers die, don’t charge for news
Back to DeBrouwere:
- The old school would wish the government intervenes to support quality journalism, whereas we’d rather win the support of our fellow citizens through Spot.Us and Kickstarter.
Again, no link to another broad claim to (in the words of Judy Sims) this “fantastic and very true piece.” What was I saying earlier about bias confirmation? Actually, none of the tweets attached to the post seem to notice the lack of such links. Strange.
I have no problem with the concept of Spot.Us and Kickstarter, but just glancing at them, I see them as a supplement to traditional news organizations, not a replacement.
- The old school regularly reminds us that our readers are stupid, whereas the internet generation knows that our obsessive focus on breaking news is hardly congenial to people who wish to understand the broader issues facing our society.
I don’t quite know what to say about that, except I’ve been arguing for a long time that there should be a news stream and a meaning stream (here’s an August 2007 post that touches on the subject). Information without context is valueless. And people have a need for both sensory stimulation (hard news, by its nature, has visceral impact) and meaning.
The BBC website does a good job of balancing these two needs on a global level, but it is a heavily subsidized public broadcaster.
I once suggested the New York Times set up a wiki to organize its “Times Topics” pages, but that went nowhere. I don’t use that feature of the site very much. Merely offering me a list of stories in reverse chronological order doesn’t add value (checking it tonight finds minor improvements since my last visit there).
People don’t go to Wikipedia to discover breaking news (I should note there is news on its main page), although they may check it out once they’ve heard about something and want to dig deeper (because of Wikipedia’s design, it quite often comes up very high in Google rankings for a given topic). I tend to use it on topics of timeless interest.
One example: figuring out who performed the mid-1970s disco tune “Car Wash” (it was Rose Royce) for a tweet on Sunday.
But providing that type of information only makes sense if you’re doing it on an extremely low-cost basis.
Try producing Wikipedia on a for-profit basis and paying its contributors. Let me know how it goes. Funny how so many new-school, for-profit business models seem to be founded on paying content creators nothing.
DeBrouwere might disdain this reality, but visceral impact (which can come from suddenly learning about a new, dramatic event) drives online news traffic — to a point. Some of Gawker‘s and the HuffPo‘s more sensationalist content turns me off.
Oh. Those two are digital-native and new-school? Well then, it must be okay.
- The old school thinks good journalism is dying. The new school thinks news has become a commodity.
Great journalism is anything but a commodity. The best can be compared to any kind of top-flight artistic output.
As we move into a much lower-margin reality, however, the pressures to produce fast-food newsburgers will continue to grow — and that will lead to even more commoditized news. News organizations will be even more resolute about chasing that which is cheap and easy. They’ll have to do so; they’ll have less revenue. That also means less subsidization of high-social-value, low-economic-value journalism by more profitable types of news.
But as Clay Shirky said, the Internet cuts costs. It doesn’t raise revenues. C’est le medium.
- The old school will cite Benjamin Franklin, who said “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter” — younger journalists, instead, will wonder whether newspapers still have an important role to play in society, whether they can make or break politicians now that so few people still trust the press.
Is DeBrouwere perhaps confusing Benjamin Franklin with Thomas Jefferson? Here’s a fuller version of the quote that I found at this page:
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” –Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787.
I’m not an expert in American political history, but my interpretation is that Jefferson saw it as being mission-critical for the then-fledgling democracy to have an informed citizenry in order to self-govern effectively. There weren’t many news media options in 1787.
In any event, who goes around spouting that quote in defence of newspapers in the context of our time (link, please)? However, I do think the need and rationale for classically good journalism in democratic societies remains timeless.
As far as “trusting” the press goes, there are valid reasons for feeling let down by the U.S. mainstream news media (eg. fumbling the ball on the lead-up to the Iraq War), but from what I can see from my Canadian perch, the United States is a seriously divided place these days. Can’t quantify it, but it seems to me that many Americans are looking for bias confirmation. That means they might well “trust” an outlet that tells them lies they find believable. For background, reach Frank Rich’s Aug. 21 column from the NYT on the ‘mosque’ controversy near Ground Zero.
- The old school just wishes there was more money to go round, whereas those new to the newsroom doubt if money would solve anything. They’ve seen their bosses throw money out of the window; they know we fail to act on lucrative opportunities time and again.
Money won’t solve anything, eh? Well, it pays for:
- FOI requests
- travel
- equipment
- complex, socially-important investigations
and many other things — wages, even.
What DeBrouwere links to above isn’t about money not solving anything. It’s an argument about not converting newspapers into non-profits and instead letting them die and having new business models emerge. An excerpt from the Jan. 30, 2009 post:
Here at NewWest.Net, we’re getting by with online advertising, a solid conference business, a few complimentary activities like online event calendars, and relentless effort to do a lot with a little. We think we’re going to do big things, and we have some more new business angles up our sleeve, but it will take a while. In the meantime wages aren’t what they were at, say, the Los Angeles Times (where I once worked), though they’re competitive with the local daily. Life is stressful, and we don’t have anywhere near the editorial resources we’d like to have. But in that regard our position is no different from countless other businesses in these difficult times. And the happy fact is that the last three months have been our best ever on the business side, despite the economy and the general ad-market meltdown.
I should shoot Jonathan Weber a note and see how NewWest is doing today.
- There’s wisdom in both strands of media criticism, but sometimes I can’t help but feel the old school hankers for a mythical past of journalistic excellence that never existed. Apparently I’m not the only one who is fascinated about that generation gap, either
I think DeBrouwere hankers for a mythical view of the old school that largely exists in his mind (it’s certainly not substantiated by linked-to, quantitative evidence) and the craniums of his fellow travellers. It’s perhaps fitting he would end with links to two posts I find almost as annoying.