Bill Doskoch: Media, BPS*, Film, Minutiae

Curated knowlege, trenchant insights & witty bon mots

The ‘Economist’ interview with Jay Rosen

The Economist interviewed New York University journalism professor, critic and author Jay Rosen.

Here are my thoughts and some questions stemming from @jayrosen_nyu‘s answers.

What I’m giving you (in places) is snippets of Rosen’s full answers to his “Democracy in America” interviewer. Read the entire interview before you delve into my post (it’s concise — unlike my response).

DiA: What is the biggest problem with the news media in America today?

Rosen: The cost of changing settled routines seems too high, but the cost of not changing is, in the long term, even higher. A good example is the predicament of the newspaper press: the print edition provides most of the revenues, but it cannot provide a future. I know of no evidence to show that young people are picking up the print habit. So if the cost of abandoning print is too high, the cost of sticking with it may be even higher, though slower to reveal itself. That’s a problem.

If online provided the same revenues as print did, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But online doesn’t. It only provides a fraction of print revenues.

I’ve seen Kirk LaPointe*, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun, comment in September 2008 that 90 to 95 cent of newpaper revenues come from the print product; I believe I’ve seen Steve Yelvington comment on Twitter that news organizations can get their online revenue proportion up to between 20 and 30 per cent.

* LaPointe had a blog item today on the revenue challenges facing newspapers as they switch to digital

To me, the question is this: If you’re a legacy news business, how do you best transition to a lower-revenue environment — gradually or abruptly?

In Utah, the Deseret News is going with abruptly. It has chopped almost half its staff as part of a digital-first strategy, according to the New York Times.

This abrupt/gradual divide remains an issue of contention. Robert G. Picard, a media economist, has produced a few related posts in the past 18 months:

The ‘dead and dying’ post has this quote:

Have journalists gone mad?

It (sic) some ways they have. They are panicking at problems in big city media and ignoring the fact that most newspapers are relatively stable and reasonably healthy. The only newspapers experiencing serious competitive difficulties are those in the top 25 markets (about 1 percent of the total) and these are joined in suffering by corporate newspaper companies whose executives have made serious managerial mistakes.

I remember Rosen once tweeting approvingly of a mea culpa by John Temple, last publisher and editor of the Rocky Mountain News, which went out of business in 2009 after almost 150 years. I asked the following in a blog post about Temple’s analysis:

After reading it (it’s long), ask yourself if Temple addressed the following question satisfactorily:

If the RMN had done everything right digitally, would it still be in business today?

Picard offered this perspective on the RMN:

The Rocky Mountain News did not die because the newspaper industry is in trouble, but because it was the secondary paper in the market and the joint operating agreement was not enough to save it.

In Canada, while there were staff cuts during the 2008-2009 recession, very few papers actually shut down (CTV moved to close or sell some small TV stations). None have been aggressively moving the the focus to digital at the expense of print (are we behind the curve?). Although CanWest Global went bankrupt, its individual newspapers were profitable. CanWest’s problems stemmed from excessive debt (it overpaid Conrad Black back in 2000).

The Globe and Mail newspaper has been aggressive on the online front (it was the first Canadian newspaper to offer a dedicated online news team for breaking news). But note this from publisher Philip Crawley:

He said the new-look, full-colour Globe and Mail that will come out in the fall of 2010 will “change the way you think of newspapers. It will not look like the newspapers you currently see.”

So one digital-friendly newspaper (disclosure: The Globe and Mail is part of CTVglobemedia; I work for CTV News, a corporate cousin of the G&M) seems prepared to make a huge bet on the printed product — to me, that’s a transitional approach.

We’ll see who’s right.

In the same question, Rosen also talked about trust:

Another example is the decline of trust. In the mid-1970s over 70% of Americans told Gallup they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the press. Today: 47%. Clearly, something isn’t working. But revisions to the code of conduct that has led to this decline would be seen by most journalists as increasing the risk of mistrust. I’ve tried to argue that the View from Nowhere—also called objectivity—should be replaced by “here’s where we’re coming from.”

On what basis should a news organization be trusted: For getting the facts right, or for doing an exemplary job of bias confirmation for its audience? If trust means the former rather than the latter, then of what value is trust? Does Rosen trust Fox News? Its core audience sure does, even though Fox misinforms them on key issues.

But in a practical sense, in Canada, we already have some differentiation on ideological lines. If we can compare the main Toronto daily newspapers, the Toronto Star (the city’s largest by circulation) has always been a mid-market, L/l-iberal newsaper; the Globe and Mail has been red Tory, the National Post upscale conservative and the Toronto Sun downmarket conservative. It’s an unspoken version of ”here’s where we’re coming from.”

If Toronto Star readers trust their paper, but not the other three, what does that mean?

I should cast about for some polling on trust in Canadian news media and see how it compares to the United States.

But I really do think that in the divided country that the United States seems to be these days, being squarely in the middle might be the wrong place to be.

For what it’s worth, I’ve long asserted that centrism can be a form of bias (Rosen makes the same point further into the interview).

DiA: You’ve written a book titled “What Are Journalists For?” Looking at political coverage in America, how is your answer to that question different from the job journalists are actually doing today?

Rosen replied that traditional “horse race” coverage allows the political press to show it isn’t ideological. But he asks how this could help voters make a decision on who to support.

My own view is that journalists should describe the world in a way that helps us participate in political life. That is what they are “for”. But too often they position us as savvy analysts of a scene we are encouraged to view from a certain distance, as if we were spectators to our own democracy, or clever manipulators of our fellow citizens. Weird, isn’t it? So that’s why I wrote my book and gave it that title.

Rosen often refers to the “Church of the Savvy.” He assures people that the term is not a compliment.  This interview with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders has Rosen talking about the term in the context of raising the issue of a single-payer health system:

Here’s a few thoughts.

I’d like to talk about political reporting in the context of during an election and the inter-election period, but I think politics in current-day Canada (and possibly the United States) are now about being a permanent campaign.

That being said, during a Canadian election, the campaign generally has two phases — the parties first set out their policy platforms then spend the back half battling to woo votes. In the back half, depending on the campaign’s dynamics, any pretense this is a debate about policy choices starts dissolving. The rhetoric generally turns quite negative as parties attack their opponents, often on trivial grounds (“Vote for us: We’re the least worst option!”) And by the end, guess what? It usually is a horse race, and the messaging is adjusted accordingly. One example in 2008 was NDP Leader Jack Layton beseeching disaffected Liberals to lend their vote to his party because their party was broken. Anyone remember the infamous “Soldiers. In the streets. With guns!” Liberal attack ads of the 2005-06 campaign?

The 2008 Canadian federal election offers an excellent example to buttress Rosen’s point — the Liberals’ Green Shift. In essence, the shift would mean imposing a carbon tax and cutting income taxes.

The Conservatives went berserk, branding this as a “tax on everything.”

The Green Shift actually came out before the election, and I can remember Peter Mansbridge, anchor of CBC TV’s The National, opening up discussion of the new plan by the At Issue political panel this way:

I don’t want to talk about the policy (of the Green Shift). I want to talk about the politics.

At a Canadian Journalism Foundation discussion on polling sometime in early 2009, I brought up that anecdote and asked somewhat acidly about  the value in polling people on how they feel about an issue if the news media has done nothing to inform them about it.

I suggested that perhaps polling could be used to identify knowledge gaps in the public, which the news media could then fill in. No one came over and slapped me on the back afterwards for uttering that idea.

But in this instance, Rosen is spot on. If the discussion is about the politics and not the policy, we’re not going to have a very productive conversation as a society.

Here are some related posts made during the 2008 campaign in both countries:

DiA: Should journalists strive to be neutral, disinterested observers?

Rosen: This is complicated. I do not think journalists should “join the team”. They bridle at that, for good reason. Power-seeking and truth-seeking are different behaviours, and this is how we distinguish politics from journalism. I think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which a serious journalist is engaged. …

Rosen talks about the current controversy around whether U.S. President Barack Obama is a Muslim (I partly deal with that issue in this Aug. 27 post: A house united in ignorance cannot stand).

But even if you do stories as a U.S. journalist pointing out that the claim is nonsense, you won’t be believed by the 18 per cent who choose to believe it is true — or stop those who repeat the canard because they see it as a useful political weapon.

There’s a component of the U.S. populace that hates Obama (there were also visceral Bush-haters back in the day). They are beyond the reach of fact and reason. There is nothing that journalists can do about that problem — especially if those folks have Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News team to egg them on.

Jon Stewart ran a clip during the 2009 health care debate of some older man in Arizona saying he didn’t like the “spin” of the MSM, so that’s why he watched Fox News. (?!?!)

DiA: In Washington a lot of reporting takes the form of left v right. As you say, “The two party system and the journalist’s method of pushing off from both sides to generate authority fit perfectly together.” How does this lead to poor journalism?

Rosen: … When both parties are closed to certain ideas, the news system becomes closed to them, too. Not good. When journalists get attacked from the left and the right, they take it as confirmation that they’re doing something right, when they could be doing everything wrong. …

That’s a reasonably sound assertion. But in these times, a news organization can be attacked not just for being wrong on the facts, but for being right. Actually, if you want to dig into news history, see how the Reagan administration dealt with the NYT’s reportage on the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador.

DiA: Media is a business, and many of the media outlets that are doing the best business are those that tell their audiences what they want to hear, and those that pursue the politics-as-horse-race model. So how do we change the incentives in order to make the media more informative? Or does the public simply get the media it deserves?

Rosen: … “What people want” arguments don’t impress me. I think anyone with a half a brain knows that you have to listen to demand and give people what they have no way to demand. You have to listen to them, and assert your authority from time to time, because listening well is what gives you the authority to recommend what is not immediately in demand.

There’s some truth to that. And I’ve argued in blog debates that one’s news judgment shouldn’t be driven solely by commercial news values.

However, there are limits to what you can push at your audience.

I don’t know if Rosen has read/written much on cognitive bias, but Chrystia Freeland briefly touched on the subject in a short essay on business books that was published in the New York Times.

Basically, people respond to personal stories, not data and abstract terms, she said. I’ll recycle a personal observation from that post:

Keep in mind that people don’t necessarily read journalism as an act of citizenship. There is a very high risk they will default to do something more entertaining with their leisure time than plow through a quantitatively dense treatise on investment banking sector problems — even though the problem has the potential to shatter their world.

I believe it was Neil Postman who coined the phrase “Amusing ourselves to death.”

Back in the late 1990s when I worked at the Western Producer, a weekly agricultural newspaper, I did a 25,000-word project called “The Farm Crisis for Non-Farmers.” It won some awards and was possibly the first web-native special project of its kind done in Canada (my mind was blown by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Black Hawk Down online series two years earlier).

In the course of my interviews, I jokingly asked one agricultural economist, “Have you ever tried to explain commodity price deflation to a farmer?” He just laughed.

But that reality was one of  the roots of the crisis du jour. I tried to make it clear in my reportage, but one good series alone isn’t enough to turn around deeply-held misunderstandings of reality.

Note what Rosen reads:

DiA: What are some examples of newspapers, magazines or news shows that are practicing the right kind of journalism, in your opinion?

Mr Rosen: Particularly good at what they do: Advertising Age. Gawker. Wired. Voice of San Diego. The New Yorker. The Economist. (Disclosure: You’re The Economist!) Rachel Maddow. Frontline. The New York Times. West Seattle Blog. Texas Tribune (Disclosure: I’m an advisor there). “To the Point” with Warren Olney. The Atlantic. “This American Life”. The Guardian. Jon Stewart. There are probably some regional newspapers doing a great job that I simply don’t read, but fewer than before.

A good number of names on that list are elite publications (Some are crap. Gawker’s current spewing of repugnant link bait on Twitter has turned me off the site). It would be helpful for me for Rosen to identify mid-market publications and news shows that he sees as doing a good job journalistically while also thriving as businesses.

Final question:

DiA: Are new technologies leading to an improved media establishment? Or are the lower barriers to entry allowing for shoddier journalism to sneak through and the loudest, shrillest voices to dominate?

Rosen: Neither proposition do I endorse. The media establishment is being shocked into awareness of how fragile its authority and franchise are. Through the fallen gates stream bad actors, good people with no talent, young people who won’t wait, smart people who don’t need anyone’s permission to publish, the people formerly known as your sources, assorted charlatans, paranoids, shysters and fools, and the obsessives who will probably discover the next press. Almost everything remains up for grabs, but the traditional players have not been swept away and so they are in position to grab a lot of it. Some new players will do well too. Ninety percent of everything is crap, but that’s nothing novel. There’s just more everything now.

That’s true as far as it goes.

But it would have been helpful to ask an eighth question: How do commercial organizations pay for good journalism in a low-revenue environment? How much should good journalism cost to provide, especially high-social-value accountability journalism?

Addendum

Here’s a Jan. 27 post that contains an exchange between myself and Rosen: Don’t worry, Big News, a new business model will just happen some day.

Update

I tweeted about the post  shortly after 1 p.m. I included Rosen’s Twitter handle.

About 40 minutes later, he issued this tweet:

A superb summary in English of what I told journalism students in Paris today. Thanks, Fiction in Truth http://jr.ly/4smg

So Rosen’s online, and my tweet would have shown up in his @ replies. Let’s see if he acknowledges this post’s existence! …

(Sunday, Sept. 5)

Nope! But he did tweet about a reference to his interview:

Riffing off my Economist interview, the editor of the Indianapolis Star asks his readers: “How can we regain your trust?” http://jr.ly/65vq

Note this quote from editor Dennis Ryerson:

Rosen thinks the press’ long-held premise of objectivity should be replaced by “here’s where we are coming from.” It’s an interesting argument, but if he wants us to announce that we will align our work to the left or right and skew our reporting accordingly, I’m not there. Are you?

Here’s where Ryerson seems to agree with me:

 As the political debate has become more black and white, with no shades of gray, reporting from the center increasingly will be challenged.

I should note that the Nieman Journalism Lab tweeted the following on Sept. 2:

I sent an email on Sept. 2 to the three people listed on the Nieman contact page offering up this post as something to tweet. Never got an answer back.

The lab does say this:

We’d love to hear from you: your reactions to what we write, ideas for topics we should be covering, brilliant ideas that aren’t getting enough attention, or just whatever’s on your mind.

Until I find evidence of the contrary, it seems the lab wants nothing to do with anything critical of their good pal Prof. Rosen, who tweeted this on Aug. 27:

Every week. Without fail. You need to read it and follow the links. @NiemanLab‘s week-in-review for future-of-news freaks http://jr.ly/4qci

Log-rolling, thy name is social media.

Tags: , , , ,

Thu, September 2 2010 » Main Page, Media

« »