Marginalia

Notes on WikiLeaks, New Media, Fixing What's Broken

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:29:48 -0400

Annotations to Jay Rosen’s take on WikLeak’s Afghanistan War logs, the WaPo’s surveillance state investigation and the media:

1. If a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it. ((*Bullshit*. Herd journalism is the rule of the land — and the real story isn’t the documents anyways, but how they’re interpreted. ))

4. Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. ((No — it’s able to report because of the effort of a few highly motivated, tremendously skilled people working in a technological framework that, thanks to concerted effort by privacy activists, still allows privacy.))

5. So [the newspapers] were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.
Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show. ((Actually, we don’t know if this is effective or not. We’ll find out in years to come. Maybe we’ll find out that journalistic gatekeepers really play a crucial role, and the crowd is very unwise with this sort of thing; or vice versa; or neither. They hypothesis is now being tested.))

7. Also, can we agree that a news organization with a paywall wouldn’t even be in contention? ((No, we can’t. Or should whistleblowers on financial malfeasance skip the WSJ?))

8. [The WaPo’s investigation is] an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes. ((Disagreed. Because what’s needed to do the fixing is a civil society with a functioning democracy, engaged media and active citizenry, all manifested in the sort of concerted effort that occurred during Watergate. We don’t have that now. A minority of the public cares about what the WaPo exposed; and those who do are too fragmented, disorganized and distracted to pull the last few rusty levers in the broken machine of our society.))

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? ((Agreed on the last point. As for the first two: what if the elites just don’t care about reform?))

The Science of SEO?

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:19:07 -0400

In response to a discussion of the scientifically distasteful term “missing link,” and how SEO favors its use:

I wonder sometimes about how many of our traffic-enhancing strategies, including those focused on search engine optimization, are grounded in solid data and proven hypotheses, and how many are based on hunches, wishful thinking and preconceived notions.

To take the latest example, “missing link” is a hot search term. But its use is going to affect your — apologies for this word — brand; if I see an outlet using it, my snap judgement will be that they’re not credible. So I’ll be a bit less likely to look at other of their stories in the future; the chance of my subscribing to the outlet’s RSS feed, and providing a great many pageviews thereafter, drop to nil; and I won’t spread the story through my social network. (And then there’s the question of whether there are advertising or payment-relevant differences in the audiences of “missing link” and “non-missing-link” approaches.)

Maybe all this doesn’t matter, and lowest-common-denominator SEO really is the best possible approach to monetizing pageviews. But I’d like to see rigorous data to back this up, and not just marketing spiels from SEO consultants with products to sell.

"A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:09:03 -0500

“A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book - just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.”

- Digital Clutter: Why How We Read Matters

Why journalism needs paywalls

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:50:35 -0500

Why journalism needs paywalls

"AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on..."

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:44:09 -0500

“

AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on what Web-search and other data tell it is most likely to attract audiences and sponsors.

Instead of waiting to sell ads until an article or Web video is produced, AOL—which has scores of niche sites, such as beauty and fashion site Stylelist, in addition to its AOL brand—says it plans to offer marketers the chance to work with its editorial team to create custom content.

”

- AOL Readies New Media-Production System - WSJ.com

"In 2002, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette started charging for online content. While it has signed up..."

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:35:52 -0400

“In 2002, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette started charging for online content. While it has signed up only 3,400 subscribers, the circulation of its daily print edition has held steady at around 180,000 at a time when that of most other papers has fallen, and its owner, Walter Hussman Jr., has traveled around the country describing how charging for Web content can help stop the bleeding.”

- A New Horizon For The News

Via @petersuderman @jonhenke

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:49:41 -0400

Via @petersuderman @jonhenke

Unraveling The CIA Scandal

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:21:35 -0400

Unraveling The CIA Scandal

The free ride that's killing the news business

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:28:42 -0400

The free ride that's killing the news business:

Because the Little Red Hen bore all the costs to produce the bread, and the other animals bore none, she can’t afford to match their prices, and they drive her out of business.

"On the issue of attribution and linking standards, we realize that if algorithms are not aligned,..."

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:30:06 -0400

“On the issue of attribution and linking standards, we realize that if algorithms are not aligned, the search marketplace whacks progress. Content entities can quickly lose credit for a scoop if they’re not quick on the search-optimization draw. In his CJR piece, Osnos tells the story of SI.com essentially being scooped by Huffington Post on the A-Rod performance-enhancing-drugs story — at least in the eyes of the search engines. Though SI.com had broken the story, Google showed references, both those that attributed the SI.com story and not, ranking above the SI.com original. Huffpo’s command of SEO allowed it to prevail in the search marketplace on this hot piece. Is this a good or a bad thing?”

- “Does Attribution Make The Link Economy Less Awful?” neatly summarizing (without a direct link) “What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?”

"We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of..."

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:36:58 -0400

“We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.”

- Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World

"I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated,..."

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:05:50 -0400

“I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information.”

- David Simon’s Testimony at the Future of Journalism Hearing

The History of News Cycles

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:12:00 -0400

In the ongoing autopsy of journalism, relatively little attention has been paid to news cycles — far less than, say, declining ad revenues, falling circulations and non-payment models. But if those are obvious and immediate causes of death, then perpetual news cycles are an underlying factor, a stress that exacerbates the disease.

Daily and weekly journalism exist in an environment defined by cable TV news in the early 1990s and reinforced by internet culture, in which immediacy is paramount and attention fleeting. This tendency was not novel — news was headed in that direction for more than a century — but a confluence of changing economic and technological factors intensified it, and made it absolute.

Quality daily and weekly journalism does not fare well in this environment, which starves reporters of time and organizations of resources; and then, as losses mount, they are further starved.

Perhaps newspapers and newsweeklies, regardless of media, would still have withered were they governed by the news cycles of several generations ago. Perhaps not. Either way, it’s worth thinking of the history and consequences of news cycles, if only to better understand how they will shape the future of journalism.

Below and in pdf form is a paper I wrote several years ago while attending the Columbia Journalism School, before the industry collapsed. The conclusion now strikes me as Panglossian. Were I to write the paper again, I’d say that a perpetual news cycle is irredeemably destructive, a cultural analogue to cheap oil and excessive consumption, something that needs to be rejected and replaced by something sustainable.

Image: Flickr/mroach

***

The Acceleration of News Cycles
by Brandon Keim
February 2006

The study of journalism’s history, like any historical pursuit, ought to illuminate modern arrangements of life. While considering topics for this paper, however, I found myself frustrated, no matter my angle of approach, by the problem of defining precisely where journalism fits in the communications ecology of contemporary America.

In this vast informational body where each of us develops amidst friends, family and two hundred and sixty million strangers, arranged like so many cells in an elaborate scaffolding of community and workplace and industry, suspended in a rich nutrient broth of conversation and broadcast and webcast and telecast and email and bartalk and late-night pillowtalk, what does journalism do? In a map of this body social, what would light up when a story hit the evening news and like a firing neuron triggered stories that set off other stories, ideas floating in search of receptors in the public mind? Would we see a system malfunctioning, its signals erratic and lost in transit, or one that has simply taken on a new form, no better or worse than in the heady days of our republic’s founding?

Even trying to imagine the parameters and inputs of such a model is literally mind-boggling, perhaps better suited to a Borges than a historian, much less a history student. The analogy of brain and body is fitting; despite the best efforts of modern science, we still have but the haziest understanding of why we laugh or love or prefer green to blue. One might, however, at least characterize the status of some essential condition which proscribes a limit of our social metabolism. This parameter is the news cycle — specifically, the national news cycle, consideration of which may play to our vanity as journalists, but at least provides a place to start.

The term “news cycle” is, unfortunately, deeply imprecise, referring to several phenomena that are interconnected but deserve to be distinguished from one another. There is a rotational aspect to the term, referring to how long stories are featured before being replaced, as well as the somewhat more abstract lifespan of an aggregate story within the public and media consciousness — how long, for example, the attention of journalists and the public lingers on Monica Lewinsky or the Enron scandal. Most importantly, the news cycle also refers to the set of practices by which the contents of news are selected, delivered and consumed — a set of practices which influence, and are influenced by, the cycle’s rotational aspects.

It is taken for granted that we now reside within the so-called 24-hour news cycle, a phenomenon birthed by live satellite broadcast uplinks and, more importantly, by cable television news, which replaced the traditional dissemination of news at appointed times — via print in the morning, and television in the evening — with its dissemination at all times of day and night, necessitating its constant and accelerated production. Some argue that the 24- hour news cycle has been so intensified that it is better labeled a perpetual news cycle, in which aspects of the former — its equation of analysis and editorializing with fact, the substitution of punditry for reporting, a relaxation of hallowed journalistic standards and a fragmented obsession with the momentary — dominate and threaten to destroy journalism.

The difference between the 24-hour and perpetual news cycles is essentially semantic. Whatever one names it — I prefer the former — certain elements are indeed unprecedented, in degree if not nature, and dangerous. It is important, however, to place the 24-hour news cycle at the end, though certainly not the conclusion, of a historical continuum in which they have become shorter and more rapid as communications technologies have evolved.

Journalism was once conveyed solely by a single medium, the printed page, composed of information carried by hand and mouth. Early newspapers often contained accounts of events that took place months earlier; stories were arranged in the order of their arrival. While the papers’ heavy reliance on advertising, as well as editorial and political content provided by press owners, prefigured later commercial and content trends, they were essentially pre- modern.

In 1837, Samuel Morse patented the electrical telegraph, permitting information to be sent at near-instantaneous speed over long distances. James Carey has noted that the telegraph’s introduction has received far less attention than deserved, for it prefigured both the technology and the influences that are considered modern.1 The quantity of information tapped, dash by dash and dot by dot, was a trickle compared to what is now conducted by satellite and fiber- optic line, but the telegraph still compressed space and time towards the instant. The owners of the railroad track which conducted those electronic messages, as well as the machines that encoded and decoded them, gained the power to select and shape the news — not an absolute power, perhaps, but still dominant.2 The organization formed to gather and transmit news became the Associated Press, and its main competitor became Reuters.

Print was soon joined by radio, which NYU media theorist and historian Mitchell Stephens describes as the next significant transformation in journalism.3 Beginning with a humble Mexican station broadcasting from Tijuana into Los Angeles and San Diego in the late 1930’s, radio was the first form of mass communication to which one could turn at any moment and expect a fairly regular briefings.4 Rather than writing for the eye, radio journalists wrote for the ear, striving to compress even further the brevity and efficiency of telegraphically-carried print journalism, where per-word transmission prices had discouraged the ornate prose of early newspapers.5 Radio news was compressed to fit a smaller format, with some of what may have warranted coverage inevitably jettisoned to meet the needs of a medium so intrinsically less information-dense than text.6 This style would eventually become the news radio so perfectly embodied, to pick an especially infamous station, by New York’s WINS. “Give us twenty-two minutes,” asks their slogan, “and we’ll give you the world.”

Though radio news continued to gain prominence — and its significance, in an America rapidly reconfiguring itself around the automobile, is probably underestimated — print remained the nation’s primary news source. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, people read newspapers with a universal avidity that today is found in the habit of watching entertainment television. Most communities had at least one newspaper, many had more, and new editions were printed throughout the day as well as in the morning.7 In terms news production rates, the news cycle had certainly accelerated from its newsweekly roots. While printing editions at multiple intervals was not equivalent to the presently incessant production of news, the wire service infrastructure anticipated it; reporters for the Associated Press and similar organizations filed stories throughout the day and, to a much lesser degree, the night.8

Print remained the dominant source of journalism into the latter half of the twentieth century, when it and radio were joined by television news. Early TV journalism was delivered, like print, at precise intervals, with special attention paid to the early-evening network broadcasts. Leaving aside questions about the intrinsic effects of television as a medium on minds and relationships, TV soon proved itself an effective journalistic medium. Coverage of McCarthy-era red- baiting and the Civil Rights Movement prompted changes in policy and culture, and that of John F. Kennedy’s death underscored TV’s communal and emotive potential. However, it was not until the mid-1970’s that television exerted a fundamentally novel influence on the news cycle.

Portable videotape was first used in the 1976 presidential campaign, and in coming years shrunk the gap between news events and deadlines.9 Reporters, editors and producers rushed stories to air, often increasing the chance of mistakes and, in certain cases, making nuanced, substantive coverage difficult. Portable satellite uplinks allowed live coverage from around the globe, placing even more emphasis on instaneity — and the live experience, which however mediated has always been alluring, became even more seductive on television.10 These changes were not necessarily welcome. “Putting someone on the air while an event is unfolding is clearly a technological tour de force,” said Ted Koppel, “but it is an impediment, not an aid, to good journalism. To simply train a camera on a complicated event is not journalism, any more than taking someone out on a boat and showing them a stretch of the coastline is cartography.”11

The next historical phase, which shaped journalism into a form fully recognizable as modern, is difficult to arrange chronologically. It contains several phenomena that took place simultaneously and synergistically. The first of these, and most often cited, was the emergence of cable television news. Amidst telecommunications deregulation that would expand the reach of cable television from ten million subscribers in 1975 to forty million just ten years later, media mogul Ted Turner launched the Cable News Network in 1980.12 Initially derided by network television journalists, it survived and eventually thrived amidst a rapidly changing cultural and conomic terrain.

In tandem with the emergence of CNN, the growth of the entertainment industry, effected a subtle but significant shift in the minds of citizens: they became media consumers, with journalism just one in a vast array of entertainment choices. Of course, it is not as if movies and TV shows and books had never existed before, but they suddenly existed — television choices in particular — in an unprecedented profusion, all of which competed for audience attention and, as would soon become more apparent, audience money.13 News organizations were also owned to an increasing and equally unprecedented degree, by an ever-smaller number of corporations, who benefited from mid-1980’s easing of regulations and — in a way that is harder to quantify but just as important — were shaped by an economic and political culture that favored the aggregations of commercial entities into behemoths of a size unseen in nearly a century.

The Disney Corporation, for example, now owns or has significant stake in no fewer than fourteen book publishing imprints, fifteen magazines, one major television network, twelve cable networks, ten television stations in large population centers, thirteen international networks, four television production and distribution companies, eight movie studios and sixty-seven radio stations — to say nothing of its internet sites, music labels, video game studios, theme parks and sports teams.14 In such an environment, it was inevitable that ownership would conceive of journalism more and more as a means to a bottom-line end, with ratings acquiring the incontrovertability of gospel.15

It is not, of course, as if the profit motive was novel. Newspaper advertisements are as old as newspapers themselves. But the long-fruitful tension between profit and the public interest, which had provided a beneficial balance between, so to speak, medicine and candy, was dramatically decided.16 Market logic pervaded news production with a near-absolute ubiquity — and it was within this environment that cable news and and other producers of journalism were forced to compete. Cable survived by adopting journalistic practices that ultimately affected their competitors, many of whom responded — and not necessarily willingly — by mimicking those behaviors.

It is in reference to this and subsequent periods that we encounter mention of the 24-hour news cycle, a phrase which occurs no fewer than 16,800,000 times on Google — about one-fifth the pages returned by “Jesus Christ.” There is, as mentioned earlier, a rotational aspect to the term: after the passage of a day and night, it is expected that the primary newsmakers will produce a wave of stores building upon and replacing those of the previous day. At the same time, however, it is perpetual; stories on cable television, and now on our digital information networks, are introduced constantly, with only a tiny allowance made for sleep. Like radio, cable television news did not appear at scheduled intervals throughout the day, but was always on; unlike radio, it became a primary news source, and had considerably greater influence.

The cycle of breaking news followed by response and and analysis, which had once taken days, was compressed by cable news into a matter of hours. As a result, stories are rushed onto air — and, in order to compete, into print — before they are ready, and often before the facts have been authenticated.17 A feeding frenzy ensues; newsmakers mob one story, and as soon as another appears — which, at a moment when novelty rules, takes less and less time — they jump to the next, leaving the first unexplored.18 It is a behavior that existed in the latter days of wire service reporting, and was accelerated exponentially by the influence of television.

At the same time, the vastness of the 24-hour television ‘news hole’ — the time and space that needs to be filled — and the fact that talking heads are cheaper than quality reportage resulted in a news culture dominated by punditry and analysis, as well as a narrow focus on a limited number of stories, particularly those involving the ever-appealing themes of celebrity, sex and violence.19 This too both predated and was exacerbated by television. As Michael Schudsen wrote, “CNN’s ratings would soar and slump with the ebb and flow of events: Americans rarely turned in unless there was a blockbuster event like a war or a verdict in a high-profile crime case” — and during the particularly high-profile O.J. Simpson case, cable newsmakers learned that such “news” was essentially a free story which could be enscapulated with a courtroom camera feed, a reporter standing outside to repeat what happened, and a panel of guest “experts” telepresenced into the studio.20, 21

Such an approach, naturally, discouraged substantive news coverage. “Because the pattern of the modern press is to swoop in, set up camera stands and then try to fill the time and hold an audience,” wrote Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel after the 2000 Presidential election, “the press is oddly reactive, depending on news conferences and statements by campaign officials. The never-ending news cycle gives ‘reporters’ little time to actually go out and report. So we see a tendency to jump on small, incremental events and treat them as if they were momentous.”22 By the late 1990’s, when MSNBC and Fox News joined CNN, the hallmarks of modern cable news were firmly established: distantly qualified talking heads trafficking unsubstantiated allegations and scarcely informed opinion, so-called breaking updates from scenes which hadn’t changed since the last report a half hour earlier, and a near-monomaniacal focus on the scandal of the moment. The archetypal example is the execrable coverage of President Bill Clinton’s sexual involvement with intern Monica Lewinsky, which Kovach and Rosenstiel examined in their seminal Warp Speed: America in the Age of the Mixed Media Culture.

“This particular crisis,” wrote David Halberstam in the introduction to Warp Speed, “has been coming for more than a decade, as the power of cable television and the effect of it on the mainstream media have gradually changed the natures of what constitutes television broadcasting, giving us an ever escalating diet of tabloid reporting… . It was simply that in the past year the new media culture reached deeper into the nation’s bloodstream, and more traditional barriers were dropped at even higher levels in the profession.”23

Mainstream coverage of the Lewinsky case embodied all the worst aspects of the accelerated news cycles that attended the rise of cable journalism: the casual passage of rumor and allegation, the disempowerment of journalists in the face of incessant deadlines, a favoring of argument over reporting, a blockbuster menatality. The story broke on a Saturday, after Newsweek had deemed it too poorly sourced to publish, on the website of gossipmonger Matt Drudge; it was discussed, and therefore validate, on the Sunday news shows; by Tuesday the headlines read, “CLINTON ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE; STARR PROBES WHETHER PRESIDENT TOLD WOMAN TO DENY ALLEGED AFFAIRS TO JONES LAWYERS” — and that was based only on “sources close to the investigation.”24 By then the story had already dominated the mediasphere, and on Wednesday night Ted Koppel, having apparently changed his mind about training cameras on events and calling it journalism, proclaimed that the crisis “may come down to whether oral sex does or does not constitute adultery.”25

Three weeks into the scandal, the Committe for Concerned Journalists surveyed network news, newspaper and cable reporting. They found that more than two-fifths of all reportage in the first six days was not factual, but instead commenatary and punditry, and more than a tenth was either attributed to other news organizations or unverified — in short, more than half of the news was simply not news. “While we know of no other story that has been analyzed quite this way to offer a statistical comparison,” wrote Kovach and Rosenstiel, “we think it is fair to assume that such levels of commentary and repetition of other’s work are unprecedented.”26

So it went, with minor ebbs and flows, for the next twelve months — and sense it never stopped.

When I first conceived of this paper, I had hoped to answer, after contemplating the acceleration of news cycles and their effect upon news content, one basic question: whether Watergate — that iconic event in the history of journalism and American politics, a name encompassing both the initial robbery and the larger extent of Richard Nixon’s police-state project — would have the same outcome if covered today. Implicit in the response to this question, I thought, would also be the answers to another question: whether by focusing on megastories and elsewhere moving ever-more-quickly to the next story, stories that deserve coverage are ignored, while those that are covered are forgotten too quickly to have any effect. In short, I wanted to know whether the link between journalism and the public interest is broken.

The Watergate question, however, does not lend itself to rigid analysis. There are too many variables to compare it with some contemporary story of equivalent heft. Answering it is a matter of opinion — and, among the historians and journalists with whom I spoke, that opinion is divided. Likewise, whether important stories are ignored or passed over too quickly would require exhaustive and as-yet-unperformed data analysis. Until then, the answer is also a matter of opinion — though, more troublingly, there seems to be a wider agreement that this is, in fact, the case.27

However, while the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle are corrosive, the situation is perhaps not so bleak as it seems. For all that cycle predominates, it is not hegemonic nor wholly trivial. National Public Radio, which has largely eschewed the 24-hour news cycle, is more popular than ever.28 Magazines still have power; testimony to this is the effect of the New Yorker’s investigation into use of torture by U.S. troops. Coverage of the incompetent handling of Hurricane Katrina was widely acclaimed, and now, months later, continues. The most widely covered news story of the last year is the war in Iraq, and in recent months coverage has been dominated by belated but thorough investigations into ethical transgressions by those who led the country into war.29 Indeed, the mainstream media is enjoying something of a mini- renaissance, displaying more skepticism and courage than at any time since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The internet — or, to be precise, high-bandwidth electronic transfer of archived information — has in some ways created an alternative news cycle, in which the flame of stories that seemed dead burns quietly until the mainstream press returns to them.

By enabling the coordination of far-flung communities, the internet has also made it possible to ask another question: whether the mechanism of change, which I feared broken, has simply mutated. Perhaps, just as news cycles have always been in flux, so too have the means by which the public interest is maintained. Perhaps change originates, in a nation of two hundred and sixty million people, not in massive, concerted effort, but instead in the focus of small, interested groups. Perhaps it originates in some way as yet unknown. If so, those new forms of change will require an understanding 24-hour news cycle and its history. Once the behaviors of that cycle are understood, and it is seen in its cultural, economic and technological context, its effects might be mitigated, and journalism someday reclaimed.

FOOTNOTES
1 James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” in
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York, 1990.
2 Paul Starr, “The First Wire,” in The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern
Communications. New York, 2004.
3 Telephone conversation with Mitchell Stephens, NYU media theorist and
historian.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Telephone conversation with David Abrahamson, Northwestern University
journalism professor and historian.
8 Telephone conversation with Steve Isaacs, Columbia University journalism
professor and historian.
9 Michael Schudson and Susan E. Tifft, “The Press,” in American Journalism in
Historical Perspective. Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, editors. Oxford
University Press, 2005.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Museum of Cable Television website. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/U/
htmlU/unitedstatesc/unitedstatesc.htm
13 Telephone conversation with Mitchell Stephens.
14 Columbia Journalism Review website. http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/disney.asp
15 Telephone conversation with David Abrahamson.
16 Ibid.
17 Telephone conversation with Rem Rieder, Editor of the American Journalism Review.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Michael Schudson and Susan E. Tifft, “The Press,” in American Journalism in
Historical Perspective. Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, editors. Oxford
University Press, 2005.
21 Telephone conversation with David Abrahamson.
22 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, “Hearing Too Much and Learning Too Little.”
New York Times, November 17, 2000.
23 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Warp Speed: America in the Age of the Mixed Media
Culture. Century Foundation Press, 1999.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 In addition to the aforenoted telephone conversations, I also spoke with David
Thorburn, director of MIT’s Communications Forum; journalim historian William
David Sloan; and Jeffrey Dvorkin, National Public Radio’s ombudsman.
28 Telephone conversation with Jeffrey Dvorkin.
29 The Tyndall Report. http://www.tyndallreport.com/yearinreview.php3

A Comment on "Newspapers vs. Bloggers: The New News Process"

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:39:32 -0400

In his attack on the New York Times’ criticism of publish-first, verify-later tech blogging, Jeff Jarvis says “this discussion should be about so much more than just errors and corrections. This is about new and better ways to gather, share, and verify news.” In the process, he defends a very poor way of gathering and sharing news, and a mediocre way of verifying it.

A subtle equation, in which the benefits are weighed against the risks, ought to dictate when to publish a story. Sometimes it makes sense — i.e., is in the public interest — to publish when a story is single- or anonymously-sourced; at other times, it makes sense to do some more reporting, get more sources, and then go. Making a practice out of the first approach is irresponsible.

Citing Nick Denton’s defense of the practice is bizarre, though it makes sense if “24-hour cable news, where the viewer must become the editor,” is the model. Whether that should be the model is another question.

Starting in the early 90s, cable TV news embraced a round-the-clock news cycle; replaced reporters with talking heads; decided to neglect an array of stories in favor of a few sensationalistic eyeball-grabbers; and exchanged genuine reportage for here-we-are-outside-the-courthouse-style pseudo-reporting. Cable TV news is where broadcast journalism went to die, and its logic and imperatives have dragged other forms of journalism along with it.

Bryan Lam’s quote is telling — “If we don’t have rumors, what do we have as journalists? You have press releases. So maybe there is some honor in printing rumors.” Journalists have reporting. He’s not a journalist.

Some thoughts on David Carr's AdAge Q&A

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:44:00 -0400

Carr: I think one thing that people do not understand is, as recently as four or five years ago, to be a member of Manhattan media, you weren’t rich, but you lived as a rich person might. You went to the parties that a rich person would go to, you ate the food that a rich person would eat, you drank the vodka that a rich person would drink, and you’d end up in black cars, and you’d end up sometimes on boats and in helicopters. We lived as kings, and it convinced us, I think, that there was a significant underlying value to what we did.

It’s also worth thinking about how this changed the perspective of Manhattan media people, giving them the perspective of the rich. Someone — I think it was Eric Alterman or David Corn or Jonathan Alter, back in 2003 or so — wrote that the left/right divide among the media was an illusion and a red herring, that what really mattered was their lower-upper-class status, with all the biases & blind spots that entailed. One of the weirder things about the big network/cable television news shows is the divide between who works there and who watches them.

Carr: […] I just went through a cycle of Oscars with, I did the Monday media column, I did a Friday thing on the Oscars, I did some Arts and Leisure stuff, I made daily videos, weekly videos, and then I did occasional news coverage. I got done with Oscar season, I’m 52 years old, and I don’t think I really did anything good or important for like three weeks or a month afterwards. I was exhausted.

Dumenco: When you talk about your down period of recovering, post-Oscars, well, [Gawker Media chief] Nick Denton would have fired you by then, if you were working for Denton instead of the Times. I mean, if your page views were down that much for three or four weeks, if you weren’t keeping up.

Carr: […] and it would have been nothing personal, but he would have said, “Look, that’s not built into our model to have you go and do a little walkabout to get straightened out.” So that’s what great about The New York Times, but that’s what makes Nick very difficult to compete with.

And that’s why Gawker will never produce meaningful journalism.

Original Q/A here.

"Why journalists deserve low pay:" the annotated version

Mon, 25 May 2009 10:14:00 -0400

((Originally printed in the Christian Science Monitor. Hit the link — the CSM, if not this article, deserves the pageview.))

Why journalists deserve low pay
By Robert G. Picard

Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.

((Actually, lots of us told ourselves this even before the industry tanked. It’s why we became journalists. I dare say it’s a better motivation than whatever drove Robert Picard to be a media economist.))

Actually, journalists deserve low pay.

Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.

Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.

((Nobody’s ever suggested that blogging or Twittering were solutions in themselves. It’s a rhetorical straw man. And why dismiss micropayments out-of-hand when they haven’t really been tried?))

Where does value come from?

Moral philosophers differentiate intrinsic and instrumental value. Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement, including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value. It is important not in itself, but because it enlightens the public, supports social interaction, and facilitates democracy.

((Leaving aside the hairballs of intrinsic value — beauty can be cold, truth can be cruel, harmony achieved through disharmonious means, etc. — one could argue that enlightenment, social interaction and democracy are so important that whatever facilitates them is, in fact, valuable in itself, just as hands and lungs and eyes are intrinsically valuable to a body.))

Economic value is rooted in worth and exchange. It is created when finished products and services have more value – as determined by consumers – than the sum of the value of their components.

To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides. Journalism creates functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits for consumers. Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas. Emotional benefits include a sense of belonging and community, reassurance and security, and escape. Self-expressive benefits are provided when individuals identify with the publication’s perspectives or opinions, or when they’re empowered to express their own ideas.

These benefits used to produce significant economic value. Not today. ((Really? So it’s okay to be ignorant, alienated and powerless? Thought so. Journalism’s benefits produce just as much value as ever. What’s changed is the price people pay for them.)) That’s because producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, the difficulty and cost of operation, publication, and distribution severely limited the number of content suppliers. This scarcity raised the economic value of content. That additional value is gone today because a far wider range of sources of news and information exist.

((This is a glib and misleading argument. It’s true that communication space has been radically opened; but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the internet went mainstream, when news scarcity still existed, print and network-broadcast journalism were already in decline.

The exceptions to this were talk radio and talking head-based TV punditry, which are less journalism than journalism-themed entertainment. The same can be said of the round-the-clock, low-reportage approach that, having worked so well for O.J. Simpson’s self-destruction and Bill Clinton’s blowjob, became the dominant format of cable TV news.

As entertainment became cheap and plentiful — hundreds of channels for 20 bucks a month, etc., some of which offered “news” — people spent less time consuming genuine journalism, and paid less money for it. If the internet was still a 56.6k playground for geeks, we’d still be talking about the death of the journalism industry, only on a slightly delayed time scale.

In short, it’s not a “wider range of sources of news and information” that threatened the financial viability of good journalism, but a wider range of content of all sorts — the modern marketplace of information. A few diehards might cling to markets as final arbiters of value for socially essential goods and services, and suggest that journalism’s commercial failure is by definition deserved. Perhaps they also agree with, say, the market’s apparently high estimation of high-fructose corn syrup’s nutritional benefits.

Lastly and most importantly, it’s impossible to talk about the price of news without discussing the technological and cultural systems that have made it nearly impossible to charge money for online journalism. This is the 800 pound gorilla in Picard’s argument.))

The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labor of journalists. Unfortunately, that value is now near zero.

((Take this moment to find a story that demonstrates the idiocy of this statement. My own pick is this NYT piece on the importance of investigative reporting by regional newspapers to exonerating prisoners who were wrongfully sentenced to death.))

The total value is the value of content plus the value of advertising. However, advertisers don’t care about journalism – only the audience that it produces. Thus the real measure of journalistic value is value created by serving readers.

((Just because an editorial page doesn’t have much space for semantic nuance is really no reason to keep conflating “value” with “cost” and “price.”))

What are journalists worth?

Economic outcomes have traditionally held low priority for journalists. That’s got to change.

Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. ((Bullshit. A good journalist, one who’s been covering a subject at length, often has a unique base of knowledge. And if that’s not true, then most professors and electricians are hardly examples of uniqueness. They just happen to work in highly protected industries. Let’s see what happens if they’re forced to teach or wire buildings for free.)) Consequently, the primary economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others. In this process three fundamental functions and related skills have historically created economic value: Accessing sources, determining significance of information, and conveying it effectively.

Accessing sources is crucial because information and knowledge do not exist as a natural resource that merely has to be harvested. It must be constructed by someone. The journalistic skill of identifying and reaching authorities or others who construct expertise traditionally gave journalists opportunities to report in ways that the general public could not.

Determining significance has been critical because journalists sort through an enormous amount of information to find the most significant and interesting items for consumers.

Effective presentation involves the ability to reduce information to its core to meet space and time requirements and presenting it in an interesting and attractive manner. These are built on linguistic and artistic skills and formatting techniques.

((By “these,” I assume Picard actually means “this,” and refers to the ability to present information “in an interesting and attractive manner,” which he seems to lack. Maybe he could take lessons from a journalist.))

Today all this value is being severely challenged by technology that is “de-skilling” journalists. It is providing individuals – without the support of a journalistic enterprise – the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively.

((Only two of Picard’s defined journalistic skills are challenged by technology — for the third, see the previous, ineffectively presented paragraph — and the challenge is hardly severe. Citizen journalists sometimes compare to professional journalists in their ability to gather and assemble facts, but these skills largely depend on the support of a journalistic enterprise — i.e., the time and freedom to report news. For every story uncovered and fleshed out by citizen journalists, professional journalists are responsible for a hundred.

To return to his “professors and electricians” example, internet curricula and a glut of literate adults “severely challenge” the worth of the former; Home Depot and men with spare Sundays, the latter. Nevertheless, I’d rather learn Shakespeare from someone who’s studied him, and leave wiring my home lighting system to professionals.))

To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. ((Marginally true in terms of immediacy, but that’s about it. And does Picard really want to argue that economic value has historically been divorced from assembling and effectively communicating facts? Perhaps he can cite examples of news organizations staffed by journalists who, using their exclusive access to sources, delivered timely but inaccurate and illiterate stories. Fox News doesn’t count.)) Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay. ((Sure. And that’s why there’s so much great local and regional journalism produced by “ordinary adults.”))

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay. ((This is a good moment to note that some journalism amounts to rewrites of press releases. That sort of journalism truly deserves low pay. But I suspect that even Picard wouldn’t argue that all journalism amounts to this sort of lazy regurgitation, nor is it the target of his article.))

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. ((Commoditize: “To render (a good or service) widely available and interchangeable with one provided by another company.” Journalistic labor has not been commoditized. Journalistic output, on the other hand, has in many instances become commoditized, and in some cases the industry should be blamed for this. Journalism would be much improved were reporters covering and producing a far richer variety of stories. But this will require many things — most of all, more resources and support.)) Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages. ((Except for general assignment reporters, every journalist has “special expertise” — and GAs are pretty special, too. If Picard doesn’t think so, I suggest he apply for a general assignment gig at his nearest big-city daily. Let’s see how he does.))

Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation. ((A whole paragraph devoted to restating what Picard said just two sentences ago. See: “effective presentation.”))

It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market, much less the highly competitive information market. ((Says the gorilla: a “highly competitive” market in which it’s expected that all goods will be sold for nothing.)) They prefer to justify the value they create in the moral philosophy terms of instrumental value. Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue. ((Some people think that trees, because they absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, are intrinsically good and should be protected, even though they don’t produce revenue. The fools!))

A century and half ago, journalists were much closer to the market and more clearly understood they were sellers of labor in the market. Before professionalism of journalism, many journalists not only wrote the news, but went to the streets to distribute and sell it and few journalists had regular employment in the news and information business. ((So let’s turn back the clock to the mid-19th century! And why stop there? How about some mid-19th century medicine and jurisprudence while we’re at it?)) Journalists and social observers debated whether practicing journalism for a news entity was desirable. Even Karl Marx argued that “The first freedom of the press consists in it not being a trade.”

Adapt or die

If the news business is to survive, we must find ways to alter journalism’s practice and skills to create new economic value.

Journalism must innovate and create new means of gathering, processing, and distributing information so it provides content and services that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. And these must provide sufficient value so audiences and users are willing to pay a reasonable price. ((The gorilla just coughed.))

If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report the news that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences. ((The irony, of course, is that Picard’s words appeared in the Christian Science Monitor — a publication built on the second-day, value-added story, in which depth and analysis were favored over pack journalism. The Monitor lost $6 million last year.))

One cannot expect newspaper readers to pay for page after page of stories from news agencies that were available online yesterday and are in a thousand other papers today. Providing a food section that pales by comparison to the content of food magazines or television cooking shows is not likely to create much value for readers. Neither are scores of disjointed, undigested short news stories about events in far off places.

((Note that the New York Times satisfies all these criteria, and it’s still tanking. The gorilla coughs again.))

Some news magazines have confronted the issue and are already changing and trying to provide unique news content. Newsweek has moved away from creating a compendium of events to a publication that explores the issues and implications of events and trends. ((And they’re no doubt doing so without any reportorial reference whatsoever to stories produced by daily news organizations, no doubt.)) US News & World Report has emphasized its consumer review and rankings activities. ((Now there’s a winner. Maybe they could add classified ads, too.))

Daily newspapers don’t have quite as much leeway with content but they can emphasize uniqueness. The Boston Globe, for example, could become the national leader in education and health reporting because of the multitude of higher education and medical institutions in its coverage area. ((And if any other reporter in the country wants to cover their local schools or hospitals, then back off!)) Not only would it make the paper more valuable to readers, but it could sell that coverage to other publications. ((What happened to not expecting consumers to pay for the same stories as are available elsewhere?)) Similarly, The Dallas Morning News could provide specialized coverage of oil and energy, The Des Moines Register could become the leader in agricultural news; and the Chicago Tribune in airline and aircraft coverage. ((Second verse, same as the first.)) Every paper will have to be the undisputed leader in terms of their quality and quantity of local news. ((Finally, Picard says something sensible. Of course it doesn’t quite jive with the whole citizen journalist thing, but why quibble.))

Finding the right formula of practice, functions, skills, and business model will not be easy, but the search must be undertaken.

It is not just a matter of embracing uses of new technologies. Journalists today are often urged to change practice to embrace crowd sourcing, to search specialty websites, social networks, blogs, and micro-blogs for story ideas, and to embrace in collaborative journalism with their audiences. Although all of these provide useful new ways to find information, access knowledge, and engage with readers, listeners, and viewers, the amount of value that they add and its monetization is highly debatable. The primary reason is that those who are most highly interested in that information and knowledge are able to harvest it themselves using increasingly common tools. ((Too bad this paragraph wasn’t the entirety of the article.))

Finding the rights means to create and protect value will require collaboration throughout news enterprises. It is not something that journalists can leave to management. Journalists and managers alike will need to develop collaboration skills and create social relations that make it possible. Journalists will also need to acquire entrepreneurial and innovation skills that makes it possible for them to lead change rather than merely respond to it.

The demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies.

((Picard, looking at gorilla: “Does anyone smell a gorilla?”

The means to “protect value” appears to be an oblique reference to the fundamental necessity of devising a system in which journalists can expect to be reasonably compensated for the value of their labor. This system once existed, but it was supported in large part by advertising. Those revenues, along with revenues provided by point-of-sale and subscription fees, have been radically reduced in the transition to the internet, where advertisements are quantifiably ineffectual and fees mocked by consumers.

Not every discussion of journalism’s troubles need to focus on this problem, but analyzing the industry’s implosion without even mentioning it is ludicrous. At the very least, it’s a failure to apply the journalistic skill defined by Picard as “determining significance.” Some might call it “burying the lede.” ))

Google and Local Journalism

Fri, 15 May 2009 17:04:49 -0400

“We hear that Google is apparently talking with papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times. And that makes sense, given their importance and size. But the problem with that is that as great as those papers may be, they are outliers in the world of daily journalism. What’s needed is something to help the 1,400 or so smaller daily publications, as well as the thousands of weeklies.

It’s time for Google to put its money where its mouth is, to assist directly in the fulfillment of its mission statement, by creating a “Google Academy” for the creation of a new era of journalism.”

From What Google should do to help save newspapers, local reporting.

On "The 'Lack of Vision' thing?"

Mon, 11 May 2009 18:50:23 -0400

Dan from Xark wants to replace journalism with informatics. Interesting read:

On the other hand, the 2010 “story” is only a subset of a much more complex and valuable data set, which exists within a data structure that allows its information to be retrieved accurately and reconfigured in useful ways.

Quick critique.

One, invoking evolution as a guiding principle: please stop. Evolution goes down plenty of non-productive paths. Many adaptations are irrelevant or counterproductive. Just because a proposed system builds on the old is no guarantee of success.

Two, the situation used to illustrate the proposed new journalism form — covering a local home fire — is cherry-picked. Journalism as database-friendly fact gathering could arguably work in this case, but more complex stories — politics, culture, anything involving enterprise — would not likely lend themselves to that sort of codification.

Three, why do pay-for-content models amount to the creation of “artificial scarcity”? Reportage doesn’t grow on trees.

Newspapers have a future — one nickel at a time

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:09:12 -0400

Newspapers have a future — one nickel at a time:

So pay to be. Assuming it’s necessary, I propose that American newspapers get an exemption from federal antitrust statutes, allowing them all to shut down their Web sites on the same day and to…

The American Press on Suicide Watch

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:06:15 -0400

The American Press on Suicide Watch:

Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.