What Journalists Do
This CJR story by Dean Starkman is being widely disseminated and discussed in journalism circles. Here’s what it’s about:
No one reading this magazine needs to be told that we have crossed over into a new era. Industrial-age journalism has failed, we are told, and even if it hasn’t failed, it is over. Newspaper company stocks are trading for less than $1 a share. Great newsrooms have been cut down like so many sheaves of wheat. Where quasi-monopolies once reigned over whole metropolitan areas, we have conversation and communities, but also chaos and confusion.
A vanguard of journalism thinkers steps forward to explain things, and we should be grateful that they are here. If they weren’t, we’d have to invent them. Someone has to help us figure this out. Most prominent are Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen, whose ideas we’ll focus on here, along with Dan Gillmor, John Paton, and others. Together their ideas form what I will call the future-of-news (FON) consensus.
According to this consensus, the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.
Here’s the argument by the author:
Not only does the FON consensus have little to say about public-service journalism, it is in many ways antithetical to it. For one thing, its anti-institutionalism would disempower journalism. Jarvis and Shirky in particular have reveled in the role of intellectual undertakers/grief counselors to the newspaper industry, which, for all its many failings, has traditionally carried the public-service load (see Pulitzer.org for a laundry list of exposés””on tobacco-industry conspiracies; worker-safety atrocities; Lyndon Johnson’s wife’s dicey broadcasting empire; group-home abuses in New York; redlining in Atlanta; corruption in the St. Paul, Minnesota, fire department, the Rhode Island courts, the Chicago City Council, the University of Kentucky men’s basketball program, and on and on). But their vision for replacing it with a networked alternative, or something else, is hazy at best.
Meanwhile, FON’s practical prescriptions””what it calls engagement with readers””have in practice devolved into another excuse for news managers to ramp up productivity burdens, draining reporters of their most precious resource, the thing that makes them potent: time.
The journalism stakes, then, are large. Just as it was an open question a hundred years ago whether a man like Rockefeller was more powerful than the United States president, it was far from clear only a hundred days ago who was more powerful in the United Kingdom, Rupert Murdoch or the British prime minister. Today, it is clear, thanks largely to reporter Nick Davies and his editors at The Guardian and their long, lonely investigation into the crimes and cover-ups of Murdoch’s News Corp. While the FON consensus is essentially ahistorical””we’re in a revolution, and this is Year III or so””we know journalism is a continuum. What Tarbell did, Davies does, and all great reporters do, always in collaboration with the community. Who else?
That’s the 10,000 foot view of public journalism, the Pulitzer winning one. We should be reminded of the aforementioned achievements, as we are annually when all the big prizes are handed out. But I think it’s just as important to highlight the actual community, ground-level view. For that, let’s go to Jonathan Thompson, a terrific editor and writer based in Colorado. Spurred by the CJR article, he reflects:
It makes me think back to the years I spent running a weekly newspaper in Silverton, Colo.. Silverton isn’t only a small town — year-round population approx. 450 — but it is also isolated by mountain passes on either side, and is the only town in the county and the county seat. That meant that all the business, all the politics, all the decisions, and about 90 percent of the “news” took place in a space that is about one mile long by one-third of a mile wide. And that meant that, long before the Internet was even conceived of, the newspaper in Silverton should have been obsolete under the “Future of News” gurus models. That is, you didn’t need a weekly newspaper to tell you what was going on, because there were plenty of “citizen journalists” (read, gossips) to fill you in wherever you went. The streets themselves, the post office, the coffee shop and the Miner’s Tavern were the Internet of Silverton, overflowing with information; if a big decision was made at Town Hall, the whole town knew about it, or could know about it, by the next day at noon, which might be a full week before they read about it in the newspaper.
Nonetheless, the Silverton Standard & the Miner newspaper has continued to be published, and read, every single week without a break since 1875. And during that 136 years, there have been many times when Silverton had two or even more newspapers (this even happened in the post-Internet age). They even kept reading it after big news was broken on Facebook or various Web sites, and after all the town/county/school board meetings were broadcast live on the local radio station, allowing everyone to get the big news delivered to them as it happened.
Why?
Because people naturally need and therefore crave the authority, voice, context and commentary that a news organization can offer by a newspaper, even if it isn’t delivered in “real time.” They know that while Donna down at the Post Office can tell you about how the vote turned out at last night’s school board meeting, and even who voted for what, they also know that she didn’t sit through all three miserable hours of the meeting recording not only the vote, but also the argument leading up to it; and not only that, but also the mood of the board members, and the audience, and the rolling of eyes and gnashing of teeth. Nor did she go back into the school the next day and pester the superintendent and the principal and get the inside scoop; nor did she dig through databases on the Internet and crunch numbers and make more calls to figure out what they mean. Nor did she dig back in the archives to see what may have led up to that particular vote.
The reporter did all of that.
Hi Keith, I know it’s your profession and therefore you find it incredibly interesting, but for the majority of your readers (if I am a typical example), journalistic naval gazing just isn’t all that interesting.
The main issue I see with “journalism” these days is that not much of it actually is journalism in the ideal sense – that is, objective reporting. Instead we have too much editorializing masquerading as journalism, a trend exacerbated by the splintering of media into so many ‘camps’ serving their specific audiences.
This trend is particularly obvious in the AGW story, and in all the recent discussions about how “journalists” should “communicate” the “message.” (See dictionary definition of ‘propaganda.’)
On the bright side, the current scenario, despite its flaws, is far better than the days when everyone watched and believed Cronkite or the NYT. Under that regime, with today’s system, we never would have heard about Climategate or many other inconvenient things.
Indeed, Louise. Its like the last dinosaurs bitching about the asteroid.
This is an interesting piece.
A community of 450 surely can’t support paying a journalist more then minimum wage. So the example used is that the value of what for all intents and purposes is ‘volunteer’ journalism to support the argument that ‘paid journalism’ isn’t in the dumps.
I know what my mother has made in 60 years of journalism…and she has sat through thousands of 3 hour council meetings. McDonald’s pays better on a per hour basis.
The nearby ‘big city’ paper owned by a national conglomerate doesn’t have anyone sitting thru 3 hours of council meetings, and if they do it’s an ‘intern’ simply biding time until they can get a ‘real’ job as a reporter. The reporters at the ‘big city’ paper bounce around like ping pong balls climbing the corporate ladder. They might spend 6 months or a year covering an outlying town before they are promoted and transferred to the city desk, or even a different region altogether or the ultimate cash cow in journalism…sports page.
The internet isn’t going to replace reporters who do double duty as journalists and town historian for knock down wages.
The internet will replace ‘drive by journalism’ because ‘drive by journalism’ doesn’t provide the nuance that a journalist who has spent decades on a single beat can provide.
Louise, didn’t your mother make you eat your vegetables when you were a kid?
Bigcitylib,
You must be part of that media-is-worthless bandwagon that I see everywhere in the climate blogosphere.
Edg,
You clearly have climate change on the brain. Everything you say can somehow be tied back to “the AGW story.”
Hi Keith, yup and I still love broccoli and brussels sprouts, but naval gazing…?
I read this blog all the time as it is one where interesting opposing views are found. I must admit to enjoying, in particular, posts that shoot down in flames the ‘opposition’ of the day, whichever side it is on. I do love a good put down.
I’m feeling particularly wicked today after finally coming to the end of a very challenging project at work (i’m on my second beer 🙂 )
Ah, a wicked woman who can take as good as she gives and who comments on climate blogs while slugging back beers. Just my kind of reader.
Geez, Louise…I always just wanted to say that.
Wait a minute Keith, is bigcitylib on the bandwagon against media-is-worthless or is he a prime example of worthless media? I’m inclined to the latter.
#5 Keith writes:
“You clearly have climate change on the brain. Everything you say can somehow be tied back to “the AGW story.””
Well Keith, that is a perfect illustration of my point and the subject that about 90% of your blog posts lead back to. Moreover, the “AGW story” is apparently the greatest crisis the planet has faced since the last asteroid hit so how can anyone not be fixated by this imminent threat to mankind and polar bears and all that? 😉
My main interest in terms of the environment is wildlife conservation issues and the history of the North American ecosystem – the real history, not the ‘whitey ruins the pristine harmonious wilderness’ version, so I would be happy if you dealt with some of those topics. (What first caught my eye in your blog, long ago, was an archaeology story… long before I ever commented.)
I’m also a very serious birder (for almost 50 years) so, given your time at Audubon, I’m always hoping for something on birds. And there is so much silly stuff about birds related to AGW that that is a virtually untapped treasure trove to explore.
Louise,
I guess naval gazing isn’t for everyone. Perhaps you simply haven’t done in the right location. The naval gazing provided by *http://www.sailfest.org/ each summer can be quite entertaining.
On the other hand maybe you meant navel?
*Shameless plug for local economy.
Edg (9)
I hear you, with respect to the other topics. If this were five or seven years ago, I suspect the ratio of climate/ecology-related posts would be much different. After all, as you pointed out, I have worked (as both editor and writer) the eco-terrain more than anything.
As it happens, though, I started this blog in 2009 when climate change was in the news constantly (cap & trade legislation, run-up to Copenhagen, climate change, to name just some of the high profile stories), and then I got into covering the politics and media angles of it all, and then it just snowballed.
Going forward, I will say that I am going to expand out and also return to some of the subjects that are of much interest to me, such as archaeology, ecology, and other sciency stuff.
More on that in a week or two.
The internet doesn’t have to be the death of big media, it could easily be its opportunity to expand into something even bigger and better. It’s like any technological revolution. When the cloth-making industry shifted to mass production, the weavers thought it was the end, too.
The problem is that the media have got complacent. They’ve got certain fixed ways of doing business they’re comfortable with, and they’ve entered into various cosy relationships with their subjects in which their own interests are put ahead of those of their customers. That’s the sort of thing the internet will break. On the other hand, the internet offers the opportunity to extend their net more widely, utilise outside talent, utilise technology for collecting and searching for news, tailoring and specialisation in response to their customers, and no doubt many other things nobody has yet thought of. It will need new skills and new ways of thinking, but there is business to be done.
I used to be a reporter. I think the smart newspapers will stick to local and, finally, do a decent and honest job of it. The biggest thing the Internet did make the redundancies and cocoonish partisanship of big journalism ridiculously obvious.
All of a sudden you have access to every paper in the U.S. online and that means you have your pick of – 500 left-of-center beat reporters writing the same thing, 300 left of left of center columnists writing the same thing, and 50 left of left of left of center “environmental beat” reporters writing the same thing.
It’s as if you got cable for the first time and realized every single channel was MSNBC
Hi Bob (10), yup, that was the beer spelling…
You’ve got some pretty boorish comments on this post, Keith, which I think is a pretty bad reflection on the posters, not you. I am not a journalist and, therefore, do not have a personal ‘iron’ in the fire but I do know, as any half-educated 10’th grader might and should, how essential to our open society and so blandly excepted freedoms the profession and craft of journalism is and has been (investigative journalism, of which we have a dearth, not least). That this is considered a ‘yawn’ or ‘special pleading’ appals me by it’s ignorance and complacency. Write more about theses things, Keith – if certain people get board they can always – drop off!
#11 Keith
Sorry, missed your response and appreciate it. Tis hard not to get deep into the AGW story as it is the dominant topic these days. Same thing happened to me on a personal level, and it is definitely not my first interest. So looking forward to seeing that broadening of topics so I can take off my ultra-cranky hat and have more of substance to contribute (wearing my less cranky hat).
That said, since the AGW debate is so popular and important I’m predicting that is is very likely that there will still be plenty of posts on that – which will make most commenters here happy. And it looks like there will be much about that to discuss in the near future.
On one hand we have journalists working in an environment that is at a loss for a business model.
On the over hand the news futurists that don’t seem to have a robust journalism model.
I think there are real potential risks down the line and I do not seem to hear a lot of hard questions being asked.
If FON gets itself into trouble who will it run to? Would that be the Press?
Can FON guarrantee their ability to publish? You set up a press and you can walk outside and sell your wares. Can you guarantee that when the publishing chain is web based. That may sound alarmist right now, in part because we have the Press. FON can be made to sound like the distribution of power and influence into many independent hands but may be concentrating that power into fewer very non-democratic hands.
A cynic might see FON as a willing and cheap way to remove power from the Press spread it around a crowd of private individuals in nice small packages, to easily scoop up later.
The future journalists may need to have very deep pockets, or climb into a very deep pocket. How many would one have to sue or arrest to encourage the others to behave.
Can we do without the current established organised journalism model? Of course we can. But should we really be happy if journalism is provided by a crowd who seems to believe that anti-institutional is the way to go. How are they going to be sure that the others or the readership will back them up if they get out of line. Who will pay the lawyers and potential damages, make bail, pay the mortgage, if you break the law or get caught in a libel?
We are going to have a new journalism, I think that is clear. If the FONs want to take it on they will need a robust journalism model and that costs money and that means a business model and …
Suddenly old journalism is the new journalism.
Alex