I haven’t posted much lately. I haven’t merely been sitting around reading about journalism in The New Yorker. There was the tragic news of Minghui Yu, which demanded a lot of attention both as a concerned student and as a journalist trying to figure out what happened. There’s been a lot of late breaking news, too, like the Teachers College story and the empty but momentarily street-freezing bomb threat. When news breaks late, we have to decide whether to delay our printing of the paper, change the front page’s layout, spend time reporting, and finally have the paper come out later. It’s a case-by-case call, but what I look for in this case is to measure how much time reporting will take, how important the news is–and with that, how much will we lose by having the physical newspaper hit stands later–and, finally, whether we have enough original reporting (as opposed to citing the New York Times or Associated Press) to merit foregoing a simple update of the web site and reworking the physical paper. I originally wanted to comment on the NYer piece when it came out, but then the breaking news delayed that. I feel like the piece is a few years late anyway, so why not dive into it a little late?
While comprehensive and interesting in its opposition of Dewey/Lippman views of public opinion and information as analogous to new/old-fashioned views of the media, most of the ideas expressed in the piece have been engaged by various people already. A few Spec editors and I attended a college journalism conference hosted by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation this weekend. We heard a lot of panelists discuss journalism in terms of business models, and little else; I heard one veteran reporter bemoan the “young journalists” on the campaign trails nowadays who don’t check facts or corroborate stories with multiple sources, but who offered no applicable solution in light of the entrepreneurial nature of new (new new?) media. Nonetheless, we still witnessed a few panelists interested in combining new media with traditional journalistic values–and I say that fully acknowledging that “traditional journalistic values” evoke an age when newspapers were effectively family-owned monopolies over a given municipality’s public information.
The author of the NYer piece seems to enjoy bashing new media (maybe he’s just doing a good job of setting me up..):
“Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as ‘a nation talking to itself.’ If only in this respect, the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers—posts that go off in their own directions and lead to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired them. Occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall.”
Or, “’User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,’ Peretti says.”
But he acknowledges why bloggers have gained steam: In response to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s statement that bloggers merely chew on the news (read: the truth), he writes: “’Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,’ Arianna Huffington protested in a Huffington Post blog. Like most liberal bloggers, she takes exception to the assumption by so many traditional journalists that their work is superior to that of bloggers when it comes to ferreting out the truth. The ability of bloggers to find the flaws in the mainstream media’s reporting of the Iraq war ‘highlighted the absurdity of the knee jerk comparison of the relative credibility of the so-called MSM and the blogosphere,’ she said, and went on, ‘In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers, and it became clear that new media sources could be trusted—and indeed are often much quicker at correcting mistakes than old media sources.’”
Personally, I think that, if the mainstream media mishandled Iraq war coverage, it is not only a product of bad journalism as a representation of the current political culture (which is in some if not large part reader-generated) that the media engage with. That’s not really a very enlightening notion, but it helps me keep in perspective that there are powers at work larger than the media. The new media is not a solution to Iraq war coverage. It is a tool that smart journalists can put to great use, if they harness its ease and immediacy rather than get sucked into the anxiety of competing with an imaginary (and, sort of, real) clock to update update update update. At the Nieman conference, the journalist who bemoaned young journalists’ sloppy reporting noted that part of the problem is their tendency to seek a big scoop by predicting, essentially, what a person is going to say fifteen minutes from now and breaking that speech fifteen minutes beforehand. That kind of scoop is vastly different from investigative work, and the discrepancy illustrates nicely the difference, as Politico editor John Harris put it, between the institutional (old-fashioned) model–in which a reporter’s name meant nothing without the name of his/her newspaper–and the (new…media…) model in which reporters act as entrepreneurs.
One solution, as illustrated at the Nieman conference by ProPublica’s founding editor Paul Steiger, is the non-profit model. ProPublica could really take off as Politico did. But as the NYer piece notes: “to imagine that philanthropy can fill all the gaps arising from journalistic cutbacks is wishful thinking.”