"Why the Press Can't Report the Campaign"

Ezra Klein is a very smart person:

I think one aspect of the modern press that doesn't get enough attention -- either among folks in the media or folks critiquing it -- is the transition from the fundamental scarcity being information to information being in abundance and the fundamental scarcity being mediation. For instance, the attitude on display in this Marc Ambinder post is fully understandable if you take a newspaperman's attitude towards the whole thing. If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

...

Similarly, if the press reports something and never mentions it again, the public knows to forget it. It's not important. If they mention it constantly -- "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" -- they know it is important. The job of the media, in other words, is now to also emphasize the right parts of the story. [emphasis in original]

This requires deciding what matters.

That last sentence is both true and a substantial problem. It's also partially why I read lefty political blogs - I have found something that filters information in a similar way I do, and considers similar things important, thus saving me from either dedicating all of my free time to sifting through the news or remaining even more ignorant.

To be clear, the reason it's a problem is that the is often based not on, say, information about either policy or instances of lying on the part of candidates, but around the idea of politics-as-game, or even around what the friggin' reporters simply find interesting. In other words, the filters used are often terrible and not conducive to deliberative democracy.

Go read the rest. It's not long.

The Washington Post, explained

Brutal.

Here's the thing, though:

"You have criticized the Post, but you have not understood our burden. Each time someone says something negative about Republicans, it tips the Great Scales. To ensure the Great Scales remain balanced, we must say something equally bad about Democrats. You see, Republicans and Democrats are morally equal in every way. They are equally right and equally wrong – on all things. This truth is woven into the fabric of the universe. To ignore it would cause the universe to unravel – "

This view actually seems to be held by a disturbingly large number of people, including many people who appear on the television. It explains a lot.

Another journalist bemoans blogging

I've seen several pieces along this line:

BEIJING — The unofficial end to journalism as I know it may have come earlier this week, when my Globe and Mail sporty colleague Matt Sekeres and I were at the triathlon venue in the north end of the city, waiting for the event to start.

...

The race was about an hour away when young Mr. Sekeres said the five words I have most come to dread: "I'm going to blog this."

Let me first say that I think such pieces are mostly crap. Mostly.

That said, the most charitable thing I can say about the effect of blogging on journalism is.... it's not having one, not really, contra to what Ms. Blatchford is saying.

Look, blogging is a tool. The internet is a tool. If either of them cause the death of journalism (or of longer forms of writing, or anything else), it's because people chose to use them in ways that are/were detrimental to past journalistic practices.

Clearly blogging can augment and enhance traditional journalism; just as clearly, traditional journalism (especially newspapers) were suffering before the Rise of Blogs. Pieces like this one are often really about journalists upset about their own loss of privilege and prestige. For example:

It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview. It is not true that anyone can edit themselves and sort wheat from chaff.

Implicit in this is that writing/news production should be left only to professionals, and that we, the riff-raff, have no place in such an enterprise. I call bullshit; ten seconds on this site should convince you that the media is not perfect, and that sometimes, the great unwashed masses can correct the professionals.

(As an aside, there are a lot of things floating around now that are easily accessible that, when measured against traditional standards, are not that good. However, the fact that I can blog, and that a few of my friends can read it, means a hell of a lot to me. Anyway.)

I guess what I'd say - in addition to noting that journalists and journalism would be better off as populists rather than elitists - is that Ms. Blatchford paints with far too broad a brush here. She would get a lot more mileage if she bothered to be more specific about exactly how journalism is hurt by blogging, while simultaneously acknowledging that blogging can have a positive influence on the act of journalism, and b) that journalism - and even newswriting specifically - is suffering from a lot more than the appearance of blogs. As is, she's written a nice tantrum, but there's nothing new or compelling here.

h/t TG

NYT Piece on The Daily Show & Jon Stewart

From somewhere in the middle of the piece:

Given a daily reality in which “over-the-top parodies come to fruition,” Mr. Stewart said, satire like “Dr. Strangelove” becomes “very difficult to make.” “The absurdity of what you imagine to be the dark heart of conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams far too frequently turns out to be true,” he observed. “You go: I know what I’ll do, I’ll create a character who, when hiring people to rebuild the nation we invaded, says the only question I’ll ask is, ‘What do you think of ‘Roe v. Wade?’ It’ll be hilarious. Then you read that book about the Green Zone in Iraq” — “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran — “and you go, ‘Oh, they did that.’ I mean, how do you take things to the next level?”

About f***ing time this hit the mainstream. Check it out - if nothing else, the writing in the story is good.

The Man From Hope, Special Media Edition

Specifically, CNN's Candy Crowley's. From Washington Monthly (via Hullabaloo):

Candy Crowley on CNN: Barack Obama was, indeed, awesome in his Berlin speech tonight, but watch out! Americans might decide he was a little too awesome.

Not only is it easy for me to read that as "uppity black man," but it fits right into that ludicrous right-wing narrative that daring to dream of a better future is crazy, or impossible, or stupid, or all three. You know, the one I made note of here and here.

And this from CNN.

Can we admit that the mainstream media is simply not liberal in any meaningful way? Please?

The (televised) press is broken

"...the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings."

Fox News Guest Jokes About Killing Obama, Laughs

Excuse me?

Can we pull our collective heads out of our collective asses yet?

Please?

What's wrong with this picture?

What does this say about O'Reilly and Hardball?

NEW YORK (AP) -- A journalism think tank studying "The Daily Show" doesn't believe many people get their news from Jon Stewart - because otherwise they wouldn't get the jokes.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism also said it was surprised at how much the Comedy Central late-night program resembles "The O'Reilly Factor," "Hardball" and other cable news shows in content.

The Washington-based organization asked its researchers to study a year's worth of "The Daily Show" tapes - hardly a grim assignment - after hearing the frequent claim that many young people learn about the world from Stewart instead of more traditional news sources.

Quote of the Day

"Sometimes, though, the professional outlook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have the most at stake - the professionals themselves - from understanding major changes to their profession. In particular, when a profession has been created as the result of some scarcity, as with librarians or television programmers, the professionals are often the last ones to see it when that scarcity goes away. It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence."

From Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.

Guess which profession he's talking about.

From the 'WTF?' files - or, What It Means To Be A Real American

I've been paying a lot of attention to politics and the media my entire adult life, and I still can't believe this actually happened.

SHUSTER: Well, here's the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, "I'll have orange juice."

MATTHEWS: No.

SHUSTER: He did.

And it's just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, "Here, have some coffee," you say, "Yes, thank you," and, "Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?" You don't just say, "No, I'll take orange juice," and then turn away and start shaking hands. That's what happens [unintelligible] --

MATTHEWS: You don't ask for a substitute on the menu.

Chris Matthews is insane.

Perhaps in the future, he will be considered the greatest satirist of all time. People will look back and wonder how he got away with having what was so obviously a brilliant comedy show on a 'news' network (and how he managed to never break character, not even once).

In the meantime....

Death of a Newspaper

Eric Alterman has a great essay in The New Yorker. I've been meaning to blog about it for a week or more, but.... I just haven't. Instead, I'm going to link and excerpt:

In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” a cartoon version of Dan Rather introduced a debate panel featuring “Ron Lehar, a print journalist from the Washington Post.” This inspired Bart’s nemesis Nelson to shout, “Haw haw! Your medium is dying!”

“Nelson!” Principal Skinner admonished the boy.

“But it is!” was the young man’s reply.

Nelson is right. Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all number of papers is everywhere. What this portends for the future is complicated. Three years ago, Rupert Murdoch warned newspaper editors, “Many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent . . . quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.” Today, almost all serious newspapers are scrambling to adapt themselves to the technological and community-building opportunities offered by digital news delivery...

...

Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. “People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered.

David Simon the slow decline of newspapers

This is a good great essay:

And now, with about twenty-five inches filed and sent to the state desk, I have come to rest, waiting while editors in the four o’clock shape the next day’s local front. I am sweating profusely, unsure what to do with my hands, my face, my soul. A Styrofoam cup of water sits in front of me, untouched. More laughter from the conference room, and finally they emerge -- Phelps and the others.

He looks at me, pulls on his mustache, frowns.

Dead. I am dead to him.

And then Phelps turns and whispers something to the tall editor beside him, something about me, clearly, because the tall guy is heading my way. I rise and actually drop my eyes. It will be fast, I tell myself. It will be fast and then I can go.

“You’re Simon?”

“Yes.”

“Good story today.”

I wait.

I've been putting off adding The Wire to my list of things to watch despite hearing nothing but good things about it, but this pretty much seals the deal. Anyone who writes at that level gets my attention.

[NYT] Diablo Cody in the NYT

She was in there, of course, because Juno won Best Original Screenplay, and she wrote it.

But tell me how, Mssrs. Halbfinger and Cieply, is this relevant:

The indie delight “Juno,” about a pregnant teenager with a mouth on her, won for best original screenplay, by Diablo Cody, who once worked as a stripper. She tearfully thanked her family for “loving me for who I am.”

She was a stripper? Oh Noes!

*faints*

Get over it. There is no justifiable journalistic reason to include this. It's not related to the content of the movie, it's sensationalist and - dare I say it - sexist, designed simply to get a rise out of readers (and, perhaps, simultaneously inspire a sense of righteousness).

[Media] Another blog goes into the RSS reader...

From someone named Douglas McLennan, blogging over at the National Arts Journalism Program:

Is there anyone not talking about a crisis in the news industry? The New York Times is dumping 100 jobs. The troubled Tribune Company is offloading 400-500 people. And across the country there are reports of slumping advertising and impending layoffs. Now this report in AdAge:

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services -- agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers -- broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth.

So things are pretty bad, and we're working in a dying industry. Nobody's reading newspapers anymore.

And yet they are. And in record numbers. Look at this report in Editor & Publisher. The online audience is soaring, and here's the growth rate and numbers of unique readers for newspaper websites in January 2008 (with 000's at the end):

NYTimes.com -- 20,461 -- 45.1%
USATODAY.com -- 12,314 -- 19.4%
washingtonpost.com -- 9,902 -- 14.6%
Wall Street Journal Online -- 6,962 -- 81.4%
LA Times -- 5,715 -- 4.7%

Not only are these huge audiences, but the growth rates continue to be spectacular. By far, more people are reading newspapers than ever before. As just one example, scroll down the list to No. 16, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has a unique web audience of 2.2 million. The P-I's print circulation, when it was considered healthy in the last century, was somewhere in the low 200,000's.

This is spectacular growth in audience. And yet, as the P-I's print circulation has declined to the mid-100,000s, its newsprint ad revenue has slumped, the paper is losing money, it's not replacing staff, and the owners are riding down its content, managing losses. As the paper's content has degraded, the perception of it in the community is one of declining influence and quality.

The problem, say newspaper industry execs, is that...

Go read for some great analysis. I'd work for a paper that was doing what he describes, even though it's mostly centered on advertising. It's that compelling.

[Media] Four Links That Should Be Posts

But alas, I've been too busy.

Slashdot: Some newspaper chains launch their own ad network. Too little, too late to compete with Google & Co.?

WSJ Blog: Newspapers' online growth isn't as impressive when placed in context.

BuzzMachine: What if we divided up the newsroom into discrete companies? I have to say, I find this idea fascinating - but what happens when one part starts losing money? Does it just die out? What effect will this idea have on the end product?

LOCAL MAN: Doug MacGill discovers 30-year-old critiques of objectivity and applies them to his work for the NYT and Bloomberg News. This should have happened industry-wide at least 20 years ago. The fact that it didn't.... well, I'm not sure what that means.

[Media] Rogue Columnist on the Newspaper Industry

This is really, really good, one of the best "this is what's wrong with the newspaper industry" pieces I've ever seen:

Mary McCarthy said famously of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

It’s tempting to say the same about the many diagnoses of what ails the newspaper world. We hear endlessly that the troubles are a result of the Internet, new technology, “people don’t read anymore,” and, my favorite, “people don’t have as much time as they used to.” As if there was once a 36-hour day, or people who once worked 12-hour shifts while raising large families had this abundance of time.

These forces are real. And yes, a big swath of the public is distracted by celebrity gossip and gets its “news” from blogs, television and talk radio. What’s less noted is how newspapers themselves contributed to the dumbing down of America. What’s most frustrating is that the discussion fails to focus on the more significant reasons behind the decline in newspaper journalism. They are:

Go read for the reasons.

[Journalism] The Nichification of the Media

OK, this turned out to be much longer than I thought it would be. I'm going to preface it by saying I'm not going to address the question of reporting in this post. Maybe in another one. I'll also say that thus far, this is a bit disjointed. Please flame away. That said....

I think this post is pretty accurate.... probably:

Media are mutating from mass to niche. OK. We get that.

...

That recess is a subtraction from the wall and that subtractive quality is what struck me this morning when I read a blurb in Paid Content announcing that a former Boston Globe political columnist will become managing editor of Politicker.com, a soon-to-be network of state-specific political news websites that appear poised to sprout from the New York Observer, the political weekly based in Manhattan.

1. The move from mass to niche is, indeed, correct, and is in no small part web/technology-driven. The ease with which information is moved around means that "newspapers" are less and less useful (or viable) as a way to organize information. Newspapers are tied to specific locations, to geography. The web is not. Which one will win in the long run among people who have grown up on the web?

2. Please note that #1 does not mean that newspapers will die out completely. The newspaper as a singular focal point of news, as an object around which content is structured, will undergo (and is already undergoing) significant changes, potentially losing most of its status.

This is also pretty astute:

Rather this announcement is a case is exemplary of the subtraction that has started and will continue to hit the journalism side of media just as it has already rocked the business side of media. We’re all familiar with this latter concept. Craig’s List started to subtract classified ad revenues; Monster.com et all started to poach on the job-wanted ads; Yahoo and its cohort have siphoned off display advertising, and so on.

Think of the Associated Press as the predecessor to this movement on the content side. Now add a heavy dose of topical breakdown to that, and you're getting somewhere.

More:

[T]he inexorable power of nichification is driven by the impulse toward efficiency. Thats what economics is all about. The drive for efficiency. And in so many walks of life specialization is efficient. Boring, maybe, but efficient.

This is interesting. I think it's correct, but I also deplore it. Newspapers, for some reason (a relatively privileged position in society, perhaps) are pretty far behind most other social institutions when it comes to fragmentation and specialization as part of a quest for greater efficiency (after all, Taylorism was so 1920s... or at least 1970s).

I posted once, I think (though I can't find it at the moment) about the nature of modern capitalism: It likes specialization. It likes to break things into tinier and tinier pieces, each more specialized and specific than the tier before.

You can see this is modern production techniques, the creation of ever-smaller niche markets for products, and even in the further specialization of job roles.

The belief, of course, is that same efficiency that underlies MiniMedia's point. And that same efficiency is, I think, anathema to good journalism - and to the creation of a good newspaper. (It's also anathema to human nature, to being a grounded human being, but that's another post.)

MiniMedia's conclusion:

How well does that analogy transfer to content and how does all this play out? How the hell would I know. But I am certain that every force in the world of media is prying loose the mortar in that wall I depicted above, and popping out stones at an accelerating pace. What I lay awake some nights wondering is: how many stones have to pop out before the godamn wall breaks?

I vacillate on my answer to these sorts of question, but, as of today, I think the wall breaking will come in the form of a radical shift in the business side of journalism, in how people are paid and what kind of name is on the check (or direct deposit slip, ha-ha). It will be less noticeable when it comes to the act of reporting (and here I differ from a lot of folks who are talking about this on the web). Certainly there is, and will continue to be, an upswing in the use of multimedia (electronic paper, anyone?).... but I still think the fundamental idea behind most media - reporting the events of the world - will not change.

Part of me expects a rapid and radical proliferation of content-specific niche organizations, like the one mentioned in MiniMedia's blog post. Those orgs would then sell, AP-style, to other organizations that simply collated content to produce a geographically grounded product. It would mean the outsourcing of almost all news production from the newspaper company in question. (Here I'm thinking of places like Politico or perhaps The Hill.)

This has already happened in radio, to some extent, and with disastrous consequences. Many radio shows are produced in advance and in a different state in which they are played, which removes radio as a social medium, as participatory, as well as removing the possibility for local, updated content.

Newspapers, on the other hand, are becoming more participatory in a sense, with the proliferation of comment-enabled websites and acceptance of the occasional bit of user-generated content. So that difference exists, and is important.

But what about the hyperlocal? I think it will still be produced locally, though certainly there is a question of resources - small newspapers can rarely afford to fund quality investigative journalism, or even comprehensive coverage (and certainly both the Lebanon Express and OSU's Daily Barometer are examples of this, albeit very different ones). There's also the question of user-generated content and what role that will play on the hyperlocal level.

I think users will have to take over more of a role. It's Indymedia meets the SPJ, and there's already one hell of a collision going on (see, for example, the reporting being done at leading political blogs like TPM or Firedoglake). But both sides are going to have to play nice sooner rather than later if anyone is interested in quality journalism surviving.

So what's my verdict? Change is a-comin', and as Mark over at Notes From a Teacher says on a near-daily basis, we (as a society) need to start changing the way we train and teach people to participate in the world of journalism - if that, is we are interested in seeing journalism survive in a useful form. I, for one, am definitely interested in that.

An Anecdote about Editors and Technology

From a reader who wishes to remain anonymous:

The last journalism conference I went to was at PSU and it was for editors only. One of the workshops was on journalism and technology, and there was a guy from a Redmond, Wash. paper who was leading it and told his audience that his newspaper's entertainment guide now had its own MySpace page and it was getting a lot of comments, critiques, blah, blah, and that it was really reaching the younger audiences.

A balding, middle aged guy shot his hand up: "What's myspace?"

Every balding, middle-aged male editor (yes it's a stereotype but it was a true one at this conference!) shared the same question. This was less than two years ago.

It's going to take a new generation to make switch to technology-based journalism. And that's... going to take awhile.

Sidebar: That conference WAS odd though because the stereotypical "editor" was there and when I walked in it felt like... I was a complete outsider, or the person that should've been getting them their coffee. One of those things you'll never forget.

This reminds me of the new comment system instituted at the Albany Democrat-Herald, Lebanon Express, and Corvallis Gazette-Times: It would have been neat in 2002. Too bad it's almost 2008.

This conversation started as a result of this post.

The Rise and Fall of TV Journalism

I wish I had the time (or the caffeine) to add some commentary....

As is, just check out this video... it' s a great bit of satire.



Found via Notes From a Teacher: Mark on Media, a great sight for keeping up with emerging trends in journalism.

Also found at Adrian Monck's place.

Bad Journalism 101

This is a relatively quick example.

Go read this story on Jeanne Assam, the guard at a New Life Church who shot Matthew Murray.

Question: What's missing?

Answer: The story - at least as printed in the DH - never says what happens to the person Assam shot. It says "Murray dropped to the ground," but that doesn't mean spit in the context of a news story. It should have established what happened to him - died at the scene, died at the hospital, lived, etc.

That's just sloppy journalism.