This week, VatulBlog takes a trip in the Wayback Machine to revisit Blogging vs. Mainstream Journalism and Saving The American Wetlands & Gulf Coast, a couple of golden apples of the Maitri, NOLA and greater blogosphere.
At the Rising Tide Conference held in New Orleans last August, Robert Block held up a copy of the latest Economist entitled Who Killed The Newspaper? and said, This article suggests you guys (bloggers) did. [applause] I think that’s bulls***. We need to work together.” Work with what? How do we get relevant news out in the face of changing media economics and relationships today and into the future?
This is the topic of Fresh Air’s interview with Lowell Bergman (approx. 15 minutes long – worth listening to before reading the rest of this post) on his PBS Frontline documentary: News War. The full 270-minute video is available online and is most of my eye candy for the week.
In part three of “News War,” entitled “What’s Happening to the News,” FRONTLINE examines the mounting pressure for profits faced by America’s network news divisions and daily newspapers, as well as growing challenges from cable television and the Internet. Bergman talks to network executives, newspaper editors and publishers, bloggers, Wall Street analysts and key players at Google and Yahoo! about the battle for market dominance in a rapidly changing world.
… An even greater challenge to both newspapers and broadcast networks is the growing power of the Internet as a news distribution platform, pulling consumers and advertisers away from more traditional media. Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes, talks about CBS’s partnership with Yahoo! News. “We haven’t seen the model for how broadcast journalism is going to end up on the Internet,” he says. “But ¦ it has to go there. I mean, you don’t see anybody between 20 and 30 getting their news from the evening news; you see them getting it online.”
But Internet news providers like Yahoo! and Google say that they are not in the business of creating content, relying instead on traditional news-gathering organizations. “We’re in fact critically dependent upon the success of these newspapers,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, referring to the Los Angeles Times and others. “We don’t write the content. We’re not in the content business. So anything that screws up their economics, that causes them to get rid of reporters, is a really bad thing.”
Phew, what a lot of factors to contend with just to get the news out: medium, commerce, technology, business plans, data gathering. Naturally, the mind tends to simplify and I offer these questions, while fully aware that this discussion attempts to nab and categorize that which is still and always will be in a state of flux.
- What defines journalism?
- What defines internet?
- What defines news?
- What defines opinion?
Take the average American consumer of news [Set A]. And then consider a New Orleanian, Alabama tornado victim, Pakistani earthquake survivor, an Iraqi citizen or anyone dealing with harm, strife or recovery [Set B]. How does news, be it via the paper, radio, TV or internet, cater to these sets of people? What do they want to know? Keep these questions in mind as we move forward in the discussion.
What defines journalism?
a) “Bloggers vs. mainstream journalists” – There are mainstream journalists who use blogging/internet as their sole medium and bloggers who create hyperlocal news stories, opinions on mainstream news and other people’s blog posts and journalize. Original content widely dispatched in the form of a weblog is journalism, but all blogging is not.
Therefore, all media being equal, journalism is reporting of news with a focus on facts, honesty, thoroughness and good writing skills. By extension, that which garners maximum media attention is not necessarily journalism.
b) As for blogger credentials, read the ongoing comments in Day 507: “An Elite Tier Of Bloggers” Like any and every medium, elitism leads to the dissemination of partial truths and the rejection of alternatives and the rest of the story. In the words of Colin Brayton:
The whole notion of a separate governance standard for bloggers is absurd, as is the notion that Journalism 1.0 is broken and needs to be replaced by Journalism 2.0. If a blogger wants to do journalism on their blog ” rather than, say, marketing or recipe collecting or publishing a daily fictional soap opera or exaggerating their wealth and beauty in order to get laid ” they can choose from among any number of pre-existing codes of conduct for journalists and try to stick to that. It is not rocket science. Say what you know, and how you know it. Don“t say that you know what you don’t know. If you publish something that you later discover was wrong, publish a note saying you were wrong. That’s about it.
c) Journalism as retirement-benefits-and-health-insurance-bearing career – if that is the end, is the news in big trouble or not? Not a topic to be sneezed at and will crop up in a later post.
What defines internet?
The Frontline documentary references Google, Yahoo! and Craig’s List, to name a few, as the initial quintessence of internet. If this internet has damaged the economic basis of newspapers (by taking over advertising and the medium) and is “killing the supplier,” what is to stop traditional ink slingers from jumping medium to contract directly to these online firms that are not interested in original content creation? Wait for it. At this time, it is important to recognize online-only newspapers.
Again, Yahoo! and Google do not the internet make. While they may be the WaPo and NYT of the digi-world, the main users remain hyperlocal. These giants’ unwillingness to create content, as a business rule, should not imply or prevent the creation and distribution of news stories by a smaller node, be it a group of people or an individual.
“People want to be part of the media,” [Markos] Moulitsas [of Daily Kos] tells FRONTLINE. “They don’t want to sit there and listen anymore. They’re too educated. They’re taught ¦ to be go-getters and not to sit back and be passive consumers. And the traditional media is still predicated on the passive consumer model — you sit there and watch.”
Note that Daily Kos is not representative of the average small node on the internet, either. Furthermore, while aforementioned Sets A and B are moving onto the internet as information medium of choice, Set A still consists of passive consumers while Set B is more than likely active, delivering original content of equal human interest.
Name recognition, be it in traditional or online journalism, is a key recurring factor, also.
What defines news? What defines opinion?
“News is the event itself, opinion covers the effect(s) of that event.”
“News, on any given day, is that which has maximum effect on maximum people. Opinion is how people perceive that news.”
For example, News = Man Dies In Central City Shooting; Opinion = What has NOPD done since the anti-crime march?; Crime has gone down in Central City in the last month; Education system has let street criminals and their victims down, etc.
These are only some definitions and I intentionally leave this section open-ended so we may revisit and populate it from time to time.
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If consumer demand is indeed for a high-quality local paper that eliminates international news, this
(a) is sad news. An eye on the state, nation and world yields quick and easy compare-contrast perspectives, and
(b) shows the additional need for reporters in various levels of news, from the international to the hyperlocal, in effect a restructuring of the traditional conduits of news via syndication, shifting economic incentives and niche marketing. Then again, do consumers always know what they want to know?
The overall question is: Leave it as is and see what pans out, or help guide news to work better for us? Let us also take this pause to reflect on our requirements of news.
