Note: I've edited my 11 August 2009 response to Eben into a revised essay above. As a result, many of the preceding comments may seem non-responsive to the essay above them.

-- RazaPanjwani - 25 Jan 2010

Eben,

What originally sparked my interest in writing this paper were the questions of establishing credibility as a reporter without being a card carrying member of the institutional “press,” and the impact of a bottom-up editorial control on consumers of news. However, it seems that the conversation has taken a decidedly economic turn. I’ll do my best to consider those concerns. (As an aside, I had never really thought deeply about the first amendment and assumed it referred to some sort of vague freedom of someone or something to ‘report’ without interference. I hadn’t thought about it as a literal freedom of the means of information distribution before this class.)

Your points seem to synthesize the preceding commentary, so I’ll use them as a jumping off point to continue the conversation.

Your first questions asks whether today’s news organizations are sustainable on their current revenue models if you cut the cost of physical printing and distribution. I think the answer is that it may be viable for some companies. Consider the following two bits of recent news. First, the NY Times Company turned a minor profit in the 2d quarter even after discounting one-time savings and accounting adjustments, despite plummeting advertising revenue. Second, in a recent flurry of articles, op-eds, and responses over Ian Shapira’s WaPo column, the president of Media at Thomson Reuters had this to say: [[http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/08/04/why-i-believe-in-the-link-economy/][“the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper… [industry] leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting “resources” (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing…”]] More to the point, Hugh McGuire? of Book Oven bluntly stated “why would newspapers pay a staff writer to spend a full day investigating & writing a 1,500 word fluff piece when there are a million fluff pieces all over the web getting published every day? What value are they adding to the info marketplace, and is that value worth the money/time they’ve spent on it?”

The takeaway here seems to be that there are too many newspapers writing too much useless crap. It’s not just an outdated distribution model holding them back. It’s an outdated model of what’s being distributed. And if that’s the case, why do we need to so many papers anyway? Do I really need a Washington Post, LA Times, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, and take your pick from the McClatchy? company story on the same event? It’s seems to me that consolidation is inevitable.

This brings me to the second inquiry, where does hard news come from? A leaner newspaper enterprise that spends less time contemplating the quandary of upper-middle-class Manhattanites looking for private kindergartens would have more resources to spend on “real” news. Leave the soft news for another business model to handle.

Similarly, a leaner “real” news focused enterprise could make its bones on investigative journalism. That being said, I think the importance of institutional backing to investigative reporting is overstated. Granted, I haven’t seriously studied the muckrakers since high school, but they seemed like fairly entrepreneurial folks, with their own muckraking focused magazines. It might be a sustainable model today. Breaking free of a model of investigative journalism that emphasizes the journalism too much, there are alternative streams of revenue. In particular, modern day muckrakers can take a page out of their forbear’s playbook and start publishing books instead of newspaper or magazine stories. Ida Tarbell turned her articles into a book on Standard Oil. Jacob Riis published a book. Upton Sinclair used the novel genre. Cliff Levy’s way isn’t the only way to get investigative journalism published.

I agree with your third point, that the real distinction between sources of information is how they’re funded. If a slimmed down institutional press is the outcome of the current industry upheaval, the next question is how do aspiring journalists who aren’t working for the institutional press keep afloat? Will free-lancing and solo reporting through a personal website or blog generate enough income? Or maybe we should take a market-based approach to this – if your reporting isn’t generating enough income to support it, it isn’t worth reporting in the first place. Maybe I just don’t have a strong enough grip on the finances of ad supported websites.

-- RazaPanjwani - 11 Aug 2009

• I think there are a couple of issues that should be dealt with in revisions and haven't been touched yet. First, at least until recently, the losses of money by newspapers publishers were largely attributable to the fact that they were publishing newspapers. Printing and distributing newspapers is an extremely expensive and utterly stupid business in the 21st century: until the onset of the current financial panic, newspapers could have staffed and conducted their businesses on the web at a profit. The current advertising collapse is an event that needs to be segregated from the "Boo, hoo, Craigslist destroyed my business" bullshit the newspapers were giving out in 2007 and first-half 2008. Even now, if Rupert Murdoch owned all the journalists and other creative types he owns, but didn't publish any dead-tree newspapers with their stuff, the rest of his media empire would be wildly profitable. So there wasn't much reason to believe that the "newspapers or bloggers" analysis had any truth in it at all. You need to scrape past a very thick coat stupidity on the part of the publishers before you get down to the bedrock question whether employing the journalists and editors based on the available advertising revenue is profitable if you stop printing crap on paper and loading it on trucks.

• Second, as Maha points out, you aren't asking how we produce information, you're asking how we produce chatter. To call sportstalk information is ludicrous. What you need to explain, as she points out, is how hard news is gathered, not how businesses promote themselves using free media to the working people who are cheated by the opiate called "sports."

• Third, whether you are talking about the people she still insists on calling journalists or the people you call bloggers, advertising is what supports all their activities at the end of the day, and compelling people to watch advertisements in digital media is impossible. All the push advertising models (which excludes search-based advertising which is pulled by the user) will become history shortly. So the line between the journalists and the bloggers is irrelevant. The right lines separate those who are self-financed, those who are financed by push advertising and compulsory payment (the models destroyed by the net), and those who are financed by other means. All the analytic action based on other distinctions, whether it is you praising bloggers or Maha and other J-School parties promoting "make people pay" has to cope with the technical facts of 21st century life: you can't stop people from sharing, so you can't make them pay, and you can't stop them from filtering, so you can't reliably sell their eyeballs to advertisers.

Justin: I feel I should clarify my points somewhat. Firstly, I am not making a distinction between "bloggers" and "reporters" but between citizen/enthusiast/fan and reporter. If you haven't already, read Jon Chait's 2007 essay where he distinguishes between the reported "wonkosphere" and the unreported "netroots." A blogger can be either of those two, but MOST, not all, sports blogs fit into the enthusiast mode. Reporting is not just having sources, but working your sources, something that is both labor- and capital-intensive.

Secondly, I'm not disputing that there will be more and different types of reported news stories that emerge from the blogosphere, but just because there are more breaking stories about topic A (say all those bloggers who beat the big media in breaking campaign stories last fall) and more breaking stories in total, doesn't change the fact that there are less stories about topic B (say, the school board or the Federal Reserve). The question is whether we're okay living in a world with no reporting on those topics, and if we're not, how we're going to pay for them--one way is to rethink online ad and subscription models, the other is to make journalism a nonprofit, public-sector funded field. So none of this goes to say the web is bad for journalism, but rather to point out that "There is more content produced" is not, in itself, a justification of online journalism.

If all web journalism took the form of the reported blog, and if there were reported blogs for all beats, we'd be off to a great future, but so far, it doesn't work that way. I hope it does, and on good days, I believe it eventually will.

Raza, it seems to me that Maha points out a hole in your paper. Namely, I think that this paper should address the concept of "sources" in the future of news. I have a few examples that I think will be helpful to your paper, and also refute some of Maha's assertions.

Maha, I read your first paragraph above as saying that "bloggers are different than real reporters because real reporters have sources, and bloggers don't have the time (or money) to maintain sources." Remaining in the world of sports, I would like to direct both of you to the ProFootballTalk Rumor-Mill. The Rumor-Mill is likely the most important source of insider information for journalists, the public, agents, players and management in the NFL. It was created by Mike Florio, a West Virginian lawyer, in 2001 as a means of trying to promote his self published book, 'Quarterback of the Future'. (The book looks terrible, its about time traveling football players). However, he has sources in powerful places - and by updating every day and communicating with sources and fans he was able to build a business with sponsors such as nfl.com and Sprint. Thus, through something Raza does address, credibility, and something he doesn't, sources, Mr. Florio was able to turn his hobby blog into a journalism business while maintaining his law practice. He even began delivering opinion via youtube. So I don't agree with Maha's point that bloggers are any different that reporters. Once you begin to get credibility and sources, you will likely get more of both and, if intelligent, can turn web traffic into sponsorship.

As to Maha's second point, which I read as saying that we will lose content without a print media. People may not cover school boards any more, but there may be more stories that surface with new media. Maha's assertion that bloggers don't break stories is refuted by the Florio example, as well as this website. As reported here Jeff Pataky, the blogger who runs Bad Phoenix Cops, uses contacts in the police department to break stories about police misconduct. I would argue that a blogger is more likely to be able to hold police accountable because of the political pressures against that type of investigation for the 'traditional' press, so content that would not have seen the light of day before will be able to surface. People, through the blogger's reputation and credibility, will be able to judge the truth of the allegations.

-- JustinColannino - 09 Apr 2009

The issue is not whether there will be enough content, but whether there will be all the right kinds of content: where is the citizen blogger reporting, on the day BEFORE the Fed makes it choice, what the new interest rate will be? This also goes to your point about people's insatiable demand for information online--the thing about old media models is that they were able to feed people news they needed but didn't necessarily want by putting it on a page with news they wanted but didn't need. I have no doubts about the survival of sports column/punditry on the web, but I have my doubts about reporting on school board meetings. Ezra Klein, who is a huge advocate for new media, admits as much in this video.

I, like you, am less worried about the ideological echo chamber, because I think it's easy enough to aggregate from diverse sources so long as journalists of the future are taught in J-school that this is what they're meant to do.

What Nicholas Kristof and the Denver Broncos Suggest about New News Sources

Traditional sources of news built their businesses on the collection, processing, and distribution of information. Aided by copyright law and limitations in technology, they monetized the information they produced. This business model is no longer generating the revenue it once did. As newspapers around the United States cease printing every day, there are questions as to where we get our information now, and the implications of this change. Even as traditional newspapers fold, I believe any given person’s sources of information are becoming fragmented, often through consumption of multiple blogs, or perhaps the use of technologies such as RSS. Some commentators decry the reliability of grass roots sources, while others fret over the construction of informational echo chambers that reinforce biases, and others wonder who will be able to afford to write. The fact stands that the new model for news overcomes these problems.

Credibility

A common charge leveled at bloggers is their unreliability as sources of information. A look at sports journalism is illuminating. Traditional sports journalism can be divided up into three parts: the broadcast of the event itself, reporting the “news” of the event, and commenting on the event and related matters. There will always be a market for the broadcast of sporting events, and access to a summary account of the event and its outcome. The third category is more interesting. This role is most prominently occupied by the breed of journalists known as “sports columnists.” These are the bloviating pundits with “inside sources” who attempt to offer their commentary in newspapers and online. They are joined by sports talk show hosts, both on TV and Radio in the same capacity. They report on rumors and lead crusades. Historically they’ve been held in high regard by those who place a value on sports as gatekeepers of inside information.

The rise of free self-publication on the internet has added a new voice to the conversation – the fans. The most successful sports blogs are not just collections of impassioned rants or mundane observations, but aggregators of news from across the internet, and investigative journalism in its own right. Mile High Report is a blog that follows the Denver Broncos of the National Football League, a team that is currently experiencing a personnel controversy involving a key player and a new coach. While traditional new outlets castigated either the coach or the player, often shifting the blame each day, Mile High Report performed its own investigation, did its own analysis and determined that a third party was the likely cause of the issue. After being ignored for days, the mainstream media picked up on the story and eventually shifted their narratives into alignment with MHR.

What’s the story here? Credibility and Reputation. As John Hiller observed in 2002, compared to traditional news sources, “weblogs are starting from zero, building their reputations from the ground up. Blog responsibly, and you’ll build a reputation for being a trusted news source. Don’t, and you won’t have a reputation to worry about.” Traditional media trades on its reputation based on past performance and a long track record, whereas bloggers’ reputations are made on their current reporting. Their track records are young and developing.

Insulation

Another worry is that the choices offered by new media will only insulate us intellectually. In a recent column in the NYTimes, Nicholas Kristof discussed the rise of “The Daily Me,” the fully customized and personally tailored compilations of news consumers are able to create for themselves, or that they can access. Kristof raises a valid concern about the ability of end users to act as their own editors. He points to data showing that people prefer sources that conform to and confirm their pre-existing beliefs. There is undoubtedly a danger of entering an informational echo chamber, with the unprecedented control over the information we consume having a centrifugal effect on the biases in that information. We only read more and more of what we already believe. And yet this is not new behavior. Choosing to read the New York Times instead of the Wall Street Journal could be looked at as a choice in political preference. Instead of acting as out own editor, we do the next best thing, we rely on editors who we are in agreement with. Kristof worries about our lack of exposure to opposing viewpoints, but what’s the solution? Surrendering editorial control of our information to some benevolently objective big brother editor? Short of centrally controlled programming, people will choose to read what they want, and ignore what they don’t.

Society of Writers or Publishers?

A final consideration is who will write if not professional journalists in the employ of large news companies. A presenter at the Kernochan Center’s Google Books Settlement Conference decried the growing inability to make a living as a writer and asked rhetorically “do we want to live in a society where only the Medici can write?” His query ignored the crucial change in the 500 years since the Medici ruled Florence- we now live in a society where everyone can publish. The underlying worry of the aforementioned writer is that this new society will lack the old financial incentives to write and, relevant to this inquiry, to report. But the lowering of the barrier to entry is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a human desire to inform and share information. We blog about ourselves. We update facebook statuses. We twitter our bowel movements. Much information that once required sending investigators to find now only requires a technorati search to turn up. Local papers have been functionally supplanted by blogs. The remaining task is to collect, assess, and reshape the information being published by others elsewhere. That this can be done without monetary incentives is supported by projects like Wikipedia, collaborative enterprises of collecting and assessing information by contributors in what time they have.

The question I’m left to consider is whether if “journalism” ceases to be a viable career for many, will there be enough “free” reporting to aggregate into reliable news?

References

-- By RazaPanjwani - 27 Mar 2009

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