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< | What Nicholas Kristof and the Denver Broncos Suggest about New News Sources
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> | Are today’s news organizations 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, and others feel the same way. Consider the following two bits of news. First, the NY Times Company turned a minor profit in the 2d quarter of 2009 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: “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?” | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | 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? All of those papers are flagships of different newspaper conglomerates. It seems to me that consolidation is inevitable. | | | | |
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< | Credibility | >
> | Nicholas Kristoff’s formulation of “The Daily Me” underscores the problem. The amount of written content on the internet is overwhelming, and not just content, but specialized and industry/topic specific content. Why does a national circulation newspaper need an arts page? Or any other specialty section? As consumers break content apart and consume just the pieces they want, specialization is bound to occur. I don’t read the NYTimes for technology related news, I read Ars Technica instead, which does a good deal of its own reporting and analysis. While Kristoff sounds an appropriate warning about viewpoint insulation that might result from such self-editing, there’s a tremendously self-righteous claim underlying the warning – that members of the institutional press like the NYTimes are somehow neutral and objective in their editing and reporting, while a reader left to his or her devices would select bias-confirming sources instead. The institutional press has peddled its fair share of biased and subjective reporting. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | 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. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | 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 old content delivery methods, 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. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | 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. This can work today in ways we’d never imagined before. | | | | |
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< | Insulation | >
> | A presenter at the Kernochan Center’s Google Books Settlement Conference decried what he perceived to be 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 news reporters aren’t necessarily in it for the money, and we definitely want to live in a world where the Sulzbergers, Murdochs, Grahams et al aren't the only ones who can publish. If the reporting is worthy, the eyeballs will come. | | | | |
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< | 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?
-- By RazaPanjwani - 27 Mar 2009 | | |
Raza: You lay out the main arguments usually made by new media optimists, but I'm not sure you've advanced them, or responded to their critics. | | | 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 | |
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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 | | |
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