I thank Clay Shirky and other posters for their responses to “Confidence Game: the limited vision of the news gurus.” Since Clay and I are going to differ on a few things, I’ll start with a sentiment worthy of a faculty club cocktail hour, namely, that I’m pleased with how the debate has unfolded.
I appreciate Shirky’s straight-from-the-shoulder tone—it’s okay; no one’s going to break—and smiled at the lines about the difficulty of making a ham sandwich (rebuilding newspaper finances) without any bread, or ham, and about Ida Tarbell’s alarming lack of productivity lately. I also, seriously, appreciate that he took some time to respond, which, I would note for one and all, did not detract from its relevance and salience one iota.
Also on the sherry-drinking side of the ledger, I appreciate the link to Jonathan Stray and his vision of a digital ecosystem that connects and integrates into journalism talent from technical fields and academia, particularly the social sciences. As someone who straddles the journalism/academy divide, I’m excited at the prospect of linking up the two. There’s both a whole army of potential allies for journalism and a body of communications literature that all reporters should be acquainted with.
Finally, I’m glad that the debate has, in fact, sharpened a couple of important points.
In the spirit of our faculty club gathering, I’m going to violate Rule #1 of the Academic Debate Handbook (“never concede anything to anyone, ever”) several times over:
Shirky reiterates, and I concede, the undeniable point that newspapers are going to hell in a handbasket, having suffered 20 quarters of revenue decline. While it’s also true those declines have moderated lately, and that newspapers will be around for a long time, their ultimate future is far from assured. (Still, I hope we’ve heard the last of the anti-pay-wall certitudes for a while.)
But, let’s concede the general point: why rely on a flotilla of burning barges?
I’ll also concede, as I conceded in “Confidence Game,” that institutions are limiting and can be the death of as much journalism as they produce. Believe me, having worked in them, I know this all too well. In fact, it’s probably worse than FON thinkers think. There is a long tradition of journalists—George Seldes, I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh—needing to circumvent or overcome institutional journalism to be heard. Like I said, for people who believe as I do, it’s a problem.
Thirdly, I’ll stipulate that newspapers often produce lame things like horoscopes and dogs-chasing-Frisbee stories, and can be, in fact, generally lame. So can the Internet, but, as Shirky has pointed out, even Lolcats has a creative component to it. Newspapers have less of an excuse.
(Again, a caveat to my concession: Shirky suggests that because local newspapers can be lame, they must be lame. Why?)
Finally, Shirky says that no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds. This sounds about right. Having no clue myself, I will concede that, too.
But all of this misses the point; the talk here is all about process and structure. I’m talking about great stories. As I said in the piece, I care about institutions only to the extent that they can produce them. If FON Theory or social production can do it, I will be first in line at the next 140 Characters Conference. In fact, I may go anyway.
Sam McClure (also dead, yet relevant) was right when he kept repeating, “The story is the thing.” It is the thing. It’s the main thing journalism does, isn’t it? Public-interest journalism is, for me anyway, its core, around which the rest of it is organized. It’s the rationale for all of it—the printing presses, the trucks, the ad departments, the journalism schools, etc. It doesn’t matter that McClure’s basically flamed out two years after Tarbell’s Standard Oil series. What matters is the kind of stories it pioneered are still being produced to this day, almost entirely, and probably not coincidentally, within institutional settings.
And the ceaseless failure of the Big Media -- the old, bankrupt press -- in failing to report the collapsing American society and thereby enabling the collapse: Can we stress over that, and find the continued existence of the Big Media essentially irrelevant?
#1 Posted by Mitchell, CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 12:07 PM
Dean Starkmen:
Please violate Rule #1 here:
Journalism > Journalism Institutions
You seem unable to understand you can't steer this conversation from this domain, i.e., one of the dominant journalism institutions in America.
Thanking you in advance,
Christopher Krug
#2 Posted by Christopher Krug, CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 02:00 PM
Dean, thank you for trying to hold up the circus tent in a windstorm. My only concern is with what I would call a promiscuous use of the word "story." From the viewpoint of a narrative strict-constructionist, I would say there were very few stories in newspaper journalism. I'd call them what they are: reports. A person goes out (even out of the office on occasion) and finds out stuff and checks it out. That's at the heart of public service, and nothing in the FON can yet compensate for its loss. But we need stories, too. I define the story as a form of vicarious experience, a form of transportation in which the reader is moved from a chair to Haiti or Iraq or a corrupt reform school in the Florida Panhandle. The purpose of reports is to point you there. The purpose of stories is to put you there. Information vs. Experience. Thanks for inspiring this reflection.
#3 Posted by Roy Peter Clark, CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 02:10 PM
I think you conceded yourself into a corner. Are you suggesting that there are no stories told online or outside of the safe harbor of journalism institutions? As though somehow the human trait of storytelling was invented by newspapers and can only continue with their vigilante guard?
People have been telling agenda setting stories since they were painting them on cave walls. I think the trait will continue for just as long (until we reach Borg status)
#4 Posted by David Cohn, CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 02:59 PM
Roy, thanks for helping to define what we're looking for. I think the distinction between stories and reports is valuable. I wonder if we shouldn't also try to elevate the idea of the report. As long as we're sending someone to the school board meeting, it might as well be worth it.
David, It's a great question. No, it's not that journalism is central to storytelling. It's that storytelling is central to journalism -- at least in my opinion. So, how to support that?
Christopher, yes, it's true as far as it goes that journalism is more important than journalism institutions. But that's just the beginning of the discussion.
Mitchell, Your frustration with big media is well-expressed and valid. But obviously I think it's a mistake to dismiss them or the idea of powerful press institutions in general.
#5 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 05:11 PM
Nobody -- not Starkman or anybody else who's serious about the future of journalism -- is suggesting important news stories are told ONLY through large journalism institutions. There are many examples of free-lancers and determined individuals and the like contributing to public knowledge about important issues.
What's being said is that most of the most important stories about our world and its troubles -- Iraqi, the abuse of folks in mental hospitals, financial frauds that affect homeowners, pensioners, etc., corruption in city, state and federal governments, corruption on Wall Street, terrible medical care for our war wounded, etc. -- are told through folks who are paid full-time (long hours, often low pay) to work as a reporters at news organizations. Might be local dailies like the Bristol (Va.) Herald-Courier (check out that little paper's Pulitzer winning series on how property owners were stiffed out of their natural gas royalties by energy companies). Might be NPR. Might be ProPublica. Might be NYT. Might be The Nation. These are all flawed and imperfect human institutions, but the work they do is more than important – it’s crucial to future of our nation and our world.
Real reporters who want to do real journalism don't care much whether their stories run online, in print, on TV, radio, podcasts, in books, ebooks, whatever.
They just want to have the time and institutional support to dig. To track down reluctant sources and persuade them to talk about wrongdoing they've witnessed. To read tens of thousands of pages of mind-numbing court documents to find crucial, previously unknown pieces of information. To file and fight Freedom of Information demands to force public officials to turn over documents they’d like to keep secret.
The new media technologies are wonderful tools for gathering and disseminating news. Using camera phones to document law enforcers’ abuses at public protests, linking back to others’ blog posts and tweets with incisive analyses, crowd sourcing to ask for information from folks who may know something about a particular subject – all are worthy and effective ways of helping to get information out about what’s going on.
But these technologies can only supplement and enrich – not replace – shoe-leather, foot-in-the-door accountability reporting. There are no camera phones filming behind closed doors when powerful folks are making corrupt deals or planning how to cover up illegal acts. Exposing (even a fraction of) this kind of secret conduct takes journalism institutions that are dedicated to ferreting out who did what. They might be for-profit. They might be non-profits. Or a melding of both.
Take them out of the equation completely, and we’re going to end up with vast news wasteland – incredible, Matrix-like technologies for spreading random facts and LOL cat photos, but little real information that goes beyond the chattering of opinions, corporate and government PR spinning, urban myths and internet memes.
#6 Posted by Michael Hudson, CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 05:21 PM
But who sets the agenda, and what or who is behind them?
The FON argument is about two things: business models and skill sets. The business model part of the discussion holds that the “old way” of running a big, aggregated, ad-supported package sold as an all or nothing proposition is doomed, and that something else has to replace it. No one can argue with that, so no one does.
The skill set part of the argument holds that any reporters or journalists or whatever we’re going to call them hence forth will have to develop a set of new skills—interactive discussion, crowd-sourcing and, most important, personal branding—in order to compete for readers and operate in whatever the new business model will ultimately be.
Boiled down, the thrust of the FON argument is, ‘we don’t know what the new business model will be, but we—somehow—do know what you will need to do if you want to be part of it.’ And that skill set is, coincidentally, exactly the stuff these FON gurus have been specializing in for the past 5 or 15 years.
This sets up the next phase of the argument, which holds that any who question the general thrust of the second part of the FON model are Luddites—nostalgic naysayers. This has formed the basis for the counter-attack on Starkman.
Missing from this counter-attack is any discussion of the real value of the uber-tweet model or of the build-my-personal-brand philosophy, which has given us such diverse voices as Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and, well, Matt Drudge.
Notwithstanding Drudge’s propagation of right-wing political leaks and hits, none of these guys has been responsible for any great stories.
Instead of stories, the thing working reporters are being asked to do more and more (in both the real world and the prospective FON model)—140-character from-the-meeting updates, three dispatches a day from the police blotter and snarko-aggregation bits following on whatever YouTube video or celebrity mishap is currently going viral—these are exactly the things that actually have little value.
The thing reporters do—or can do, or used to do—that actually has value is the story. The profile of the richest guy in town, or of the panhandler on the median strip. The narrative investigation of the way the state corrections department is being run, or the way the city housing agency handles itself. The stuff that actually adds value is exactly the stuff that sometimes takes weeks or months to assemble, does not benefit from interim tweets or crowdsourcing, and is frankly best accomplished by reporters whose names do not appear on marquees and who do not command six-figure speaking fees or Murdoch sinecures.
Focusing as he does on the problem of institutional decay and the FONsters’ faith in free-amateur power, Starkman does not address head-on the benefits and drawbacks of the personal brand ideal, but I’d like very much for some FON proponents to do so, because it is so self-evidently at the center of the new, institution-free system, and is so anathema to everything that was drummed into my head as a wee content provider.
#7 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 06:00 PM
Dean, thanks for the reply. Yes, Journalism > Journalism Institutions is the beginning. Oddly, a lot of the more "sophisticated" discussions/debates I read about the FON didn't start there.
#8 Posted by Christopher Krug, CJR on Wed 21 Dec 2011 at 10:30 PM
Nicely said by all. Submitted here for consideration is that this gap would be greatly diminished with a small amount of attitude adjustment on both sides. It is an unfortunate truth that an undertone emanating from many FON evangelists is that the tradecraft and experience required to get great stories is illusory or irrelevant. This is reflected most in the “journalism is wherever it happens by whoever is there” argument. Dean, I think, does a better job than many of articulating why this is insufficient, if not foolhardy, because while that notion may be semantically true, it will not regularly produce the kind of deep, watchdog journalism that is so critical.
Meanwhile, many “traditionalists” continue to fail to recognize, or simply resist, the notion that media organizations must find ways to again be part of the connective tissue of their communities or they will not survive. Occasional great stories are not enough. This involves new (additional) ways of plying the tradecraft, including the inclusion of readers in ways that, lo and behold, can also lead to more frequent instances of great stories. Today’s journalism that matters is great stories but it's more than that, it isn’t always stories (Roy), it isn’t always text, it’s networked, it’s relentlessly essential, it’s not a creature of a narrow band of sources and talking heads, and it’s hard. But also exhilarating.
JRC seems to recognize that this is not a binary conversation, which is why what is happening there is so encouraging.
#9 Posted by Jonathan Krim, CJR on Thu 22 Dec 2011 at 09:21 AM
Want some great stories? Produced by a variety of new, old and hybrid organizations?
Look no farther.
http://www.j-lab.org/about/press-releases/enterprise-reporting-awards-a-home-run1/
Personally, Dean, I find the "debate" to be so much sophistry. Draw definitions the way you want, get the conclusions you desire. Me? While I love reading Clay and Jay, it's to focus on how to do the job I've done for 35 years differently and, one hopes, better. Not to ruminate on whether a particular model is better.
Sort of, I suspect, like the various reporters who came up with the excellent stories Jan Schaffer's awards highlighted.
#10 Posted by Tom Davidson, CJR on Thu 22 Dec 2011 at 01:46 PM
GREAT writing voice.
#11 Posted by jan shaw, CJR on Thu 22 Dec 2011 at 01:53 PM
As I wrote on your original fon piece, what we are seeing is the decentralization of mass communication, every person can potentially mass communicate with the devices in their pockets. This has affected journalism by acting as competition for revenue (Craigslist takes the classified revenue, huffpo takes the ads) and by challenging the authority of the old medium (because journalists, unlike comedians with heckler's, can no longer dominate the discussion by 'dominating the mike'). This has been a change with both positive and negative effects and it's easy for journalists to focus on the negatives since it is their jobs that are affected, but if one evaluates the changes honestly, you can't look at the effects of the FON age and see them as a huge improvement on what came before.
And that's because the preceding journalism became increasingly undemocratic, insular, and uninformative. It was focused on the pseudo-scandals of Clinton, the non-existant case for war with Iraq, lauding the corosive economics of the 'free markets' and 'free trade', celebrating its credentials for false balance and neutrality, and ignoring and minimizing problems to do with the expanding security state and the increasing boiler room mentality infecting once respectable financial institutions. Journalism, as a whole with few exceptions, earned the contempt shown it from the FON crowd.
It did so through:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/politifact-lie-of-the-year-6619997
"gutless pissantery ... generally practiced by gutless pissants who use the intellectual freedom of others as barter for a bigger office, a longer title, and the ability to make miserable the lives of the people who do the really good work in journalism. Often, the gutless pissantery is practiced in the name of "fairness," "objectivity," and, worst of all, "ethics," as though there is something unethical in calling Newt Gingrich out for the doughy fraud that he is. This enables the gutless pissants to dress up their tattered intellectual cowardice in shiny raiment...
"Objectivity," as it is currently practiced, is a terrible wasting disease in the press. It always has been. It saps the energy. I creates listlessness. It leaves the sufferer prone to bouts of lethargy, and the discourse prone to infection by the most egregious kind of lies."
It's this stagnant journalism pool that FON objects to. Well done investigative reporting? Love it. Well done informed analysis and punditry by individuals qualified to speak on their subjects (so not looking at you Cokie Roberts and George Will)? Adore it. The vapid crap that has come out of media over the last 30 years? Burn it with fire. You say FON has complaints but no answers? I say they're a TV audience who's sick of watching 2 and a half men quality news and are starved for an AMC quality alternative where honest stories matter.
Pt 2 in a sec
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 23 Dec 2011 at 02:12 PM
And contrary to this:
"Notwithstanding Drudge’s propagation of right-wing political leaks and hits, none of these guys has been responsible for any great stories."
They're finding it on the net.
In the story Ryan linked earlier:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/matt-stoller-how-the-federal-reserve-fights.html
we saw powerful reporting and audience engagement which produced previously unthinkable results. Little of this was done by the professionals:
"Soon thereafter, I met Pittman, and a whole suite of people on the right and the left skeptical of the Fed’s behavior (including Yves Smith, Bob Ivry, Barry Ritholz, Walker Todd, Chris Whalen, Josh Rosner, Jane D’Arista, Bill Greider, Karl Denninger, Dean Baker, Simon Johnson, and lots of others, including over email Tyler Durden). The financial blogs formed a sort of shadow financial elite, making counter-arguments against the standard establishment norms peddled by centrist, conservative, and liberal Fed defenders. These people became increasingly influential over the course of several years, which is an important reason the financial reform bill became stronger over the course of 2009-2010, unlike most bills which get chipped away at by special interests...
The Fed wanted to frame this as a Goldilocks choice. Congress could do nothing, which was clearly unacceptable and too cold a response. Congress could adopt the Ron Paul – Alan Grayson Fed audit, which was fringe and way too hot a response. Or it could adopt Mel Watt’s bill, which was just the right temperature. Congresscritters like compromise, especially when that compromise is supported by the Fed, and in the five minutes they had to consider this amendment, they might have gone for Watt’s bill... And the Fed was able to frame the Watt bill as a compromise among the old media outlets with whom it was friendly. Normally, this would have won the fight. But we were able to get new media outlets to focus on the substance of the amendment, and show that it shielded the Fed from Congress... this time, advocates on the internet were watching carefully."
The result?
" In terms of how the Fed was brought to heel, that House vote was a crushing moment. The Fed simply did not lose fights like this, ever."
This kind of thing is good for democracy. It's bad for the societal control and stability required to create the horrific inequities that have developed over the last 30 years, in fact it's a real Crisis of Democracy, but it's a good thing on the whole for the society and he world in which we live. (And now all it needs is a business model!)
#13 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 23 Dec 2011 at 02:28 PM
Argh, my crisis of democracy link got borked.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crisis_of_Democracy
#14 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 23 Dec 2011 at 02:37 PM
Speaking of links that are borked, the Michael Hudson comment under the "Featured Comment" box seems a little swedish.
Bork bork bork.
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 23 Dec 2011 at 06:43 PM
Well, Thimbles, we agree that folks like D'Arista and Greider deserved more attention and respect. But I don't think this is the insider vs. outsider fight you depict. Greider is a pro. D'Arista was a congressional staffer--though unfortunately unknown to to many financial reporters--someone with the means to reach media gatekeepers.
That outsiders like Yves Smith (and the late Doris Dungey from Calculated Risk) might not have found an audience 20 years ago is hard to prove either way. Blogs obviously make it easier for minds like theirs to be discovered. But that dosn't give them much amplification. Tanta was regularly attacked by know-nothing boom mongers even after the market turned.
The battle is really about how to pay for the people able to gather hidden facts, develop clear analyis, and deliver these broadly, with authority. I have not seen a lot of FON gurus make the kind of argument you make, about the substance of the coverage. Most appear to be agnostic about that, even as their faith in the news consumer--his ability to find good info and to tell the difference between it and crap--is undiminished by contrary evidence.
Being famous, as with the Huffpo (and Drudge) models, gets one clicks. I have yet to see any indication that it makes one's message smarter or truer than those without fame or clicks. Newpapers have (or had) the power to depict the unfamous in a way sufficiently authoritative that their message might be heeded by those in a position to make change. This is the crux of the matter.
As for the FED, I may have missed something, but I am unaware of that institution recently being down, let alone out.
#16 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Sat 24 Dec 2011 at 12:33 PM
"That outsiders like Yves Smith (and the late Doris Dungey from Calculated Risk) might not have found an audience 20 years ago is hard to prove either way."
There have been plenty of people with newsletters 20 years ago and nothing really came of it. Ron Paul, for instance, wasn't a nationally known household name until the Internet began to traffic his conservative, anti-war views. If you were an outsider, the media acted as gatekeepers to keep you out (for instance the outside anti-war view during the Iraq war push). Perhaps this would not have been so bad if the media's definition of reasonable debate wasn't so narrow and the coverage wasn't so vapid, but the decline of journalism quality was on display many years before the mainstreaming of the Internet platform.
Remember a movie called "Broadcast News"? The basic premise of that film was showing how as news priorities became more commercial, news content became more cosmetic. News professionals were accorded success based on their screen prescence, not on their journalistic ability. Journalism became less about information and more about social club status in which people like David Broder, Sally Quinn, and Maureen Dowd thrived. It became a press club in which reality didn't matter, perception and gossip are the trade of the vapid superstars. The result?
http://archive.pressthink.org/2007/08/14/rove_and_press.html
"Whereas I believe that the real—and undeclared—ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.
Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.
Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain."
Thus the existing press lived and operated in a bubble world disconnected from the important issues Americans needed to know about. That American need formed the void that blogs and other FON enterprises came to fill. Journalism that is audience responsive, audience participatory, populated by audience expertise. It's this which has allowed enterprises like TPM to produce quality national work without the reach of a national newsroom because they have a national audience to draw from.
Journalism can remain the irrelevant and disconnected enterprises they've evolved into, and continue to lose their viewers as their shoddy work bleeds the institution of credibility, or they can involve the people who read their stories and can contribute feedback now that the technology exists.
One model disempowers the audience, restricts acceptable perspectives, and empowers manipulators who have done horrible damage to the nation as a result. The other builds communities, empowers people, and allows perspectives otherwise unconsidered a chance to make their cases. I don't know about you, but I've lived long enough under the former model.
"As for the FED, I may have missed something, but I am unaware of that institution recently being down, let alone out."
We're just getting started.
#17 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 24 Dec 2011 at 03:48 PM
An outsider's perspective on the inside:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/joe-nocera-gets-mad/
"Basically, Joe is arriving where I’ve been since 2000: what’s going on in the discussion of economic affairs (and other matters, like justifications for war) isn’t just a case where different people look at the same facts but reach different conclusions. Instead, we’re looking at a situation in which one side of the debate just isn’t interested in the truth, in which alleged scholarship is actually just propaganda.
Saying this, of course, gets you declared “shrill”, denounced as partisan; you’re supposed to pretend that we’re having a civilized discussion between people with good intentions. And you’re supposed to match each attack on Republicans with an attack on Democrats, as if the mendacity were equal on both sides. Sorry, but it isn’t. Democrats aren’t angels; they’re human and sometimes corrupt — but they don’t operate a lie machine 24/7 the way modern Republicans do.
Welcome to my world, Joe."
#18 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 24 Dec 2011 at 04:52 PM
The social club still lives and they are still giving us dispatches from their bubble world:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-schmoozing-6627729
"I don't know what it's going to take to convince people that the political opposition this president has faced is sui generis in political history. The numbers are certainly there for all to see. None of the accepted rules — social or otherwise — apply. The committment of the Republican party in Congress to this president's failure is absolute — and, it should be noted, the country be damned. There is nothing Barack Obama can do to change that, and certainly not in an election year. The idea that the solution to the current era of gridlock is located somewhere in the ineffable tangles of his complicated personality is a shuck and a dodge, and a way to let off the hook a Republican party dedicated to non-government with every fiber of its being. You want to go skull-diving for an explanation for the current Washington clusterfk? Start with the mind and soul of Eric Cantor, if you can afford the electron microscope you're going to need to find them."
Honestly, after all the country endured over the Clinton years and the Bush years, you'd think these people would learn to take their job seriously and quit pretending the world is best seen through their social lens.
I have problems with Obama because there are serious problems with Obama. But his lack of reaching out to his opposition? Not effin' one of them. The guy tried to put Judd Gregg into his cabinet for cryin' out loud! The guy swept the crimes of the Bush administration under the carpet for cryin' out loud! The guy actively defends the guys who caused one of the greatest financial collapses in world history for cryin' out loud!
And the reward for being bendoverly magnanimous from the Washington press? He's not being bipartisan enough and he needs to be more friendly with the business community according to people like David Gergen. Until the broken press gets fixed, until they "have what it takes" to see "the opposition this president has faced is sui generis in political history" (though there were plenty of Clinton parallels) focusing on the FON critics is like focusing on an industry's cold when it's riddled with cancer.
Would you mind telling us a little more how to fix the cancer?
#19 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 29 Dec 2011 at 02:21 PM