Editor’s note: CJR’s Dean Starkman was invited to give the opening keynote speech at this year’s Narrative Arc Conference, at Boston University. The three-day conference at the end of March gathered some of the best nonfiction writers in America to talk about the craft. Starkman edits The Audit, CJR’s business desk, and is our Kingsford Capital Fellow. In the speech, he took off from his seminal piece in our 50th anniversary issue—“Confidence Game: the limited vision of the news gurus”—and discussed how powerful reporting and agenda-setting narrative writing need to fight their way back into the center of the discussion about the future of news. The following is a written version of his speech:
It goes without saying that I’m honored to be speaking to this particular group about this particular subject.
I’m going to open with a quote from the great Bostonian and important American historical figure, Ram Dass, who often says: I’m not here to tell you anything new. I’m here to remind you of things you already know. He would probably add, “Om.”
The reason I’m here, I believe, is that I’m perceived to have been engaged in the battle over the future of news with the technological vanguard and am now asked for a report from the front, to find out how it’s going. What are the prospects for our side?
Last fall, I wrote an essay called “Confidence Game: the limited vision of the news gurus,” about the ideas of leading journalism academics, concentrating on the work of Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen, touching on that of a few others. I identified what I called the future of news, or FON, consensus, and argued mostly against it.
The genesis of the article, the reason it came about, is that, like you, no doubt, I was unnerved by the collapse of the financial models that had supported long form investigative and narrative journalism. Like you I was spooked by the array of new technologies and communications tools that were replacing old distribution methods, and I was a bit intimidated by the sweeping pronouncements from new journalism theorists who seemed connected to a technological culture with which I was quite unfamiliar.
Like you I listened to a discourse that seemed to consign old journalism forms and methods, and even old journalism values, to the dustbin of history. And did so with a certitude and certain relish that I didn’t fully understand.
As Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, his 2008 popularization of network theory:
The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced or destroyed.
Or as Jarvis wrote in a 2009 blog post which was an imaginary address to a gathering of news executives:
You blew it. So now, for many of you, there isn’t time. It’s simply too late. The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There’s huge opportunity there—for them.
And I thought, well, we certainly did fuck some things up, God knows.
And I have to say, I listened to the discourse that was going on about journalism by these new entrants, and I learned a lot. I learned about the value of networks, the potential of something called peer production for journalism, about free content, and sharing, about branding and entrepreneurism, about journalism as conversation, about horizontal communication, , about “iterative” journalism—reporting on the fly, fixing mistakes along the way—about the value of informality and spontaneity over hidebound formal style and narrative forms.
And I thought, well, who can object to sharing? Freedom and things for free? Isn’t horizontal better than top-down? One sounds democratic. The other like a form of oppression. More on this later.
I certainly appreciate someone taking a skeptical eye to Jarvis and Shirky. I admire these two enormously, but I think you have a point. It is one thing to say that journalism is going to die -- quite another to be pleased about it.
But I think you also miss a point. Journalism will be practiced largely by amateurs and freelancers, not because it is a better system, or more democratic, or more fair...but because of the economics of content distribution.. It is simply uneconomical for publishers to employ talented generalists and professionals who rely upon the publisher to provide distribution. That model is broken.
If I were to argue against Shirky and Jarvis (or a "Triumphalist straw man" -- I haven't read them as thoroughly as you) I'd suggest that what we all missed two years ago was that social and search would move us into an age of author driven content distribution. Content is going to be shared and discovered not based on print distribution, a domain name, a huge library of content, or even a storied brand. Content will increasingly be found and consumer based on the reputation and social following of the individual who wrote it, at least for the next 5 years. This changes the narrative quite a bit.
This model may not support foreign press desks or expensive investigative journalism campaigns -- but it does take power away from the Publisher, content farms, and the "everybody", and puts it in the hands of a journalistic elite.
Which is what you want, right?
If an author can create enough of a following by breaking a key story (think of what Matt Drudge accomplished with one dress) -- they can create whatever content their audience demands, including long form, investigative pieces. It will not be flat, democratic, or horizontal. It will be elitist, vertical , and high quality. But the notion of a "Publisher" as a viable business model -- will disappear.
#1 Posted by Andrew Boer, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 05:32 PM
I guess I should add that writing about the death of journalism without talking about how to pay for it, is sort of like writing about the death of the short story. Sure we can compare the relative merits of Hemingway and Fitzgerald to radio serials and early television -- but unless you can figure out of to make short stories economically viable, they will disappear.
#2 Posted by Andrew Boer, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 05:40 PM
OMG what took establishment journalism so long to stand up for itself? This story almost inspires me to renew my subscription to CJR, the dead-tree edition. And I'm not even that old!
#3 Posted by AJF, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 10:28 PM
Mr. Starkman, I really think if that you need to break down the problems with modern journalism a little more in order to communicate where you and the people you're criticizing are coming from. The way it is presented, symptoms of different problems are just a bit mixed up together, in my opinion. There are two problems with modern journalism, legacy and revolutionary.
Let's start with the legacy problem. Modern journalism has suffered for several decades from the commodification of news. The business aspect of the 'news business' has encroached deeper and deeper into the public service aspect, the mission aspect, as media businesses consolidated and news transmission evolved from the literal and into the visual. 3 symptoms arose from this.
Paintball journalism: TV had an advantage over press since it could save a thousand words with every image and every clip. Unfortunately, the words omitted were often the historical context and, without context, the clips became a means of entertaining the audience, not informing them. When the 24 hour news channels began rolling out, the audiences were already conditioned for bite sized journalism. And it had to be bite sized journalism about 'YOU' because the audience required a personal interest hook to maintain their attention. Journalism work became less about carefully producing an in-depth picture of the world and more about shooting paintballs at the screen. Anything more might be considered boring and elitist.
In the club: When you have a situation where businesses consolidate and once separate pools of labor have to merge, you get a situation where the valued work gets assigned to fewer people and the rest of the people don't get work at all. This creates a winner take all - superstar dynamic. The problem is the superstars of journalism were not being rated on their ability to inform their audiences. News had evolved into an entertainment business. Suddenly these people weren't just reporting on the important affairs of the country, these were the affairs of their friends, of their country club members, of their party guests. They travel in these social spheres. They invest in their companies. They and their editors not members of the public's club, and thus they do not express a viewpoint that serves the public's interests.
Where's the beat: Journalists require expertise on a subject in order to report that subject knowledgeably and accurately, but with news consolidation and the emphasis on entertainment, actual knowledgeability took a back seat to 'common knowledge'. The skill of journalism changed from being able to evaluate a public official's claims into being able to take a public official's dictation. It's not like media could afford to give the word space to actual expertise anyways, so let's allow Ditzy McSmile to pass "That republican candidate? People would love to have a beer with him" off as a proposed budget analysis. Superstars do the entertainment and reporters are the interchangeable cogs providing material. Therefore, in the established journalism market, we had a shortage of journalists qualified to work their beats and too scared to challenge the common wisdom that had become a substitute for so many many words.
The legacy problem has contributed to, if not caused, some of the great failures we've had in our society over the last few decades with little accountability. There has been a corruption of the "journalism business" as its members, both journalists and corporation, became members of the club, ceasing to be apart from their subjects. Journalism became the chronicles of family and friends, not analytical business of the news.
And then came the revolution.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 04:30 AM
The revolution was when technology shifted the tools of mass communication into the hands of the general population. This caused 2 major problems for journalism.
Ad Wars: This meant that a guy named Craig could eat your lunch with a web page that had global reach.
This meant that the cost of mass publication could no longer act as a justification for the cost of ad space.
This meant, as many businesses found out, if your business model requires a separation between customer and information (such as competitor price), your business model will not work in the network age.
Journalism suddenly had competition for ads done on cheap publishing platforms, but that wasn't all.
There can only be one: Consolidation works because, as as a vendor gains market control, they obtain more power to set market prices and raise profit margins (often by busting labor while raising prices etc, you know, the Gannet game).
The net lowered the requirements for mass publication to a old Athlon server in the basement. Journalism can no longer effectively consolidate while every person in America with a basement could become Josh Marshall should the need require it.
But this is why the FON guys are excited. Consolidation and top down control were the sources of journalism's legacy problems.
A person with a website can put together a carefully crafted masterpiece on a site with video, if they choose, and no one is going to scream "CUT TO COMMERCIAL" in the middle.
A person with a website doesn't need to be a member of anyone's club and can even be an exile.
Any person, be they an economist or a climatologist or a professor of middle eastern studies, can start writing an informative website covering the issues which affect their field today and the background on why those issues are important.
There's no voice from on high taking people off this air because "we don't want their message to taint our brand". This is the network revolution, and it bugs the hell out of media because we tend to remember who failed us and how and because we don't fit their conventions - we're not under their control. We don't beg executives and officials for access, we get their documents leaked into our inboxes. We don't avoid calling people out and risk insulting the decor, we bluntly j'accuse the j'accusable. We don't blindly accept assumptions which everybody knows but nobody has proven, show me how NAFTA strengthened all three North American economies and how more free trade deals with more repressive societies will increase our prosperity.
If you're asking FON for a business model, beyond blog busking and google ads, they don't have one. But if you're asking about how to correct the faults in journalism caused by the warped priorities of bad, monopoly seeking, ownership, then mass communication ownership atomization seems an like exciting path to us net users.
If everyone has a voice, then everyone has a choice of who to listen to. The power of mass communication stops being about who has the most money or who belongs to the right clubs.
It starts being about who you should listen to according to those you know. The future of news will likely be spread by word of mouth, and will hopefully consist of more than 140 characters.
And that has to be better on the whole than what has passed for news for the last few decades.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 05:48 AM