More importantly from my point of view was this: Will it be able to produce great stories? That’s what journalism does, isn’t it? And it seems to be a hole—and not a small one—in a peer-produced model of news. It doesn’t really have any great stories, and, worryingly, it doesn’t seem to have any way to produce them.
I don’t say this as in, haha. I say it because it’s a critical problem.
I’ve written that a centerless model for enterprise journalism, is having trouble producing great stories for the same reason that Here Comes Everybody wasn’t written by “everybody.” Important books, like great journalism, require authorship, a power journalists require and deserve at least as much as academics. Can Plan B support authors? If so, great. But as I’ve asked, how exactly?
The larger question looming behind this entire debate, though, is whether the FON consensus believes that the story really is the thing, that is, whether it believes in the centrality of the great story. I’m happy to have that debate. But, as I’ve said, relegating the story to the margins of journalism would be a bold position for a journalism academic to take.
And, you know, it was never Bill Keller’s lawn. It’s the public’s lawn, so it was time to bring some seriousness of purposes to the discussion.
And this brings us to McClure.
Okay, this was a very peculiar man. Considered by many to be a genius, he was also just an impossible boss—a font of enthusiasms, you might say. He was forever steaming in from Europe, throwing the office into turmoil with new schemes, ideas, and editorial changes. “I can’t sit still,” he once said to Lincoln Steffens. “That’s your job and I don’t see how you can do it!” Staffers would literally rent hotel rooms so they could hide and finish their stories, but apparently McClure would always find them.
The son of an Irish shipyard worker and his wife, Samuel Sidney McClure was brought to the U.S. as a child after his father was killed in a work accident. He was raised amid severe privation in rural Indiana, moving among relatives, and grew into a high-strung, impulsive boy. He ran away “dozens and dozens” of times, his biographer notes. He worked his way through Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, founded by abolitionists and a center for social reformers and as a collegiate orator, once made this declaration about the abolitionist movement, so revealing of his character: “It was when they believed in what seemed impossible that the abolitionists did the most good, that they created the sentiment that finally did accomplish the impossible.”
Modern journalists have an ambivalent relationship toward muckrakers, I would suggest. And it’s understandable. They were moralistic. They were deeply religious, part of the religious left you might say. They wrote in such high-flown language, in such high dudgeon. We remember them, inaccurately, I should add, as intemperate hotheads.
Vanderbilt English professor Cecelia Tichi wrote this: “Say the word ‘muckraker, and the listener’s mind shuts as quickly as it opens. For muckraking suffers from both too much and too little familiarity. The term floats freely in the popular culture, but the texts themselves lack literary prestige, no matter how skilled their practitioners….”
But there’s a reason why—despite our own ambivalence and their strangeness—the muckrakers are considered foundational figures in American journalism. In my book on the financial crisis and the financial press, called The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark, I’m going to argue the muckrakers—at least in their earlier, purer incarnation around McClure’s, bestowed on us great gifts—qualities that still guide, and I have to say, challenge us, today. These are the values we have to hold onto and insist up on in the current debate. It’s the circus tent—in Roy Peter Clark’s wonderful phrase—we have to hold up in the windstorm.
The first is what I call a certain journalistic purity. They had clean hands. The muckrakers literally stumbled upon their subject—institutionalized corruption-while searching for great stories. It was not, as some would believe, the other way around.
Most muckrakers’ early careers were not political. Many weren’t even journalistic.
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