To read Megan Garber’s “Common Knowledge,” click here. To read Justin Peters’s “Something to Talk About,” click here.
Justin Peters: You said that news is “a reflection of ourselves.” But aren’t lots of things reflections of ourselves? Art, fiction, and so on? How is news specifically different? I think you’re saying that news doesn’t just exist outside of its creators; that what we produce as news is a function of who we are as reporters, or something like that. Am I right?
Megan Garber: Yes, that’s basically what I’m saying. When I wrote that, I was actually thinking specifically of Marshall McLuhan—not so much his medium/message stuff, although that’s certainly part of it, but this idea he had that digital media (by which he meant, primarily, television ) mean that we ‘wear all mankind as our skin.’ There’s a porous element to the news, I guess, a kind of osmosis that takes place between news consumer and the news itself. Because, of course, news is much more than art, or fiction, as you say—which certainly share elements of cultural reflection, self-reflection, etc. News is different because—and this is an obvious point, I realize, but it’s also a crucial one—it traffics in reality. It’s not meant to inform the soul; it’s meant to inform the mind.
News is, I guess, self-reflection that is, ultimately, actionable: it isn’t meant to inform vague conceptions of ‘the human condition,’ or what have you; it’s meant instead to provide us with the daily information that will help us live our lives.
So, yes, to answer your news/reporters question: news is, I think, very much a function of who we are as reporters. It is a reflection of how reporters see the world, as individuals and as a collective body. And it is a reflection of the filters we establish—‘the media’—according to that vision. But, then, there’s also an element of news that transcends who we are as individuals—which, then, gets back to the ‘it’s about reality’ thing. Because news is, most of the time, about observable reality. So reality itself is what keeps reporters’ subjectivity in check—and what makes news a fundamentally collective enterprise.
JP: But there are innumerable different ways to interpret an event, right? Which I think gets to your points about niche news. If news is a reflection of ourselves, then what does it say about us that news is increasingly stratified and segmented—for better or for worse?
MG: First, I should just clarify that the “observable reality” I was talking about above isn’t entirely limited to “observable events.” Sure, that’s the case a lot of the time…but that’s certainly not all news is.
As to news’s stratification, segmentation, etc., and what it says about us: I actually think that’s quite a natural response to the empowering capabilities of the Web. Narrative—and, more precisely, being the one to tell the tale—is power. It’s human to want that kind of agency over the events we’ve observed…and as you put it in your essay, the human impulse will always win out.
My concerns, I guess, are on a macro level, and connected to the (otherwise empowering) new technologies of the Web. Because, when systematized—when, for example, consolidated into niche sites—narrative power can become rather insidious. Take the fact that, per a recent poll, nearly half of Americans believe Sarah Palin’s “death panel” inanities. Nearly half. It’s horrific. And, to me, it’s also an example of narrative power run amok—and of what can go wrong when we lose our baseline sense of reality. It’s a kind of cognitive free-for-all out there right now.
JP: One of the things I found interesting about your piece was the idea that niche news isn’t just fostering different worldviews, but different worlds. Maybe it’s just clarifying these worlds that have always existed, though. Is this really something new so much as a new way of observing something that was already there? People have always organized themselves into interest groups, or picked their friends based on common interests, or so on. Couldn’t you say that news’s presumption that “we’re all in this together” has always been, in some sense, an artificial one?
I live in San Francisco, one of the most mediated (and media-saturated) places in the United States, if not the world. Everything here has at least one controlling narrative (promulgated by at least three or four publications or blogs), and there are always ambitious journalists trying to extrapolate the Next Big Thing out of technological and social developments that feel, to people like me experiencing them first-hand, completely quotidian. Being the home of the EFF, Flickr, Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, and more large-scale New Media platforms creates a powerfully tangible sense of unreality at times, as New York Times and Economist stories regularly feature people who may be old friends from previous jobs or casual acquaintances from Burning Man. It makes all of us feel like self-important digerati from time to time, even if (like me) we've always been digital janitors, working behind the scenes.
Here's the kicker, though: San Francisco is an absolutely terrible place to try to stay on top of news having to do with San Francisco. I've only been here for 14 years, so I can't say with any authority that it's always been this way, but I'm an avid consumer of journalism, and i have to say that all of the local news sources are fatally compromised in one way or the other, and all the New Media in the world (more or less literally) hasn't substantially improved the situation. The SF Chronicle has a storied (pre-Hearst) past, but the present is a lot of generic AP wire stories, some uselessly establishmentarian / pure-politics local political coverage, and a tiny sliver of useful old-school civic-minded journalism from Matier & Ross and a couple other antediluvian (pre-Hearst) columnists. Bruce Brugmann talks a good fight about the need for a muckraking progressive press, but the SF Bay Guardian runs on good intentions, internships and Brugmann's fossilized ideas about progressivism. The SF Weekly is a dumping ground, with the occasional exception of Matt Smith's soi disant lone-man-with-a-typewriter schtick (and over time he too has ossified into a portrait of contrarianism for its own sake). And I've been looking and looking, and there's nothing equivalently useful going on in the blogosphere.
A point I think needs to be made is that if community and social connection are an important good fostered by a shared communal understanding of the news, the current intersection of technology and journalism provides a broken model. The "community" brought into existence by adding comments to the SF Chronicle / SF Weekly / SFist is not one that I recognize from my day-to-day life as a San Franciscan, and is not one iin which I have any interest in participating. I see this all over the place on newspaper sites and local news sites now -- comments sections seem to be pure id and seething resentment rather than any sort of discourse.
I guess my point is this: the internet and the web are disruptive technologies, but there's more to this point in time than just the internet wrecking traditional journalism. There's the corporate consolidation of news organizations under an ever-smaller number of owners, there's the explicit streamlining of news products in response to market research to make them more pure entertainment, there's the dissolution of the fragile, semi-mythical political and social consensuses of the postwar / Cold War era, there's the consequences of trying to figure out how to live in a more diverse (if not more tolerant) and less openly oligarchic or class-/race-/gender-privileged society. I think the main thing that technology has done has been to accelerate and expose processes that were already in play, and I think that must be incorporated into any brainstorming or planning journalists do in figuring out where things go next. I think we're in the middle of figuring out a new social compact, and even the smartest, most adaptable news organizations aren't going to be able to reliably ser
#1 Posted by Forrest L Norvell, CJR on Fri 11 Sep 2009 at 03:30 AM
The philosophical debate presented is interesting, but, like Forrest Norvell, the real frustration I have with my local paper (Vancouver Sun in Canada) is similar: where's the news?
Today the lead stories are various police news stories, the hockey team has begun training camp, a British pop star is in town, and a trailer for a movie being shot in the area has been furtively posted on YouTube.
I'm sorry, I know there are "slow news days," but I do expect the local rag to do better than this. I'm not saying the news should be more "serious," or serving the public good, or more respectful of the democratic process, or anything that noble. I just want it to be engaging, and while these stories are not uninteresting, they certainly don't grip me.
Take the hockey camp story. Yesterday, on facebook, a friend posted a picture showing one of the hockey team's stars, the high-paid goalie, posed with her husband and six-month old baby. It's a cute picture; the child has a funny expression on his face as he looks at the hockey star. (Probably gas.)
I suppose her posting is news of a sort, and it's fun, and if I see my friend I will comment about it, but it's not what I expect -- or somehow need -- on the front page of a newspaper.
Nor do I particularly want a story about the training camp on the front page--unless something highly dramatic or "significant" happened: maybe if the hockey star broke his leg and won't be able to play during the coming season, for instance. (God forbid; I am a fan.)
The newspaper, with its resources, should consistently give me engaging news that my friend, with her snapshot camera most likely cannot. We still need the news, that is, stories of interest and significance (psychologically if not materially) to the area community.
#2 Posted by Neale Adams, CJR on Sat 12 Sep 2009 at 10:40 AM
Both the original dialogue and the additional comments are remarkable. The following are offered as a non-critical contribution to the feedback loop:
@ MG - "A Wikipedia entry written by 20 million people will be more reality-reflective than an entry written by twenty people."
Without putting too fine a point on it, a typical Wikipedia entry is not written by 20 million people working on the same entry, it's written by different groups of 20 different people each working on 3 million separate articles. Not the same thing at all. A contributor might not know much about the process of rice farming in Asia, for example, but be an expert on Eastern European history. The friction you mention later is mostly in the subset of living people and current events which tend to reflect a political agenda.
"You really can’t have too many cooks in the kitchen on this one...What I am arguing against, ultimately, is the ghettoization of information."
I'm confused with this because it sounds like an inherent contradiction. It also seems to me that the fundamental model of how information is shared has always been ghettoized in the form of, for example, local news, specialized trade publications, academic journals, or a conversation with a neighbor across a fence. I could be wrong, but sense that one of the more critical elements of change seems to be at the touch points between groups, the interstitials.
@JP - "The news is fungible."
Sorry, but that's not true. If you read a story about the death of Michael Jackson which is pretty much the same as a dozen other stories, it can rightly be considered as a quasi-commodity. If you read a story about the city wanting to bulldoze your block to make way for a freeway, it's not fungible at all.
"Not just thinking about the best way to translate what we’re doing onto the Web, but thinking about their role in their communities."
Bingo. But the problem is that there are a few barriers to this. One is that the current business climate tends to block innovation unless it involves large economies of scale. Another, which is related, is that for a long time there has been a disruption in physical communities to the extent of a WalMartization and loss of sense of place. Still another is the fact that, with rare exceptions, the news community has been reactive and not pro-active about its own disruption brought on by the Internet. Due, one assumes, to a lack of ability to see trends which affect itself.
One example of this lack of awareness about the direction of things is current development in the area of the Semantic Web. Something which is making strides and likely to have a large impact in the fairly near future. Another is in the emergence of "intelligent assistants" such as the DARPA-derived SIRI project. This isn't Buck Rogers stuff; for its own survival, the news business needs to be awake and paying attention to fundamental shifts in the technology instead of the buzz of a Twitter or FaceBook.
Two of the common metaphors you hear about the Internet are that it is as profound as the invention of the printing press, and a paradigm shift of the telephone. Both true. But it strikes me that there is yet another metaphor in the sense of the proscenium arch and the early days of motion pictures. Once people started playing around with the camera's ability to move, it brought about an entirely new way of telling stories unbound by an existing frame of reference.
#3 Posted by Perry Gaskill, CJR on Mon 28 Sep 2009 at 11:25 PM