We started with the story of Ida Tarbell, so it seems fitting to finish with an anecdote that casts a different light on the consensus and its contribution to journalism. In class on Monday I had set students a task of defining a goal around finding an audience or making connections with available digital tools. In reporting back, one student described her exercise to rapt colleagues. In seeking to follow a serious investigative story in a chaotic regime outside the US, she had focused on tweeting links and finding sources on social networks that were of relevance to that country and story. One link led to another and another. Her diligence and work were rewarded with a random contact through Twitter, which in turn led to chance meeting in New York (yes, real shoe leather was expended), and her obtaining a number of key contacts and numbers in the administration she was reporting, new leads in a story that is neither trivial nor easy.
In her words: “It is really incredible, to be able to get this access, this quickly, is really something I would never have imagine was possible.” This winter break she will follow the story, honoring the Tarbell tradition, using the methods of the networked way.
Ok. For me, this is the entire nexus of the argument, and nicely done for finding it:
The cruel truth of the emerging networked news environment is that reporters are as disempowered as they have ever been, writing more often, under more pressure, with less autonomy, about more trivial things, than under the previous monopolistic regime.
--vs--
The suggestion that the Internet has “disempowered” journalists is just not true. In a global context it is willfully wrong. But even in the narrow context of journalism in the US, to say that individual journalists are disempowered by a medium that allows for so much more individual reporting and publishing freedom is baffling. If this case is made in the newsroom context of reporters having too much to do, then maybe this is an institutional fault in misunderstanding the requirements of producing effective digital journalism. Unlike the pages and pages of newsprint and rolling twenty-four-hour news, there is no white space, no dead airtime to fill on the Internet. It responds to 140 characters as well as to five thousand words.
Pay attention to that bolded comment, as I think it contains room for common ground.
Thoughts?
#1 Posted by C.W. Anderson, CJR on Wed 9 Nov 2011 at 05:13 PM
@Emily: Great piece.
@CW: I think you're right there. But the good newsrooms are retraining, rethinking their strategies for writing stories. At The Atlantic, we have blasted through the idea that 300-500 word stories based mostly on aggregation were the way to win the Internet. Now, we go shorter and we go longer (much longer) regularly. Our readers like it more and we're more effective in the journalism that we do.
One institutional reason for this change: unique user growth is driven by big story hits. Now that uniques are the dominant metric for most news sites, I think you'll see more and more places swinging for the fences more and more often. It's taken reporters who understand the metrics to be able to make the case that good journalism was also good business. Until we had people willing to stare into the maw of the business side, they controlled the narrative about "what worked." On this last point, I mean it to be general to the industry, not specific to the Atlantic.
#2 Posted by Alexis Madrigal, CJR on Wed 9 Nov 2011 at 09:10 PM
You realize that In your knee jerk attempt at refutation through your rhetorical use of the perspective of "I" (which coming from the Guardian hardly gives you the ethos you seek), you completely miss the weight of the point in the previous piece.
Rushing to tear down the castle at the insistence of a few "forward thinkers" based on their predictions of impending doom brought on by disruptive technology has been the great fuckup of all the so far disrupted content creation businesses. Yea, Craigslist kicked a hole in the side of the ship of newspapers, just as Napster did the music business, but it did not spell it's end. Rushing to tear down the walls without thinking (as FON does) is just as ignorant as burring ones head in the sand and hoping for the best because the both fail to examine technology and changing consumer behavior and think pragmatically about changing business models to adapt to change.
The argument was never made in the previous piece that twitter could not be a useful tool for sourcing new contacts or sources. The general point was that just because technology has reduced barriers of entry to publishing, it does not mean that the NYT should go with free everywhere in a panic. The most valuable products of journalism require resources; the news man covering a Bergan county high school baseball game might not any more, the tech blogger for Techcrunch spitting out 4 snarky paragraphs in responce to a product launch or press release never did (and both do provide great value to readers) but a war correspondent does need resources, backing and time...which must be paid for somehow, someway. If you toss up all the gates in the name of a predicted techno utopia that's just around the proverbial bend ( which historically and statistically have always proved misguided), you may dry the well that you pull from to create value that consumers want. It's worth thinking about and experimenting with new approaches to the business bit not blindly following the tech disruption crowd shouting fire from the white tower. As a former editor for the Guardian, this should now be apparent to you as the pay walled times and WSJ are starting to thrive. The Guardian...not so much.
I would say ask an EMI executive about the perils of not keeping your eyes on the business model when disruption starts knocking and looking for what works best instead of reacting blindly in a panic and letting the consumer perception of the value of your product essentially dwindle to zero, but the analogy would be false because in the case of the music business their great blunder opened the door for the content creators (artists) monetize themselves directly and market themselves dirrectly using new technology and media. The problem is, while the consumer dollars spent on music consumption are greater than they ever have been prior and now flow dirrectly to the artist pocket, I fear many more artist can sell many more concert tickets in many mor markets on many more tours than all but the most known journalists could sell amazon Kindle singles.
So why tearn down the process of experimentation with business models in the hopes of finding an equilibrium in the name of a technological utopia that my not ever come to fruition? I think this was his point.
#3 Posted by Jason Thomas, CJR on Wed 9 Nov 2011 at 09:45 PM
Ms. Bell: You mention at the beginning that you not explicitly named by Mr. Starkman. He's perhaps being unduly generous to a Columbia colleague who is tied so closely to a Wall Street vulture fund. So I'll ask. How much is Alden Global Capital, the owners of Digital First, paying you to "consult" on the vulture fund's' dismantling of a large part of the media landscape. Since Alden owns large shares in just about every major newspaper company in the country, your paid-for-view will be necessary reading for thousands of soon to be unemployed journalists. Make sure to invite all your Columbia students to Torrington for a cup of coffee and to file a free story for Alden Global. How about if you buy?
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/139303/how-alden-global-capital-has-become-a-major-player-in-the-media-business/
#4 Posted by H. Barca, CJR on Thu 10 Nov 2011 at 12:51 PM
The CIA has been able to get focus on emerging situations with Twitter and Facebook. The CIA has been able to adapt (If we were to go just on "Class 11," we might think that the CIA could never adapt to modern information management).
I see value in both unusually gifted institutional reporters and in information that flows from public networking. But the debate is artificial because our information environment is so limited.
NYU should start up an Internet only Global Journalism Review by January, given its many international operations. Why NYU can't orient to doing it rapidly and powerfully is a mystery. (In The TLS, Peter Stothard complained that journalists could not orient to the cancer issues raised by the death of Apple Man.)
Mysteriously, journalism schools can't introduce the powerful information management courses that would help focus the very issues Dean and Emily are discussing. How is it possible that students are graduating from J-schools never having assimilated a fundamental media reading cycle? Columbia in January should say: our cycle for the next year and a half at least will be the print weekend WSJ, Sunday NYT, and Sunday Times of London, the examination cycle.
Students would have to assimilate the cycle to the point that pattern recognition and original perceptions would improve markedly. Where is the IM course that begins with "The Information" and leads into "Cognition" by Mark Ashcraft? In language, we have the great products of the corpus revoltion in Linguistics that J-schools can't teach (the COBUILD English Grammar).
It is like the lists of books. The symbolically sleepy lists. People in journalism have their ingrained habits. They do not like to change them.
#5 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Thu 10 Nov 2011 at 01:09 PM