The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism 388
The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some more. Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that) explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column translates and deconstructs Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's Michael Gerson became the latest journo to bemoan the death of journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?) bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print journalists.
hard-working, honest, ethical print journalists (Score:5, Interesting)
Who exactly are they referring to?
- Political journalists, who help their sources insult people and ruin careers anonymously? Or do what Stephen Colbert pointed out was "the White House tells you what to write, you write it down, and print it."
- Sports journalists, who basically are professional sports fans, desperately clinging to rumor, conjecture, and hearsay?
- Business journalists, who often act as cheerleaders for a company's stock more than anything else?
- Slashdot editors? (enough said)
These are not the days of Bernstein, Woodward, Hersch, etc.
It's a Changing World (Score:5, Interesting)
The wonders of the internet and the change they have brought about.(sigh)
When Ford mass produced the "A" and "T" a lot of buggy whip mfg., saddle mfg. and liveries went out of business. Hay production declined in favor of food crops.Horse breeders and trainers suffered. You might say a big industry went teats up. We simply didn't need their services or needed limited quantities. Before that Coach services were displaced by Rail services.
When News, Music and Movie industries cannot adapt to serve the needs/desires of their benefactors , they die like dinosaurs in a glacier. Of course there will be a lot of whining about lost jobs and hyperbole about the affected economy, but all in all, it's for the best and I welcome it. These were industries that were not friendly or really helpful to the benefactors (us) so their passing for something better is to be welcomed with open arms, minds and hearts. As for the displaced...They too will have to adapt. In the words of the Judge Smales character in the Movie Caddyshack " Well, Danny, the world needs ditchdiggers too."
the newspapers screwed up their business model (Score:5, Interesting)
for years the model was to sell the newspaper for the cost of print and let advertising cover everything else including the profits. in the late 1990's the newspapers should have bought up Ebay and Craigslist or at the very least started a competitor. instead the trust fund babies who run most of the newspapers allowed their content to be commoditized by Google, they lost the advertising market probably because they thought it was beneath them to go online. and now they are crying. the WSJ was an exception to this for a few years, but there are some good financial bloggers out there now that will give them a lot of competition.
I remember 10 years ago if you wanted to sell your apartment in NYC you had to advertise in the NY Times and pay their ridiculous rates. and the supposedly liberal pro-blue collar newspaper that the NY Times is supposed to be has the snobbiest RE section i've ever seen. on sundays you would see people walking around with a copy of the Real Estate section checking out buildings to buy in. these days the realtors still advertise in the NY Times but it's a generic add with the same properties that probably aren't on the market anymore and the goal is to get people to call the office. not to sell a specific property. all the properties for sale are listed on redfin, craiglist, MLS which is open to everyone now
and there have been so many new immigrants in the NYC area lately that it makes sense to advertise in their ethnic non-english newspapers as well.
Paradigm shifts (Score:2, Interesting)
People want to participate (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the real threat will be government intervention (Score:3, Interesting)
The little bit of journalistic integrity left will be destroyed if the government starts picking up the tab. Newspapers will have a vested interest in getting funding so support of one candidate or another will be rewarded with money, instead of just interviews, questions at press conferences, and leaked memos.
This was actually an issue in Boston recently, when the city gave a small minority paper a loan to stay in business:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/07/17/menino_offers_loan_to_keep_banner_afloat/ [boston.com]
Re:first post (Score:3, Interesting)
Regular journalism has been dead for a long time in my country (France). So called "journalists" just take Reuters & others news and republish them, adding in the process useless rants and made up facts. If that dies, we'll all be better off.
Re:the real threat will be government intervention (Score:5, Interesting)
I take it by your "government is always worse than private sector" bias that you're most likely american.
Here in Sweden the general consensus seems to be that SVT ("Sveriges Television" lit. "The swedish television") is the most reliable broadcaster while private ones are considered a lot less reliable by most people except for the extreme right who insist on SVT being "communist", "leftist" and "government controlled", they even use these descriptions now even though we currently have a right-wing coalition government.
What's important is that there is separation between government-funded media outlets and the government that funds them, not that governments shouldn't fund media outlets (SVT has a lot of advantages over privately funded television networks, such as how they can broadcast shows that only appeal to a fairly small subset of the population while the private networks prefer constantly going for the least common denominator).
/Mikael
Re:Hello, I am a professional journalist (Score:1, Interesting)
If any or all of that is true, what justification does any ethical journalist have for taking a job at, say, Fox News?
Re:Rupert Murdock... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bad writing has don its damage as well. TFA was BORING. I read maybe the first four paragraphs and almost fell asleep. The guy writes as if he's being paid by the word.
When a blog is informative and readable, and the newspaper article reads like the writer didn't really want to write it but slogged though it for the money, why would I read the paper?
Re:Rupert Murdock... (Score:0, Interesting)
And I thought the utter failure of journalists to report on the subjects that interest the broad population was the reason. Something along these lines: http://hillbuzz.org/2009/12/03/climategate-will-be-looked-back-on-as-one-of-the-last-nails-in-journalisms-coffin/ [hillbuzz.org]
Or maybe these: http://whiskeys-place.blogspot.com/2009/06/failure-of-media-part-two-lingering.html [blogspot.com]
Now that we know the real root of the problem, thanks to your highly-moderated comment. Now if only we could stop Murdoch from running CNN, LAT and NYT...
Synergy: The Sports Analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
I have yet to see any major newspaper actively recruit and develop the legions of amateur reporters out there armed with a computer. Major league sports has a farm system for developing and identifying talent, and bringing it into play. Newspapers need to embrace what's happening, not compete and complain. They're the experts. They should be leading the exploitation of the Internet for the delivery of news and information.
Truth be told, tiny C-SPAN is far and away the best in the news business at getting this right. Their use of all the means of modern communication -- radio, TV, Internet -- is outstanding. They run contests to develop young reporters. They have blog aggregation pages. They run dedicated news dashboards during special events such as elections. They have call-in shows. They are scrupulously even-handed in their coverage, which is not only the best way to be objective, it makes for a lively and interesting show. Watch and learn, guys. It's not rocket science.
journalism is already dead (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see, the big news stories this week: (1) Tiger Woods gets in a fender bender after he gets in a fight with his wife, and (2) the White House party crashers apparently lied about other stuff, too.
Journalism is already dead.
Re:Internet killed the Video star (Score:3, Interesting)
Fear is the problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Pants-shitting cowards afraid of gay marriage, pot, change and any boogeyman they learn about so long as it can be 'fought' by the military. The boogeyman of climate change is of course not real because tanks and guns cannot stop it in any way.
Liberals won't cut social spending for fear of Americans starving because they have no money for food conservatives won't cut military spending for fear of attacks by groups against which traditional military is fairly useless.
It's all fear. We need to harden the fuck up as a country.
Re:the real threat will be government intervention (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually there has been a fair amount of press discussing how the BBC does have an editiorial view and spins things accordingly.
Re:Hello, I am a professional journalist (Score:3, Interesting)
I wasn't saying that bloggers aren't objective. Many are. I am saying that objectivity should be kept as an ideal - which is something many people want to throw out, saying that you need to be subjective and speak truth to power and tell people your opinions. That's fine for opinion writing, but it's not journalism. That's all I'm saying about objectivity. That it's good and that we need it. From your comment, you seem to agree. I also think that journalism has done a terrible job at it, recently.
The only reason I brought up business blogging and objectivity is that many people explicitly say that the fact that things can be written by insiders is a big plus for blogging, and argue that the whole idea of a third-party journalist is obsolete. I think that's a lot of bunk.
Re:the real threat will be government intervention (Score:5, Interesting)
Neither of you replied to precisely the point I made -- you can't trust anything you read or hear in the media right now because there is no standard of truth to which they are legally bound.
I mentioned only Fox News because they're the ones who fought for the right to lie to the public, not because I think there's any difference between them and the rest. In fact my argument implied the opposite -- that I think all media can and will lie to us at any time for ratings.
You can find the reporting on the case from whichever outlet you prefer by Googling something like "fox news truth first amendment florida court case" which worked for me, although several of the headlines seem to read things like "Fox News gets okay to misinform public".
I love how you put words in my mouth, by the way, without asking what kind of regulation I'd insinuated at all because you believe that government people are inherently more crooked than private sector people.
I believe strongly that Fox News should have lost this case, that knowingly publishing falsehoods and claiming them to be true ought to be illegal for any media outlet, and I believe most of the American public expects this to be the case already when it clearly is not.
PS the First Amendment is government intervention. Jeez.
Re:Hello, I am a professional journalist (Score:5, Interesting)
As one of those who put up some gripes with modern-day journalism, the biggest problem I was alluding to was not the censorship by the news organizations, which blog-based journalism could remedy, but 5 much more critical problems:
1. The mixing of editorializing and reporting. The telltale sign for that is only 1 major source for a story rather than 2 or 3 sources (some of whom disagree with each other).
2. The mix of advertising and reporting. This is the big one for the business press. For instance, a story with a headline of "CEO John Doe of Initech announces launch of FlimFlam" combined with an advertising link to buy shares of Initech.
3. The dependency of journalists on their sources. This causes all sorts of problems, the most common of which is that the source can threaten to cut off the reporter if the reporter doesn't print something favorable to the source. This is a huge problem in political reporting, because reporter's careers tend to depend on getting and keeping insider sources.
4. If 2-3 sources say the same thing, and it's not dug into more deeply, reporters will not infrequently incorrectly assume that the 2-3 sources aren't organized. A classic case of this is the Pentagon paying retired generals to stick to a party line, while reporters were using the retired generals as independent analysts (kudos to the reporters who did look more deeply and figure that one out).
5. A perception by a lot of news organizations that speed beats accuracy.
Re:the real threat will be government intervention (Score:2, Interesting)
The only honest TV journalist I know of, is Jon Steward. And he's not a journalist...
Before Murdoch There was Hearst and Pulitzer (Score:2, Interesting)
Murdock has ushered in the era of factless journalism and pure opinion as news.
"Reinstated," not "ushered in." Before Rupert Murdoch, there was Hearst and Pulitzer [wikipedia.org], whose yellow journalism more or less defined the conditions to which Murdoch is now returning his media empire.
The good news is that these things seem to be cyclical. The bad news is that, if Hearst and Pulitzer are any indication, it takes a somewhat cataclysmic event (such as the Spanish-American War) to shake people into their senses and start demanding across-the-board accountability.
Re:Internet killed the Video star (Score:3, Interesting)
Videos were a good promotion outlet for music, but the Internet effectively killed music videos on television.
As I recall, MTV killed the music video by transitioning its programming over to game shows and reality shows until eventually you could not turn on the channel and see a music video for hours. This change was made way before the Internet got big enough tubes to flow a music video to your house.
Re:Hello, I am a professional journalist (Score:3, Interesting)
People like to heap scorn on traditional journalism, but there's a very good reason for fact-checking, and there's a very good reason for objectivity. I'm all for new journalism and I read plenty of blogs. I do think that form of journalism is, more or less, the future. But let's not be quite so hasty to discard everything that made traditional journalism what it was (even if it's tarnished, in this day and age), and let's not be quite so quick to put all our faith in blogging. I'm confident that a more concrete code of ethics will develop in blogging, and bloggers who lie and distort will get weeded out just like traditional journalists who've committed the same transgressions tend to be (eventually), but I'm not quite ready to hang up my sad little hat with the press pass or my dreaded red editor's pen just yet.
Events in recent memory when the "traditional" press has failed us:
How many times can you expect to fuck up and still receive a pay check? The press played a role in the eight year clusterfuck of the Bush administration. Too bad if you're out of work, too. Payback's a bitch, aint it?
Prolonged Death of bad Journalism ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Murdoch's business model is based on withholding information. Since his sources are accessible to others just as well, this won't work anymore. On the same note, I'd also welcome the death of the local TV news: "There's something in your drinking water. More after this short break."
That said, I agree with the warning about blogging: first person accounts can't replace objective journalism. One of the attractions of bloggers is the seemingly "authentic" view of a person involved with the topic, versus the 3rd person account a journalist offers. And yes, the "true authentic" is often an illusion. Industry is already influencing bloggers, and not everyone discloses their "free samples" they got before writing a review. - Or just the fact, they are writing a review on a sample they got without comparing it to the competitor. Bad bloggers aren't an improvement over bad journalists.
However, there are many cases where the blogger is better than the traditional journalist: An IT-blogger usually provides better information about a new software release, than the tech column writer in the local paper, who got moved to the tech column last month, because he did such a good job with the obituaries.
So, why read the paper if I can get the same or more online? Why watch the news about a land slide in South America, if local bloggers have more information available? Yes, these are rhetorical questions. The answer of course is: Because a journalist offers more. Or to turn it around: Where journalism doesn't offer more, it will die. A journalist can connect the dots, analyze, ask questions: Land-slide - Population growth? Deforestation?
Where journalists are doing that, journalism still adds value. But, you can't ask good questions about things that sound jibber jabber to you and you can't even achieve anything that resemble an objective presentation of different options, if you are too undereducated (or under-experienced) to realize that there might be more than one way to look at it, or that the opposite of main-stream isn't always "crazy". So, good journalism requires journalists that know things about the things they are reporting, not just how to present things that might interest people who are into these things. That again is bad news for Fox News, but also for people who think, that a CJ-BA will be all it takes to become the next investigative wonder, or that the semester of Japanese will let you write articles that are better than the political blog of a Japanese ex-pat with a PoliSci degree.
I hope for the death of bad journalism. Whether this will help good journalism, I don't know. There are journalists I find worth reading. I lived in the US and Germany long enough to know both countries, but Marcia Pally still gives me things to think about. Her articles are also on-line, does that make her a blogger? While missing the boat on some topics, Scholl-Latour usually points out political crisis years before they become daily news. But he too isn't in the daily-news business. He writes books and does documentaries.
What about newspapers? I don't know. A local paper can't feed an expert journalist and her family, but it's its access to local news, that keeps the paper alive. Germany has newspaper cooperatives, where international and national news are done in a central office with the local papers then adding their local content before print. The only major American paper I know of, that does that, is The Onion..
Re:Hello, I am a professional journalist (Score:1, Interesting)
While I take your point about columnists vs. journalists as valid, how often do you see the general (and extremely gullible) public taking the words of a columnist and pushing them out as fact. They'll forward every editorial punched out in an e-mail, they'll stand on street corners with signs quoting word for word from columnists, and they'll form entire opinions from columnists. You find this out if you ever push them for answers or reasons.
Columnists sell papers because people want to hear their opinions echoed by "important" people. Journalists do not do that.
Rupert Murdoch and his ilk have unashamedly embraced this fact by advertising and pushing their columnist material with fewer and fewer disclaimers, because it gets eyeballs and most importantly sells ads. I'm supposed to mourn the death of a system like that?
Re:FOX News is indeed the best choice (Score:3, Interesting)
The GP is probably referring to the various studies by Pew and UCLA (to name the biggest) which, while using completely different forms of measurement, all came to pretty much the same conclusion, Fox leans slightly right while almost all other stations have a strong left lean.
The studies focused on news broadcasts and not their opinion shows.
There are also numerous studies about the past election cycle which showed pretty much the same thing.
It's can be a bit of a pain to find a direct link to the original summaries of the PEW or UCLA study so I'll leave it to you to just google them and find a source which references them that you'll accept.
Re:the real threat will be government intervention (Score:4, Interesting)
Holy crap man, thanks for reminding me about Crossfire, I just went and watched it again. It's hilarious to see how they just don't get it that he's not a journalist.
I think you have a point, but I also think its because he comes from a comedy background where blunt honesty is pretty common.
Re:the real threat will be government intervention (Score:3, Interesting)
There was that study that shows listeners of NPR were the least misinformed about the Iraq war while Fox News viewers were the most misinformed. Every media outlet has a bias, but they are not all equal when it comes to accurately reporting facts. NPR isn't perfect, but it is by far the best mainstream media source we have.