journalism

I saw some tweets to a post, The Trouble With Twitter (Melissa Hart, The Chronicle review), and something occurred to me. The essay is another of the many Twitter critiques that, personally, I’m finding a bit tiresome. After reading it, I thought that what it amounted to was, “I don’t want to change.”

That’s fine. No one needs to. At the same time, those who do want to are free to do so.

In some ways the essay is critical of the 140 character length imposed by Twitter and almost seems to confuse a headline with a story or, as I’ve put it before, a postcard with a letter. It doesn’t quite get to that point, however. The essay seems to be more focused on the time element involved with Twitter and the idea that it takes time to fact check, absorb and understand, and then write the story. And I agree. However …

In the case of the Twitter streams I follow, that’s what happens. Tweets are more about: “This has happened,” and “Something appears to be developing here,” and “Trying to confirm a report …”

In other words, they are often about the progression of the story, not the end piece. They are about keeping followers involved in the development of a story. And eventually, when all is said and done, the story itself – a link to the full piece.

What is often overlooked in all the pro and con debates about tools like Twitter is the responsibility of a reader. It’s not just the journalist, or blogger, or whoever is doing the tweeting that has a responsibility. Readers have a responsibility to question what they are reading and consider its merits and to understand its intent, meaning and so on. If a story is unconfirmed, it is unconfirmed. That means it could be true but could just as easily be false. And anyone who has done any reading at all of news stories knows that what you read today can very easily change tomorrow because journalism has to wade through facts, PR spin and rumour to find out what exactly is true and many stories are ongoing.

The essay mentioned above is entirely from a particular journalist’s perspective. It is about how she wants to research, understand and present a story, and that doesn’t include a desire to keep readers informed of her progress as she does this. Again, that’s fine if that’s how you like to do things.

The problem, however, is that as a reader, I don’t want to wait.

I don’t want to wait till all is said and done and everything can be put in context before I find out what is or has been happening in my world. It is happening now and I want some information, even if incomplete, about what is going on. I want to know it’s being investigated. I want a heads-up that a complete assessment is in the works and headed my way.

And I understand that, as a reader, I have a responsibility to give a tweet or post the appropriate credence and to see it for what it is.

Journalism is a two-way street. I know that. Give me some credit for being able to assess and judge the merits of something.

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A few days ago I posted You are what you post. While I had something completely different in mind, that same headline is even more relevant to today with the Telegraph-Journal, the primary newspaper in Saint John, New Brunswick. Today they printed and posted an apology to Canada’s Prime Minister and two of it’s reporters for a story, “… that was inaccurate and should not have been published.”

The apology included the reporters because what they submitted, “… did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote.”

With the traditional news business in its current state of chaos as it tries to figure out how to survive with the huge shifts that are occurring due to economics and the Internet, this is the worst time possible for something like this when so much of the debate regarding the value of traditional news rests on credibility.

What the apology does not state, and what must be made clear, is how did something like this get into the story? If it was not part of what the reporters submitted, who added it? And what will the consequences for this be?

As much as the PM is owed an apology, as well as the reporters and many others (not the least of which is the family of the late Govenor General Roméo LeBlanc), journalists and the public should be provided with an explanation of how it occurred and what will follow from it. In a digital world, New Brunswick is not off the beaten track and this is not something that affects a small few. It affects journalism and, today, even its survival.

Credibility is not something news can afford to not have, even in New Brunswick.

Update:

As the CBC updates the story (Wafergate leads paper to apologize to PM, reporters) it just gets more interesting and troubling. “This is another in an embarrassing string of events for the Telegraph-Journal.”

See also:

Craig Silverman: New Brunswick newspaper apologizes to Canadian Prime Minister over made up accusation

Update #2:

From the Globe and Mail posted at 1:30pm ET titled Newspaper apologizes to Harper :

A secretary for Jamie Irving, publisher of the newspaper, referred questions about the apology to Kevin Publicover, acting general manager for the company that owns the Telegraph-Journal, Moncton-based Brunswick News.

Mr. Publicover said the company would not make any further comment on the apology.

“Our position is that the statement in the newspaper today is self-explanatory and that we have no further comment on it,” he said in an interview.

Sorry. But that’s not acceptable. It may be self-explanatory as far as stating there was a screw-up. It does not say how it happened, who is responsible or what the consequences will be, if any.

And one last update (a biggie):

From CBC: Publisher, editor out over wafer story

I guess there were consequences.

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Through a tweet (@davewiner) I came across a column on the Christian Science Monitor. It was by Robert G. Picard and was titled Why journalists deserve low pay. I think it says in a much better way (as in clearer) what I’ve been getting at in a few of my posts.

His headline, of course, is meant to draw attentention. And I’m sure his opening probably wouldn’t sit well with some:

Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.

Actually, journalists deserve low pay.

Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.

Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.

The essence of the column, however, is in the summary: “The demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating real value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies.”

It’s worth reading column, even if it doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before. What it does, I think, is put it together and state it more clearly than I’ve seen.

And for what it’s worth, here are a couple of my flounderings on the subject:

• Monetizing meaning: What is content anyway?
• Why are print newspapers dying?

Note:

From the CSM: “Robert G. Picard is a professor of media economics at Sweden’s Jonkoping University, a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, and the author and editor of 23 books, including “The Economics and Financing of Media Companies.” This essay is adapted from a lecture Professor Picard gave at Oxford. He blogs at  http://themediabusiness.blogspot.com/“

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Are you familiar with Mooer’s Law? It goes like this:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.

It’s clunky way of saying it, but that’s Mooer’s Law (Calvin Mooer) and it’s not to be confused with Moore’s Law. This law, I think, is at the heart of all the problems media is having with the Internet and revenue. My interpretation of the law is this: Ease trumps authority every time. This is why it is so difficult to generate sustainable revenue for news content.

One approach to content has been the “walled garden” idea. This approach keeps content inaccessible until it has been paid for. A few years ago this was tried by many newspapers as they tried to make the transition to the online world. The problem was that, while they might have been a more authoritative source (a debated notion) they were difficult to access. “…Painful and troublesome …,” as Mooer’s Law puts it.

And it was so much easier to get it elsewhere. Where you got the information might have been of dubious authority but that was less important than how easy it was get. Similarly, why go to the library and get an authoritative text when it was so much easier to just Google it? When people speak of students using Wikipedia as a source for information for essays the reason students do is because it is easier. Faster. It’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they are behaving as most of us do.

Over at Technology Review, Jason Pontin has an interesting post titled How to Save Media. It’s worth reading because it is the best outline of a way for journalism to take on the current situation. It’s written with a pretty comprehensive understanding of the situation, the tools and the history. It’s the most realistic strategy outline that I’ve seen.

Having said that, I’m not sure it would work because of Mooer’s law. There is still a reliance on “paid for” content and while I am sure there would people willing to do so the problem is not so much in who pays for and receives that specialized content as it is in who does not. This may be conventional internet thinking on my part but when so much of the internet’s commercial aspect is dependent on numbers, can content that is not seen by most people justify itself economically? Isn’t some of a work’s value online its ability to reach many people? In other words, in relative terms, wouldn’t it be like creating content only to release it to a void where no one sees it?

My other concern with Pontin’s suggestion is complexity. Much of what he suggests I would like, especially the idea of print getting away from the daily delivery model into a model where a consumer chooses how often he or she receives it. But I’m always skeptical of something that adds a layer of complexity and this approach, much as I might like it, moves away from the simple “one size fits all” approach to the more complex “tailored for you.” And this at a time when print as a delivery mechanism is fading away.

But to return to Calvin Mooer … The internet allows us to do many things, one of which is observe human behavior. That’s what Mooer’s law is about: how we behave. Any approach to online content that makes it more difficult to access, versus similar content that is easy to get, will fail. In fact, even if similar content was not available, I think it would fail because it’s “troublesome.”

That’s Mooer’s Law.

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There’s a good answer on the question of Twitter, blogs etc. as news. From Susan Chira, foreign editor for the NY Times, answering reader questions March 30-April 3, 2009. Via @jayrosen_nyu (btw … the link at the end of this quote goes to the page it’s taken from but you need to scroll down to get to the questions. This answer is from the first question.)

So let’s take citizen journalists, bloggers, or even in some cases, Twitterers. I think for professional journalists the information they provide is great raw material. But before we can print it as fact, we usually have to sort through it and try to figure out how to verify it. Let’s just take a few of the very charged conflicts we cover: say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war between Russia and Georgia. How do we know someone sending us information over the transom is accurately reporting what he or she witnessed, or whether the information is being slanted or even fabricated to suit an ideological point of view? As reporters, we can weigh statements from witnesses we interview personally, and cross-check them with other sources. We are still learning how to do that in a warp-speed Web world. But it’s great to have the opportunity to figure out how to get more information, and the new tools to enable us to broaden and deepen our coverage using the resources of the public.

from: Talk to the Newsroom: Foreign Editor (NY Times)

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If you follow discussions about social media, journalism, “Web 2.0″ and all that other related “stuff,” a number of terms pop up over and over. Content. Value. Monetization.

There is also a lot of “what if” that goes on. I kind of like that sort of thing. It’s fun to imagine how change will be manifest. (I grew up reading, and loving, science fiction and that’s all about “what if.”)

But as with all things, sometimes you want to call a timeout because it becomes excessive. Sometimes you get so caught up in imagining and speculating about one thing, you forget to think about another. In this case, I think the thing that’s missed is meaning.

Content

We refer to content but, when we do, we refer to it as a product. As if it is a number in a column in a spreadsheet that will be in a formula (probably the formula that allows us to determine “value”). While for cost purposes I suppose that’s a good way to look at it, that isn’t what content is. The term “content” is probably not a very good one to use because it is one that is, psychologically and emotionally, divorced from what actually constitutes “content.” As terms go, it is a kind of dispassionate third party.

Content is meaning. Sometimes as a film, sometimes as a song. Sometimes as a news story, sometimes as an image. Be it a painting, movie, song or whatever – even software – content is always meaning. When we like these things, it is because they mean something to us, even if we can’t articulate it. And vice versa. When we don’t like something it can be because of its meaning or maybe the fact that it has no meaning to us. It’s gibberish. Lack of meaning is itself a kind of meaning.

Value

When we refer to value, it usually concerns how much we (or some group) want something. The demand side of the supply and demand scale. Once again, we speak of it as if it’s a number in a column in a spreadsheet waiting to become an input in a formula. (Or maybe it’s the output of a formula.) As with content, we speak of it dispassionately, as if we can separate it from ourselves and consider it objectively. But like content, value is about meaning. It is not itself meaning (that’s content) but it’s the significance of the meaning to us. If something means a lot, it has a high value. If it doesn’t mean much, it has a lower value.

Value is the significance of something’s meaning to us.

Monetization

The third term, monetization, is related to content and value and is also about meaning, though in a somewhat different way. It’s the conversion of meaning into money. In this context, monetization is what we will pay for meaning based on its value to us.

Monetization is meaning as money.

Meaning

A problem I see with all these terms is their dispassion. Content, value, monetization … they all seem to separate us from the core of what they are about, which is meaning. If you’re like me, you probably feel one way when discussing content and quite another when discussing movies or books or journalism. There is an emotional attachment to the latter; there is an emotional disconnect with the former.

At times this is good but there are also times when it is not very good. I think, currently, when I see these many discussions in blogs and Twitter, it’s not very good because we are so focused on that word “monetization” that we forget what we are talking about monetizing. (All things are already monetized – the discussions are really about monetizing “content” differently.)

By discussing content almost exclusively in business and marketing terms we lose sight of meaning and focus almost exclusively on the money.

Questions

It may be true that the value of content, the significance of its meaning to us, has lessened but, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we wonder why and also wonder about the consequences of that? The current discussions often remind me of discussions of style versus substance (meaning). It strikes me that we are currently heavily focused on style, by which I mean we’re caught up in the means of delivering content, almost to the point that we’re indifferent to what that content might be.

And, oddly for a pretty secular world, we seem to have a blind faith in the idea that “things will work themselves out.” It’s the argument that the market will correct itself. That may be true but we say it and believe it as if no other possibility exists, that that’s simply how it is, end of discussion. Blind faith.

Content will always be generated. Human beings have an infinite capacity for it. That has been an idea behind much of the thinking behind Web 2.0, bloggers and evolving media. The generation of items of meaning is endless. But what happens to the monetization aspect when the value goes down because meaning no longer means much to us anymore? When algorithms and findability (ease of locating content) and cost dilute the significance of meaning?

The money aspect aside, what happens if or when the value of meaning approaches zero and we’re largely indifferent to meaning or, perhaps, lose the capacity to distinguish the value of something because it doesn’t matter anymore?

Put in a vernacular way, what happens when content that might have great significance to us is lost in a haystack of meaningless crap?

I’m not suggesting we install some old school custodial approach to managing content, to preserving someone else’s idea of what has value and place it behind some secure, walled city of “preserved meaning.” I think all protectionist approaches to what is occurring are, to put it bluntly, idiotic.

I am saying I believe we need to spend time discussing what is occurring from something more than the delivery/money side. We should revisit the style vs. substance argument and think equally about both (the delivery of content vs. the significance of the content). How something is said (delivery) is as important as what is said (content). Focusing on one without attention to the other risks conclusions that are unbalanced.

(An aside: With the way Internet technology is evolving and particularly with the way we are using it, could it be that content is no longer about depth but about breadth? And if so, what does that mean? What’s gained; what’s lost?)

Maybe the question I’m asking is, how will we value content in a world where there is so much of it? How will we distinguish what is of value to us and what is not? And how will we ease the nagging problem of not knowing what we don’t know, of never having any sense of assurance that what we have found is what we needed or wanted?

And where will art live in all of this?

My own guess is that old professional classes (journalism would be a good example given the current discussions) will be replaced. But replaced doesn’t mean arbiters will be gone. It means we will have new arbiters. Maybe they’ll be Google algorithms. Maybe it will be “the wisdom of crowds” via various social networks.

Whoever they are, in some quarters there is an assumption they will be better. In other quarters, there is an assumption they will be much worse. Myself, I’m undecided on this. One minute I think one way, the next I think another. While not cynical, I am a skeptic and my worry is best expressed by Pete Towshend:

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

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Maybe that should read, “everything is false.” The Twitter Premium Accounts hoax is what got me thinking about this. Some people believe it is true. Some believe it is false. Which is it?

If you look at it closely, I think you can reasonably conclude it’s a hoax. For one thing, you can’t find any reference to it on Twitter itself (in settings, their blog and so on – at least I couldn’t). As well, if you look at the description of the “premium accounts” they seem so wildly absurd, it’s hard to believe it could be accurate. And if you follow tweets about social media, competition, Twitter vs Facebook and so on, it would strike you as an improbable decision.

Now, to many users of Twitter, particularly heavy users, the hoax is probably immediately obvious. But as we know, online at laptops or on handhelds, tweets scroll by and we usually scan. In other words, we don’t read very closely. And, as Neil Postman points out in Informing Ourselves to Death, “… nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.”

Absurd as it may read, it should not be surprising that a lot of people would believe the Twitter hoax.

That said, what does that say about credibility in the social media arena? What do you trust when everything may or may not be true? It might not be that big a deal but when we are talking about the end of traditional journalism and the rise of news via new media tools and non-traditional reporting (or, as some put it, the middleman eliminated and sources speaking directly to us), how do you know what is accurate? Previously, we trusted the mediator (reporters, editors) to verify accuracy. Perhaps naively.

I think this part of what is killing traditional news media – not only is news moving online, distrust of traditional news outlets appears to be on the rise. So this isn’t just a social media issue.

I don’t have any brilliant insights, by the way. It’s just something I started wondering about. What bloggers do you trust? What tweets are true?

What do you believe when everything might be true?

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There is an apparent effect of media, particularly of social media, that results, I think, due to the sheer number of voices in the conversations and the speed at which they can communicate. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it the dichotomizing of issues. Or, maybe a more accessible term would be, “The Either/Or Syndrome.”

I notice it particularly in the discussions about social media and the current, related discussion about news. There seem to be just two views:

• We’re going to hell in a handcart because traditional journalism is dying and we’ve only the web (bloggers) to replace it and credibility is absent there, as well as resources etc.
• Traditional journalism is dead but doesn’t know it and therefore won’t give up the reins willingly to the new world so let’s just take ‘em and too bad for those guys.

That may not be the best description but at least it suggests what I’m getting at. And it’s not really my point.

My point is that we don’t take a more considered view, regardless of the side. I’m almost tempted to call it a more humanistic view but that sounds a bit more warm and cuddly than what I mean. We don’t appear to take human behavior into consideration.

If someone’s job is ending, if the career they’ve spent years developing, if the industry they’ve put money, time and sweat into is vanishing, it’s hardly surprising that they would not embrace the changing landscape willingly or that they would question what appears would replace them. I’m pretty sure I would respond that way. So it seems both callous and short-sighted to react to their reaction as we appear to, which often comes across as, “Well, f*** ‘em, then.”

At the same time, in the thrill of change we forget that change is just that: change. In itself, it has neither a positive or negative value. It’s not good or bad. It’s just change. For it to be good, the change needs some definition. If something is changing, what is it changing into? If we replace something, what do we replace it with? The assumption seems to be that it will be better than what was there before but, to quote Pete Townshend and The Who, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Change can be a blessing but it can also bite you in the butt. So it’s probably a good idea to get a sense for what that change will look like.

I think it’s pretty clear that change is happening. It’s also pretty clear that no one has any idea what it will look like. There are some vague scenarios tossed around but almost all of them hit the skids when it comes to, “But how does it make money? How does it function when everything it does has been commoditized down to ‘free?’”

So maybe it’s time for both sides to engage in a discussion about what this change can look like and figure out how to go about achieving it. My own feeling is, as things stand, the change that is happening will be a lose-lose event for all sides.

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Over at Printed Matters, Tim Burdon has a post United, Journalists May Stand where he says, “I say we organize and start a new media company. Nimble, debt-free, unsullied by corporate concerns, online-only, web-centric, dedicated to journalistic principles, tightly focused on one geographic area. Our prime goal will be to utterly dominate the local web space of our local communities.”

I decided my comment should be a blog post. So here it is:

I completely agree with your idea. However, in all the kerfuffle over the end of mainstream media organizations I think something that is missed is the fact that the notion of what constitutes news has changed (although you touch on it with your point about being, “… tightly focused on one geographic area.”)

A few months back I wrote a post titled, Why are print newspapers dying? As with most of my posts, it has a lot more questions than answers, but in it I wrote, “… I would argue that one of the things that has changed is who calls the shots in determining what is news. The editorial aspect of “news” is vanishing. Users are their own editors, particularly with aggregator tools like Google Reader that allow a user to, in a manner of speaking, design his or her own newspaper in terms of content and, to a limited degree, even the look of it.”

A worrying part of the Internet’s multiple ways to communicate, and reflective of contemporary politics, is a tendency to talk amongst ourselves – preach to the choir, so to speak. We choose to hear the voices and topics we like, and ignore the others or dismiss them as irrelevant.

So, being locally focused will be important but won’t be enough. Will you be left? Right? Focused on the environment? Business? What the character of the new media company is will be hugely important as far as getting an audience. Equally important will be what it is not. Local won’t be enough. (I suppose this is what would traditionally be called editorial position but, if so, it’s position on steroids.)

There are political junkies out there and there are people who couldn’t care less about politics. There are people who take to technology news like crack, and there are others indifferent to it. Culture is big for some, for others not at all. How narrow a niche will a media company need to be to develop an audience large enough to make it successful?

And how do you deliver news in a world that is less interested in objective reporting than in having their established opinions echoed back to them?

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