Attack of the Scribes
In his illuminating book, Here Comes Everybody, NYU's Clay Shirkey recounts a marvelously ironic and relevant anecdote
dating back to 1492. The printing press was already a half century old, and the ancient profession of being a scribe was in the process of being expunged. The invention of movable type had robbed the small circle of scribes of their monopoly on producing the written word.
So in that same year that Columbus bumped into the Americas, Herr Johannes Trithemius -- the Abbot of Sponheim -- wrote a spirited defense of scribal tradition titled De Laude Scriptorum. As Shirkey points out, this screed would be remembered only as a reactionary defense of the old order at any cost if it weren't for one niggling detail. The good Abbot's work was not published and copied by scribes. Nope. It was published in mass by one of those new fangled printing machines!
We've got just such an ironic happenstance this week. Lefty journalist Chris Hedges has let loose a holy celebration of the dying newspaper and a throaty condemnation of the Internet -- by publishing it... on the Internet. I'm not going to quote from the piece as you can read it for yourself (on the Web). Suffice it to say that it reads like like the last groanings of a dying priesthood. Though it's clothed in anti-corporate rhetoric, Hedge's piece is but a nostalgic whine for something that is very much on its way out and represents a closed-mindedness worthy of a card-carrying member of the Minutemen.
Too bad. Hedges did terrific work when working as a daily reporter for a number of top flight newspapers including the Chri Sci Monitor and The New York Times. He brought a cutting edge to his memorable dispatches from El Salvador, the West Bank and the Balkans (among other hot spots) that sharply distinguished him from the pack of go-along-to-get-along MSM reporters (which makes it ever more baffling why Chris is now so nostalgic for the good old days when the corporate news rooms monopolized the news agenda). WTF?
In this latter phase of his career now retired from daily reporting and dedicated to writing books and magazine pieces for The Nation -- indeed, now that he has been liberated from the strait jacket protocols of "objective" newspaper reporting-- Hedges has perhaps overcompensated a tad and has become something of a fire-breathing ideologue of the left (albeit with a decided Christian edge to his perspective).
Jeff Jarvis finds Hedges' anti-Web blast as wearisome as I did. So he only half-heartedly takes Hedges' "argument" apart in this riposte. Then again, it didn't take much more than a short puff to blow Hedges down.
Last week, by the way, Jay Rosen described nostalgic professional reporters as something akin to an uprooted tribe that -- now forced to migrate-- don't know exactly what to take with them and what to leave behind. It's a perfect description of Chris Hedges who sounds like he's been wandering around a bit too long in the blazing sun.
July 26th, 2008 at 4:28 am
How much is Hedge’s resentment based on the fact that they are now subject to instantaneous and often devastating feedback? And they are no longer the “deciders” about what’s important?
BTW, I await your thoughts on the strange nocturnal wanderings of Senator John Edwards.
July 26th, 2008 at 5:26 am
bw – I assume you’re referring to this FOX News headline:
“Guard Confirms Late-Night Hotel Encounter Between Ex-Sen. John Edwards, Tabloid Reporters.”
Whew ! Tabloid Reporters ? How many ? ‘Cuz that’s even weirder than Larry Craig…
July 26th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Only a (left)wingnut like reg would think that the number of tabloid reporters was weirder than Larry Craig. But that is what we have come to expect from Mr. Shallow-Thinker.
July 26th, 2008 at 8:50 am
On “moderation” I thought I’d repeat something…the real story on Edwards is that a young “Alexander Hitchens†– son of Christopher? was one of the reporters.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Rope, quit showing your ass.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Is there really someone out there to whom the unintended humor of a headline referring to a “late night hotel encounter between John Edwards and tabloid reporters” in the context of a “sex scandal” has to be explained ? Guess so…
July 26th, 2008 at 9:51 am
If journalists are realistic, there is no change in what they can publish. The change is in how that information is delivered. You can get it in the morning delivered by the paper boy or you can get it throughout the day at your convenience. No one is telling them what to publish. However, the market is telling them what form is preferred.
July 26th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Well, there’s no doubt about the presidential preference of the L.A. Times.
July 26th, 2008 at 11:18 am
“Rope, quit showing your ass.”
Actually reg, it’s your ass that is showing and the quality of your “response” shows it even more.
July 26th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Quit while you’re behind…
July 26th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Marc is 100 percent on the Internet bus, which is probably a good place to be given the inexorable change in how journalism is distributed, moving from ink and paper to bits and bytes. It is strange, however, to see him demonstrate the same sort of reactionary close-mindedness that he accuses Hedges of. It’s fair to call Hedges’ piece nostalgic and melodramatic. But in my view his most important point is that the shift to the Internet isn’t, as Woody suggested, a simple transfer to a new means of delivery. A new medium is a new medium. It cannot help but change how content is consumed, which will eventually change the content itself. Hedges mentions this in his piece:
“The average time a reader of The New York Times spends with the printed paper is about 45 minutes. The average time a viewer spends on The New York Times Web site is about seven minutes. There is a difference between browsing and reading. And the Web is built for browsing rather than for reading.”
This notion has been explored in more detail elsewhere:
http://www.slate.com/id/2193552/
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
The Internet is an absolutely wonderful thing, both as an effectively inexhaustible font of information and a means of communication — and blogs like this are a marriage of the two. But most people have a different relationship with information on the Web than when it comes from newspapers, magazines and books. The Internet encourages superficial — often incomplete — reading and ADD-style foraging. And as Cass Sunstein puts it, there can be much less serendipitous exposure to new events and perspectives on the Web that you get leafing through a newspaper. Instead, people are prone to retreating into ideological echo chambers.
Hedges sees this as a bad thing for journalism, thus a bad thing for democracy. I think that’s a fair conclusion to reach. It would be nice if newspaper publishers had some civic pride and would accept smaller profit margins in order to run papers like public trusts, as they should be. That’s not bloody likely, though, but it’s nice to dream.
So with dead-tree media going the way of the buggy whip, the last thing we need is more members of the techno-utopian vanguard like Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen to stomp out any possible criticism. I think we’d all be better off if those who embrace journalism’s migration to the Web would consider some of the negative consequences (information cocooning, skimming and skipping instead of reading) and how those consequences might be mitigated.
(As a post script, it also warrants mentioning that people have gotten used to not paying for information on the Web and papers are still struggling to find out how to make money from their sites — but that is mainly a concern for those out there who try to make a living by trading on their reporting skills.)
July 26th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Bobby: …the Internet isn’t, as Woody suggested, a simple transfer to a new means of delivery.
July 26th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
2nd try….
Bobby: …the Internet isn’t, as Woody suggested, a simple transfer to a new means of delivery.
Yeah, but, I don’t have to wait for the paperboy, call circulation when he forgets, or read a paper often soaked in water. (Plus, I hate the cheap ink that comes off on your hands.)
July 26th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Plus, with his confessed wordcount limit of 200, Woody’s attention span is perfectly matched!
July 26th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I like the internet for my news because I learned today that American Jews don’t much like Joe Lieberman but most of them like Obama. I doubt if I’d have found that out reading the newspaper.
(Actually I’m posting this because I realized I’d been leaving the BH URL link off of my “name.)
July 26th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Also found out, via the internet, that degenerate skanks like Woody are doing McCain’s ads these days -
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/mccain_ad_obama_isnt_there_for.php
July 26th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
(Note the image used for Obama “going to the gym” – with troops in the background. This wack, desperate ad is as accurate as “experienced” McCain’s explanations of the connection between the Sunnis turning on al Qaeda and the “surge”, i.e. totally false.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Actually, one aspect of this very blog post illustrates a problem with the Web as a medium. Clay Shirkey calls bullshit on Trithemius “De Laude Scriptorum”, claiming it’s an “instructive hypocrisy” (p. 69) that Trithemius had it printed. And in Marc’s hands, Trithemius’ essay becomes a “screed”. You have to wonder how much research either of them did. Especially considering how easy it is to do research, via the Web, these days (not to suggest an “instructive hypocrisy” or anything, no no!)
I did a little. Guess what? It turns out Trithemius was a very enthusiastic customer of the printshops of his day, and was hardly fundamentally opposed to the printing of books. He was in favor of monks continuing to copy *liturgical* manuscripts, primarily for the spiritual benefits of copying them (especially for the orders that had taken vows of silence). True, he mentions that paper was more perishable than his preferred media, but this was lo-o-ong before acid-free paper, and besides, what about people who, TODAY, talk about CDROMs delaminating eventually (losing information *sooner* than if it were on a printed acid-free paper)? I doubt even Clay Shirkey would want to trust the world’s intellectual treasures to erasable hard drives, or even to CDROM. Trithemius was a traditionalist cleric, certainly. But it appears he was no Luddite, he was quite the info-pragmatist if anything.
Of course, in any medium, one can rip anything out of its historical and biographical context, and damn it as “hypocrisy”, leaving it to others to go the whole nine yards and call it a “screed”, without having read the thing, or any other word about it. It’s just that, as Cass Sunstein and others have pointed out, the Web lends itself to these sorts of “information cascades” turning into avalanches, under which the truth gets buried rather more quickly.
[Source on Trithemius: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, p.15; searchable in Google Books.]
I read a newspaper almost every day (International Herald Tribune, here in Japan), but I also read a lot of news on the Web. I love David Brooks’ writing when I get it over the Web. I like it in print, too. But I seem to have an easier time spotting Brooks’ (all too frequent) bad logic when I’m getting him on paper. I’m often less judgmental about Web writing — digital is like talk, and talk is cheap, easy come, easy go. When it’s on paper, however, you have consider: trees died for this. So it had better measure up to some standards, right?
I suspect the Web will eat print news long before the e-book finishes off the printed paper book for all ordinary purposes. I am unhappy about surrendering the advantages that the printed newspaper apparently now has, however, and I fervently hope that this sacrifice is not permanent, that the Web will evolve ways to be better than print in all significant aspects.
The overall trends don’t look too good in some ways, though. There are some great sources out there on the Web. If I want interpretations of economic developments, there are dozens of economists blogging now, from several schools of thought, and all across the political spectrum. But what’s the number one economics blog? Freakonomics: potato chips for the mind. What’s number two? Marginal Revolution, your daily dose of Libertarianism. THEN you get Paul Krugman, with many even more able writers trailing a long way down in the rankings after him. What’s the point of having a medium that gives you easier access to better information if bad information overwhelms the good that much more easily and quickly, by way of the same medium?
July 26th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Turner nails it:”I’m often less judgmental about Web writing — digital is like talk, and talk is cheap, easy come, easy go. When it’s on paper, however, you have consider: trees died for this. So it had better measure up to some standards, right?”
I’ll add that I read a lot of specialized theory journals, and even when the essay is available online before I have a print copy, I read it as it was meant to be read.
July 27th, 2008 at 4:36 am
I browse rather than read, apparently, because I get my written news from the web (NYT, Boston Globe, WaPo). What is it called when I get my television news from The Daily Show rather than ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox?
Oh, and why am I supposed to care that John Edwards was skulking around an LA hotel?
July 27th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Bobby: Hedges sees this as a bad thing for journalism, thus a bad thing for democracy. I think that’s a fair conclusion to reach.
I have to disagree with this. There are many pertinent facts about national issues and politics that I learned on the web but that had been suppressed by the liberal mainstream media. Democracy is aided by an informed public–not a selectively informed public.
- – -
Bobby: It would be nice if newspaper publishers had some civic pride and would accept smaller profit margins in order to run papers like public trusts, as they should be.
As I mentioned to someone else on this matter, one could claim that Kentucky Fried Chicken should be a “public trust” because it feeds people but can give them salmonella if mishandled. So, why limit “public trusts” to just what you want? If people want something bad enough, such as the L.A. Times, they should be willing to accept civic pride and include consumers within the meaning of a public trust and be willing to pay more for a product rather than expect owners to forego profits. But, when it’s liberals doing the demanding, you can bet that they expect others to pay for what they want.
- – -
On sports, I really like the web rather than having to wait the next day for a paper to get a score and then find that the game ended too late to make the morning edition.
- – -
Michael Turner, I couldn’t finish reading your comment because it was over 200 words.
July 27th, 2008 at 9:22 am
In the case of the two major “conservative” newspapers in the U.S., the NYPost and the Washington Times, they’re both huge moneylosers so it’s obvious that the schmucks and losers who rely on them for their drivel expect others to pay for what they want to hear.
July 27th, 2008 at 9:39 am
The publishers choose what to do. Conservatives did not made demands. You have pretty twisted logic.
July 27th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Conservatives are the biggest whiners about the news business on the face of the earth. And, as William Kristol admitted, it’s a bullshit tactic to intimidate reporters and publishers.
July 27th, 2008 at 9:51 am
To be more precise, here’s what William Kristol had to say about the “Liberal Media Derangement Syndrome” that Rightwing Crybabies suffer from:
“I admit it, The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”
July 27th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Kristol is wrong on that point–by 100 to one.
Plus, the liberal media is getting out its message, as indicated by what is received by the public in this poll:
Conservatives aren’t whining when they state the truth.
July 27th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Remnember the good old days when John McCain talked openly about the press as his “base?” Don’t remember anyone considering their manlove for McCain – the tingling legs and all – a problem. But that was then and this is now…
Woody, you’re obviously beyond embarrassment talking about “stating the truth” after the crazy and/or falsified shit you’ve been raining on Marc’s website in recent days.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Of course, the notion being circulated by rightwing whiners that the media gives Obama a free ride is false:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,712999.story
July 27th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
“there can be much less serendipitous exposure to new events and perspectives on the Web that you get leafing through a newspaper. Instead, people are prone to retreating into ideological echo chambers.”
The “ideological echo chambers” is not without its BENEFITS for democracy. It facilities the self-neutering of wing-nuts. Rather than let their petty resentments and bigotry build up, they get a chance to vent it 24/7 and live under the illusion that a general public buys into their inanities.
How many Woodies and GM Ropers have killed off any possibility of running for public office by exposing the unintermediated juvenality on the Internet?
At the moment, the right wingnutosphere is shouting itself down with the mantra that Obama is a Marxist Muslim Manchurian candidate. Meanwhile, the candidate himself is attending church, fending off guilt by association with his CHRISTIAN pastor and meeting with those crypto-Marxist stalwarts Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker and Warren Buffet, to gather advice on economic policy.
Overall, the Internet is a huge plus for journalism, democracy and open society. Where would Obama be without it?
To the extent that the Internet makes it easier for ideologues to drown out any dissenting inner voices, it also makes it harder for the mainstream to suppress dissent and those who seek it out. How isn’t a buyer of that bargain?
July 27th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
The Internet also facilitates typos, apparently:
I meant to write: WHO isn’t a buyer of that bargain?
July 27th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
McLovin, good stuff but everything you said about the ‘rightwingnutosphere’ could be equally applied to the ‘leftmoonbatosphere’ as well.
Say what you will about the old dead white guys who wrote the Constitution but they were forward-thinking enough to realize that a free unfettered press– as the web finally provides to just about everyone– provides (among other benefits) a great escape valve for all the tons of hot air both sides’ hacks harrumph out their pieholes.
Just sayin’…
July 27th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Reg, this whole bias garbage has been called “working the refs,” the words not of any liberal but of Rich Bond, former chair of the Republican Party, who stated: “There is some strategy to it [bashing the media as liberal]….if you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”
Or maybe we could examine the words of James Baker, who, after reviewing the media coverage of his party, summarized “There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don’t think we have had anything to complain about.”
And how about the right wing fanatic Pat Buchanan, who found that he could not identify a single instance of alleged liberal bias against him during all of his runs for presidential office: “I’ve gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage – all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the ‘liberal media,’ but every Republican on earth does that.”
But perhaps the most telling quote comes from Noam Chomsky, who sanefully points out that the very fact that we even have such silly arguments about the political tendencies of a corporate dominated media (who themselves often start these silly arguments) is in and of itself proof that there is a right wing bias. A “liberal bias” is a label that any person in the press greatly relishes…so it is basically a favor to CBS, NBC, ABC, NYT, etc. to use the term “liberal”….just as it was a favor for the Republican – controlled Congress in 1996 to give away tens of billions of dollars in welfare monies to the same status quo known as the “liberal biased media.” Sheesh, you dumb ass Republicans have nothing. Your hypocrisy is so funny all one has to do is laugh.
July 27th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
So, reg, you are right on with your remarks, and Woody as usual you have nothing. See Eric Alterman, “What Liberal Media?” for the above citations.
July 27th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
“could be equally applied to the ‘leftmoonbatosphere’ as well.”
True enough, but there is an important distinction.
The wingnutosphere constitutes a much bigger percentage of right-wing blogland than does the “leftmoonbatosphere” of left-wing blogland.
The progressive movement has seized on the Internet as an organizing and fund-raising tool. Moveon.org, Media Matters and many others are very much oriented to getting readers involved and active.
And while Huffpo, DailyKos and Eschaton have their share of lefty loonies, there just isn’t the nexus of paranoia/general nuttiness between the hosts and the commentors that you find in places like townhall.com, thedrudgereport and so on.
In the end, the blogosphere will repel wingnuttiness in the same way the mainstream media has: not be snuffing it out, but by relegating it to second- and third-rate status…
July 27th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
It’s easy to see why Woody is utterly convinced the news media are liberal.
It is because the right-wing media consists largely of unopposed commentary. So the Woodies of the world listen to talkradio, which is one long a narrow, hyper-partisan rant, then compare that to mainstream newspaper journalism. And on that basis, we can all agree with Woody. If you use talkradio or Fox News Channel as representing the “center” of the political spectrum, then, certainly, the mainstream media worldview falls to the left.
At the end of the day, there is no credible definition of where the political center actually is, so talk about bias is missing the point. That’s why accuracy, rather than fairness or balance, is a far more meaningful measure of media quality.
July 27th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
McLovin, good comments, and I might add that for me personally, the biggest problem I have with the old media – newspaper, network and cable television news, radio – is that they are all no longer news-driven, but icon driven (especially FOX News, which highlights celebrity news so much that it would be worthless as a medium were I a neo-con, conservative, OR a neo-nazi). They all spent inordinate amounts of time reporting several days ago that Obama voted in favor of the latest FISA bill without adequately explaining what the hell FISA was…the story instead was Obama. They don’t report “news”, they report personalities. I have received more news, I swear, on this very blog, and Comedy Central, than I have ever received in decades of consumption of the above avenues. What a sad commentary.
July 27th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Woody writes: “Kristol is wrong on that point–by 100 to one.”
The political contributions of a network’s EMPLOYEES don’t determine how liberal or conservative the network itself is.
I remember that poll, Woody. Inconveniently for your case, Fox News employees contributions to the Dems outweighed their contributions to the GOP by a margin not wildly different from the ratio at CBS, ABC, NBC ….
So why is Fox so conservative? Because its EXECUTIVES are meeting the echo-chamber demands of its AUDIENCE … just as you’d expect any marketing-savvy company to do.
Why would a Democrat work for FOX? Well … maybe to have a job? Though in the case of the proofreader overseeing their error-laden text crawl, I think that’s gotta be one Democrat who’s got his feet up his desk, sipping a latte, reading the NYT and paying no attention at all … because he realizes that fixing all the typos would be casting pearls before swine anyway.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I share the sense that the American news media leaves lots of room for improvement, but it’s important to compare it realistically.
The BBC is awesome and in terms of breadth, depth, objectivity and factuality utterly destroys all U.S.-based TV news.
Still, they are the exception. I browse foreign TV newscasts from time to time, and I’ve yet to encounter any — outside the BBC — that are obviously superior to our networks, PBS and CNN.
On the newspaper front, the NY Times acquits itself very well. Again, the Britons make some bold bids with The Independent, the Guardian and, even, Murdoch’s Times, but none seem to me to be clearly superior to the best American journalism, though surely part of that is just that I’ve grown up with the U.S. style and probably find it more comfortable for that alone.
I try to read translated news from Japan, Iran, China and elsewhere, occasionally and find the quality very, very low compared with the better American newspapers.
It’s a big world, but no one seems to have come up with a better formula of funding or supporting high-quality journalism than the U.S. or, arguably, the U.K. Shouldn’t that tell us to keep our expectations pretty low?
The far bigger problem in America is that the lowest common denominator demographic finds entertainment far more attractive than information and a sizable part of the population makes little or no distinction between the two.
Thus the struggle to make real news profitable.
The quality and quantity of journalism available to me far surpasses my needs. Sure, an awful lot of dirty deeds go unreported and good ones overlooked in the news media, but for me, there’s still far more reported than I can possibly keep up with. I don’t think I’m very different from the average American in that regard.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:13 am
You guys are so clueless.
July 28th, 2008 at 7:42 am
“At the end of the day, there is no credible definition of where the political center actually is, so talk about bias is missing the point.”
Well, you could come up with a definition, but the problem is, hardly anybody would identify with it. And the news media need an audience identity go slant towards. After all, news is a business. Businesses need customers. Quality is what the customer says it is. And we really do have two major groups of customers here:
http://www.themonkeycage.org/econ.soc-thumb.png
I read once that the newspaper business really started declining with the rise of the automobile. Time was, people took public transportation home. Often you were seated with people you didn’t know, passing scenery you’d seen a zillion times. So the afternoon edition of a newspaper, which might have merely rewritten yesterday’s news with a little more depth, and added some comments made by intelligent and/or knowledgeably people, had a natural market, simply by being more interesting than your commute, and in making use of your eyes and brain. You could sell fresh news in the morning, and better-cooked news in the late afternoon.
These days? You can listen to talk radio while stuck in traffic, maybe call in using your cell phone. Yes, driving makes use of your eyes and brain, but at what cognitive level? Chimps have been taught to drive. With enough chimps on the road, we could have a chimp radio channel. Chimps taught to auto-dial on cellphones could call in to those shows as they drove home from whatever jobs chimps might be trained to handle. It would be, as they say, a hoot. (Just don’t give ‘em the vote, please.)
July 28th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Hedges writes:
“We live under the happy illusion that we can transfer news-gathering to the Internet.”
Jarvis responds: “Well, he’s right about the happy part. News alerady has come to the internet, where it is faster, more complete, more global, with more voices.”
“Alerady”? “internet” not capitalized? Hey, it’s blogging, don’t expect the cleanest copy!
I’m more concerned with flaws in reasoning: how did Hedges’ pointed “news *gathering*” get blunted into Jarvis’ “news”? Jarvis seems to conflate dissemination with accumulation.
The Internet makes dissemination cheap. But the Internet does not do legwork, the Internet does not conduct and transcribe interviews, the Internet does not check quotes with sources, and as yet there’s no website or search engine (I know of) where I can go and type a question like “have the prices of tires risen in real terms since 2003?” and have some whiz-bang AI go and find the answer for me on the Web in seconds, for free. These tasks take human time, and human time is human money.
Oh, but we can get that labor paid for with website ad revenues, right? After all, media analysts have concluded that 2008 is the first year in which Internet ad spending exceeded spending on more traditional categories like TV, radio, newspapers.
http://tinyurl.com/6ralce
Oops, read on: that’s only true if you include how much companies spend on their own websites — which, it turns out, is about 60% of their spending in the category of “online advertising.” So, really, over a decade after hitting the big time as a medium, the Internet is not pulling its weight as an advertising revenue source for funding news gathering. And those corporate websites soaking up so much of online advertising budgets now — gee, we can expect beaucoup unbiased news reporting from those, I’m sure ….
“OK,” you might say, “maybe at the moment, but Real Soon Now, that’ll change, because internet advertising in Internet news sources features great bang for the buck, right? Isn’t it just a matter of newspapers figuring it out?”
Oops. Sadly, no. It’s a matter of what those who pay the ad bills have figured out.
“Overall, companies will spend 61.8% of their online budgets on their own Web sites, for a total of $65.1 billion. This partly reflects a shortage of online ad inventory, but may also signal dissatisfaction with the advertising and marketing services offered by online publishers.
“Indeed, 75% of advertisers ranked their own Web sites as the most effective means of lead generation (ahead of exhibitions at 66%, custom pubs at 65%, and direct mail and trade magazines, both at 64%).”
It’s fair to say that the trends are in place and pretty solid, by now. News on paper is eventually going to die. News online isn’t going get anything like the same supporting revenue per fact-checked, source-checked, proofread word. (And arguably, most online readers don’t have the attention span for that quality product anyway.) So I see ever fewer ultimate sources of news (including journos who … uh … who take the time to *think* more clearly than the obviously hurried Jeff Jarvis)? because there’s going to ever less money to pay them. Yeah, I can get a wider diversity of people commenting on the results, perhaps. All hail Blogistan and its perpetually warring tribal chieftains! But … don’t they ultimately rely on somebody’s facts for any credibility at all?
As someone (Moynihan) said: we’re all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. Absent coolly objective AI over our shoulders, it looks like somebody has to pay for actual facts. Maybe in the end, if present trends continue, you’ll be able to tell the more honest among us by how much more often they answer questions on the major questions of the day with a shrug, saying “Who knows? Not me. And, almost as certainly: not you either.”
July 29th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
If you accept Michael Turner’s premise that news-gathering companies who see their revenue shrink respond by eliminating the number of news-gatherers they employ (and there’s plenty of data points to support that premise), it’s no wonder amateur journalism projects have grown. Between the thousands of fired reporters and the drastically lowered barrier of entry for publication, the landscape for journalism could be likened to a field newly cleared and fertilized by rounds of slashing and burning.
So we have the “mass amateuriaztion” that Clay Shirky wrote about vis-a-vis the printing press and scribes, only applied to journalism. Marc talks about people committing “acts of journalism,” which I think is fair characterization of amateur reporting . It’s certainly a fairer characterization than the grandiose fantasies heard from the cheerleaders of “citizen journalism.” If you read Jay Rosen, for example, you’d get the impression there are no possible drawbacks to part-time volunteers trying to do the job once done by trained reporters. Moreover, you’d think that any criticism of amateur journalism is always ignorant, reactionary, condescending and/or anti-democratic.
August 4th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
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