Will fragmentation make us savvier media consumers?

I was catching up on my On the Media podcasts this morning and lo, what a gem waited for me at the end of the March 25th edition. It was an interview with David von Drehle (who, after hearing what he said is a hero in my mind right now), editor-at-large for Time Magazine and author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. It was part of their series investigating bias in public media and after discussing the differential treatment of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 by the most prominent NYC newspapers at the time (Hearst’s The American, Pulitzer’s The World and The New York Times`), host Brooke Gladstone asked:

It strikes me, listening to you, that the media are the same as they ever were… And at all of them you see what you referred to as an incredibly short attention span, something that some people blame on the digital age. So what do you think? Are we just merely recapitulating media, as it’s always been?

And more convincing that James Fallows’ “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media” in April’s The Atlantic, Von Drehle said:

I think 20, 30, 50 years from now, when we look at media history, we’re going to look at the late 20th century as the aberration. It was created artificially by the scarcity of broadcast -frequency. The people who had that broadcast frequency created enormous monopolies, and with monopoly they had to speak broadly to huge audiences. What kind of journalism does that create? That creates a journalism of the middle.

Now we’re just back to the way it was before, when anybody with some verve could start up a publication and get it out there, and if it spoke to people, it would grow. Papers would take off, become hugely popular, and vanish almost overnight back in those days. And what does that kind of environment create? It creates point of view, it creates voice, it creates partisanship.

And back in those days, you know, people who read the papers, they knew what Hearst was up to, they knew what Pulitzer was about. They knew The Times represented this and The Telegraph represented that, and The Herald represented still another thing. And that kind of savvy media consumer is what we’re going to have to re-grow in the era we’re in now.

Boom. I’m sold. Give me blogs, give me Tumblr, give me partisan news aggregators. At least, to the informationally-inclined (I hold to he belief that some people just won’t care and all new media means to them is the move from The National Enquirer to the TMZ Twitter feed. Yeah, I’m an elitist. Deal.) we’ll be a little more skeptical and aware of the kind of news we’re consuming, not this objectivity bullshit. I listen to NPR because as Amity Shlaes said:

NPR’s bias toward education–its voice is that of an educated gentleman or woman–does the same. This also holds true for PBS, which airs some of the best documentaries made. The intellectual sophistication of public radio’s product validates teachers’ personal decisions to invest their lives in a field that places a premium on education.

I’m biased to those same things. And I want to hear my biases streaming through my radio alarm clock the same way some people in my family tune to Fox News all day because they believe Glenn Beck is the last refuge of sense and sensibility (not for long, but they might just have to change channels. Yes, Beck thinks he’s the conservatives’ Oprah).

Note:

` – had no freaking clue the Times was a conservative rag back in the day. There’s some hope and change for ya.

New media enthusiasts need to take a chill pill

Brian Solis, writing for PaidContent.org wrote this absolutely infuriating piece that basically says… investigative journalism is dead. Reporters should just plug into their iPhones and laptops and wait for news to come to them. It was so absurd and downright small-minded about the importance of journalism that I actually got mad and started cursing out loud (I got even more mad after doing a very reductionist summary of his point).

Halfway through he says that journalists should give up: crowd-sourced information is going to do a better job than they ever will so they should just sit back and become “social seismologist”. I can’t say this any more eloquently– what the *$#%?

As reporters become social seismologists, it is also the responsibility of the reporter … to connect information to audiences who can thus serve as information emissaries to further extend stories to social graphs across the Web.

Journalists reduced to a the trivial neo-profession of “social seismology”‘? This is what really set me off. Excuse me, tweets and blog posts are great and all but I don’t see anything like this wonderful feature on the NYTimes about a Queens payphone coming anytime soon. What about those ‘beats’ that Twitterers or bloggers don’t cover? Take a quick look at the demographics of this so-called Internet ‘global society’ and you’ll find many places don’t even register a single bleep on this ‘human seismograph’ of information. We still need to know about police brutality in that crime-ridden neighborhood even though no one updates their Facebook status about it. Who is going to go out there and investigate but the professional journalist?

The romantic raving continues:

I once referred to Twitter as TNN, the Twitter News Network as it consistently beat traditional media in the race to report relevant news and trends. And as a result, Twitter and other social networks continue to earn an entrenched role as the primary source of information and breaking events for the hundreds of millions of people connected to one another at varying degrees within and across each network.

If someone ever needed to get slapped in the face with the cold fish of reality, it would be this guy. Don’t forget about the ‘digital divide’, my man. Tim McGuire wrote an absolutely lovely article about how journalists should properly use new media sources of information: responsibly. And no Brian, Twitter isn’t the best iteration of social media as news source. First of all, so much bullshit goes on in these sites that I beseech the reader to imagine the hackneyed idiom about a haystack and an easily misplaced sewing tool. Second of all, and actually most importantly, this is a grave confusion of journalism as a consumer product. It’s not about getting the newest and the freshest (though unfortunately thanks to the advertising driven model of news media and now all this social networking, it’s becoming more so). It is about readers getting correct information and processing it so that people can have a better understanding of the world around them and make good decisions about social issues and politics.

This disturbing train of thought is further elucidated by the following line:

Media is now forced to compete in an attention economy where the business of news is now a real-time competition for mindshare, connectedness and earned relevance.

Mindshare in an attention economy?  This is not the latest denim cut from The Gap! It probably shouldn’t surprise me, this guy has a background in public relations (he is, and I quote: the “Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley”) hence cares more about the ‘business’ of news that its social use. He actually even says the ‘business of news’ repeatedly throughout the article which is probably why my face got redder as I went through the whole thing. This article refocuses the ultimate purpose of news (which is to inform the population) to become all about the news-gathering process. Literally, he makes it about the journey and not the destination. You don’t make good decisions about voter initiatives on the ballot by re-tweeting. You make good decisions by learning about relevant facts.

McGuire quoted one of the journalists who succumbed to the instant gratification of Twitter and shamefully had to retract. Its a good thing it was only sports, imagine if this thing was about something much more important, like nuclear armaments, war or the health care debate. This guy Michael Rand from the MinnPost prematurely tweeted about some high school football signing with one team and started a “trending topic”, something Solis gushes almost lovingly about, that he had to take back. I liked what he said: “But if we [journalists] are to be standard-setters instead of standard-followers, we can’t just get caught up in it all. There was far less to gain by being 45 minutes early than there was to lose by being 100 percent wrong, even if we were trying to hedge our bets. And in this case, we could be sure that a final answer was coming at a finite time. Sometimes judgment isn’t just about right or wrong, it’s about what’s at stake in either case.”

THANK YOU. Let’s remember professionalism, credibility and accountability.

Honestly by the time he concluded his article, I was so blinded by rage I don’t even know what he means by this:

As a new hybrid of collaborative journalism takes shape, reporters who remain plugged-in to communities outside of their domain will open new doors to relevance – connecting to stories and people that propel information beyond the reach of any one network at the speed of the now web.

You know what, I think I’m grateful I don’t understand it because if I did, that would mean I chugged the Kool-Aid right along with him and the rest of the Twit-o-blogo-verse. And I realize this might seem a hypocrisy because I myselt tweet, blog and get my news from various sources on the Internet. But I still subscribe to public radio and trust the Times or the BBC or the WSJ or those random briefings of the Council of Foreign Relations for most of my news. I’m as much in the boat as everyone else and I am so excited by the possibilities new media holds for journalism. But this sort of talk is not constructive and if it’s the discourse that wins when this whole tumult ends, I think I’m going to go join that guy who lives off the grid. I hope he can make room for me in that cave.