The book of lists: Things we know

There are some great "things I know" lists out there where people in the news biz enumerate the hard truths they believe to be true about the state of journalism and this transition we're in the middle of. Here are three I highly recommend:

William Lobdell's "42 Things I Know"

Veteran LA Times journalist Lobdell volunteered to be part of the recent round of layoffs. He left his job Aug 1 after 18 years in the biz. In an email exchange with an OC Weekly reporter, Lobdell made the sobbering admission that he had concluded that "the risk of staying at the paper had become greater than the risk of leaving."

His list of "42 Things" offers his assessment of the news industry, including the fact that the newspaper business model is broken (#3), no one knows how to fix it (#4), and that's probably because it can't be fixed (#5).

He also says:

• A news web operation can support far fewer journalists and layers of editors. It requires a different mindset. (#17)


• Sam Zell isn’t the ultimate villain.... In the long run, he’s just an accelerator for a downfall that is happening naturally. (#20)


• We operated as though we had a monopoly on truth and great journalism for far too long. We didn't listen to our critics and sometimes our readers. That cost us. (#24)

Ryan Sholin, "Ten Obvious Things You Need to Get Through Your Head," and "Ten Obvious Things, One Year Later"

Sholin is a San Jose State University grad student in mass communications. He's also a former Web developer and online editor. Plus, he's located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Maybe those things combined have contributed to his point of view.

"Ten Obvious Things...," written in June 2007, was one of his most popular blog posts ever. He updated it a year later. Among his thoughts:

• Your major metro newspaper could probably use some staff cuts. If you’re not writing about local news, your paper’s readers are probably getting what you do from somewhere else. (#3)


• Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. (#7)


• You ignore new delivery systems at your own peril. RSS, SMS, iPhone, e-paper, Blackberry, widgets, podcasts, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter — these aren’t the competition, these are your new carriers. (#8)


• THE GLASS IS HALF FULL. There is excellent work being done in the new world of online journalism and it’s being done at newspapers.... You don’t need millions of dollars or HD cameras or years of training to make it happen; all you need is the right frame of mind. (#10)

Mindy McAdams: "The Survival of Journalism: 10 Simple Facts"

McAdams teaches university courses in online journalism and the use of technology for communication. She says:

• Journalism CAN be done, and done well, without newspapers. (#2)


• Newspapers were a nice business.... It worked for a long time, but now, like trans-Atlantic leisure travel in big passenger ships, it will never work again. (#5)


• The business model to sustain journalism in the 21st century has not been seen yet. (#9)

Photo courtesy of Claudecf. Creative Commons license.

The industrial purveyors of consensus

Just read this description of the traditional media by HuffPo Off-the-Bus project coordinator / PressThink blogger / NYU j-school prof Jay Rosen:

...the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news...

Indeed, that's how it was.

One-to-many, because newsfolks owned the delivery channels. They controlled what went into their channel. From them (the one) to the many (everyone in the community).

Today, of course, the fact that anyone can publish has transformed the situation in one that the tech world calls many-to-many. Anyone can broadcast (the many) to everyone else (the other many).

"Consensus-is-ours" because the printing press owners, ie: the journalists, decided what the narrative was, what the interpretation was, thereby creating the illusion of consensus.

With myriad voices online, the illusion has been shattered. There is no consensus anymore. There is no single narrative. There is no single interpretation.

To some traditional journalists, the myriad of narratives and interpretations is confounding. They assume that those differing viewpoints are driven by agenda. Because if there were no agenda, there would be objective reporting. And, they believe, objective reporting generates a single, consensus view of what happened and what it means.

And yet, that's not what it means at all. Anyone who's seen "Rashamon" can tell you that. The illusion of objectivity was a by-product of the fact that there was only a single channel through which to tell a story. The fact that there now are myriad channels (myriad viewpoints) doesn't mean that no one's objective. It only shows what we've always known: There are myriad ways of recalling and interpreting the same event.

The "one-to-many, consensus-is-ours" world was certainly an easier place to live. Readers didn't have to do so much work, and journalists could go to be certain they'd gotten the story "right." The new world requires more work of readers and more confidence, or at less attachment to being perceived as an authority, on the part of journalists. But just because it's a harder place to live, doesn't mean it's wrong.

Photo courtesy of David Silverline. Creative Commons licence.

That old bit about glass houses

Here's the second nugget worth considering from Howell Raines piece on Romanesko in Portfolio. (The first nugget was here.)

He notes that, "The fogies are in an uproar about the internet's glorification of opinions from a nation of bloggers sitting around, figuratively speaking, in Romanesko's old bathrobes."

Then adds, "Oregonian editor Sandy Rowe... counsels us to ignore the 'journalistic tizzy fit of righteous indignation.' We were never as careful with facts as we claimed to be...."

I agree. Traditional journalists have to be careful about getting all up in arms about the current state of reporting online. It's that old line about glass houses. There were plenty of transgressions from the canon when news came in paper form. It's just that there wasn't an efficient mechanism to identify them and hold the culprits up for scrutiny.

Photo courtesy of lisachamberlin. Creative Commons license.

The demand is not plummeting; it was never there

Howell Raines' mildly interesting piece on Jim Romenesko in the current issue of Portfolio is probably not worth the 15 minutes it takes to read it, but it does have a couple of nuggets worth reflecting on. I bring them to you here.

The first is Raines' observation that "it's not technology per se that's killing newspapers; it's plummeting demand for quality information."

I would propose that the demand for quality information is not plummeting. Rather, that it never was there to begin with. Technology has made it possible for readers to go elsewhere for the things they actually were seeking in newspapers. That is the phenomenon that is being revealed here.

We don't really believe that readers bought newspapers because they wanted the latest news from city hall, do we? If we're honest with ourselves, we'd admit that readers bought newspapers for the sports scores, the stock quotes, the TV and movie listings, maybe even the comics. The news? No. The news was simply a freebie thrown in with the other stuff customers were actually buying.

Readers were also buying newspapers--and reading the news--for other reasons that had nothing to do with the content itself, nothing to do with any desire to consume "quality information. Reasons like:

-- The desire to feel connected to the community

-- The desire to feel on top of what's going on in the community

-- The desire not to look stupid at the next cocktail party

In the design world, we call these "affective" attributes, the word "affect" being a stand-in for "emotional." Affective attributes are those that generate specific emotions or feelings in a person using a product. Not everyone who bought an iPhone did so because they thought it was the most useful and beautiful cell phone out there. Some bought it because they wanted to look cool, hip, down with the latest. Some bought it because they wanted to feel like they were on the cutting edge. Some bought it because they were afraid of missing out on something special.

Many purchase decisions are driven by these kinds of factors, rather than the practical value of the object in question. Exhibit A: Killer muscle cars that don't actually run all that well. The "quality" in the information? That's like the medicine in the cough syrup. No child who ever agreed to slurp down cough syrup did it for the medicine. They did it for the cherry flavor.

This might sound depressing, but it should be encouraging. Because it offers the key to the solution: Figure out what your readers really want from you--whether it's the sports scores or the desire to feel connected, or both, probably--and then figure out how to deliver the news so that the reader gets those things they're actually looking for.

And accept that there never was, and probably never will be, any meaningful demand for quality information. Except among a tiny minority of news junkies, and those of us in the business. Sure, when something like the domestic wire-tapping story or the Walter Reed scandal come to light, people are interested. But on a day-to-day basis? Really, they're more interested in the sports scores. And the stock quotes.

Photo courtesy of Yogi. Creative Commons license.

Time to Face the Facts: Newspapers weren't really all that great

At a cocktail party last night, a guy I met, a former reporter, raised one of the most common objections to Web-based news: "Sure there's a lot out there," he said. "But a lot of it is crap."

I hear mainstream media folks making this point all the time. But here's what bugs me about it: It assumes that everything that appeared in newspapers in the past was quality journalism. As in: "The problem with Web-based news is that, while some of it is good, a lot of it is crap. Don't we owe something more to the public, something like the fine journalism that has always been produced by newspapers?"

The thing is, a lot of what has appeared in newspapers has been crap. Don't you agree? Whenever I hit the road in the States, I always pick up local newspapers. From Idaho to Arkansas, Texas to Illinois, I'll always grab a copy of any local newspaper I come across. Not just the big ones. All of them, from the tinsy tiniest to the biggest of the big. For no reason other than sheer curiosity. I want to learn what's going on across the country. And even more, how people think and view the world. Nothing will give you greater insight into a community than what they cover in their local newspaper and how they write about it.

Based on those perusals, I can confidently claim the following: A lot of newspaper reporting and writing sucks. Sure, the topics they cover are important: The goings-on of local governments, new business deals, even local sports. But do most newspapers write about those things in compelling ways? No. Let's be honest. A lot of the stories appearing in newspapers across the country are either painfully amateurish or mind-numbingly formulaic. And as for the "investigative journalism" journalists worry will be lost in the digital era, the "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted...", if we're honest about that too, most newspapers don't do a whole bunch of it on any kind of a regular basis. Really. I challenge you to pick up any random newspaper in the country today (other than the biggie of the bigs), leaf through its pages, and try to find a single article that genuinely is holding some institution accountable or calling into question--in a meaningful, not just a taking-down-dictation kind of way--something being done by someone in power. Nine out of ten times, you're not going to find it.

So here's one more sacred cow that many newsfolks need to let go of: This idea that the demise of newspapers will be a terrible thing because newspapers have been performing such an important public service. They haven't. Or, at least, they haven't been performing it in such a powerful and consistent way that the service can't be similarly delivered digitally.

Photo courtesy of Scoobymoo. Creative Commons license