November 12, 2008

The Rosenbaum-Jarvis smackdown

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My first reaction upon reading today’s old-vs.-new media tussle between Ron Rosenbaum and Jeff Jarvis was to wonder “can’t we all get along?” A tiresome sentiment, I know. But is it any more so than replaying the arguments that these two heavy-hitters bring to the endless circular discussion about 21st century journalism?

Shorter Rosenbaum: Jarvis is cruel to those traditional journalists and old media outlets getting hammered by job and budget cuts. Jarvis ignores what they bring to the table -  reporting on real life events - while focusing on the new forms journalism should take. And his self-regard has become unbearable.

Shorter Jarvis: I’m just telling it like it is: if traditional journalists don’t stop whining and adapt to a rapidly changing environment, they’re doomed. And I’m not unbearable; the truth hurts. Nyah.

Rosenbaum is his typically entertaining self: Jarvis’s oracular pronouncements and descriptions of his jet-setting do sometimes verge on self-parody. But I think Jarvis is, on the whole, correct: radical innovation is the only way forward for journalism, and is incredibly promising. Whining about the bygone days (five years ago!) of newspapers and magazines may provide a necessary emotional outlet, but it’s a huge waste of energy and a distraction from the challenges at hand.

But Rosenbaum does identify a weakness that runs through the pronouncements of many a new media guru: the obsession with, and fetishization of, technology and new forms. That’s good as far as it goes, but it’s still not clear what truly great post-dead tree journalism looks like. Oh, there are more and more examples out there - TPM, Spot.us, Grist.org - that combine reporting with technology, Internet, and social networks in compelling ways. And examples of the big media outlets adapting, such as the Washington Post’s decision to include blogger Chris Cillizza as part of its incoming White House team.

However, there’s a certain chicken-or-the-egg factor here. Do emerging technology and the social changes that follow from it naturally beget quality journalism (if you build it, they - journalists and readers - will come)? Or is there a risk that if you focus on technology and the changing relationship between the journalist and the news consumer, the fundamentals get lost in the shuffle? This is a problem at many newspapers, which in their relentless race to cut back and innovate simultaneously are literally trading journalism talent and experience for technical expertise.

The focus on technology, form, and social networking is a big part of the puzzle. But content should be given its due. What are the problems - in communities, the nation, the world - that deserve investigation and exposure with these wondrous new tools?

 

November 11, 2008

Farewell

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From 11/7/08:

THIS IS THE FINAL REPORT OF NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

THE MISSION OF THE NEWS SERVICE HAS BEEN TO PUT THE FINEST JOURNALISM IN FRONT OF AS MANY EYES AS POSSIBLE. FOR NEARLY HALF A CENTURY, WE HAVE DONE OUR BEST TO PROVIDE YOU WITH ARTICLES THAT INFORM, EDIFY, EXCITE AND AMUSE YOUR READERS. WE BID FAREWELL WITH THE WISH THAT THE NEWS BUSINESS WILL BE KIND TO YOUR PUBLICATION AND ITS HARD-STRIVING EMPLOYEES.

 

November 6, 2008

Oh-Bama!

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I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the incipient Obama administration going forward. In the meantime, a side note about newspapers. It was a banner day for the traditionalists: Many papers had to do midday press runs because their dead-tree editions sold out. (I was lucky to find a non-empty Washington Post box near my gym and picked up a copy. Now I have to keep it forever?)

One observation: historic newspaper headlines announcing an election result or other event were straight declarations. Think: NIXON RESIGNS, MEN WALK ON MOON, et al. This is what made them, well, historic. They concisely described the moment.

But today it’s different. Most people picking up a paper the day after something big happens already know all about it. When I got my paper, I had already watched election results the night before on TV, read news websites and political blogs. So the hard news headline is no longer needed. Meanwhile, newspaper design is also becoming flashier, more photo-heavy, the headlines bigger - and shorter.

So instead of the declaration of history — OBAMA ELECTED PRESIDENT — today’s headlines were impressionistic:

* • “Yes We Can.” (The Record of Stockton, Calif.)
* • “Change Comes to America.” (Canada’s The Hamilton Spectator)
* • “Change of Course.” (Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald)
* • “Face of Change.” (Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald)
* • “A New Hope.” (Iowa City Press-Citizen)
* • “In Our Lifetime,” declared The Anniston (Ala.) Star.
* • “Obama Overcomes,” said The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News.
* • “Race is History,” The Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise offered.
* • “Obama Reaches The Mountaintop,” said The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.
* • “Obama!” (The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa.)
* • “Oh-Bama! (The Orange County (Calif.) Register
* • “Mr. President.” (The Chicago Sun-Times)
* • “It’s Obama.” (La Tribune of Paris, France)

What does this mean, other than that today’s newspapers are like yesterday’s magazines? It’s sort of paradoxical. People seek commemorative editions because they are, of course, physical objects, and they distill something of the day that a web page, changing every 15 minutes, can’t. At the same time, though, because papers no longer have a monopoly on information and are desperate to grab attention any way they can, the headlines (and in many papers, much of the content as well) are softer, less matter-of-fact, less “serious.” When we look back on these headlines in 40 years, it’s hard not to think they’ll show more about the steady fading away of the paper edition than the historic event they record.

 

November 2, 2008

The ombudsman’s lament

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Is there any job in American journalism hurtling toward obsolescence faster than that of the ombudsman, the “readers’ representative” who mediates between the myriad comments/complaints/suggestions of readers and the management of the paper?

With the collapse of the newspaper business model, many papers have eliminated this position. That’s probably a good thing. Not long ago, I felt differently: newspapers are traditionally opaque institutions that call other people to account, but are reluctant to acknowledge their own mistakes. Good to have an in-house critic who could get answers from the publisher, from editors and reporters. But with the rise of countless online sources of media criticism and the migration of newspapers online, the ombudsman’s function is becoming redundant. Newspapers are starting to open up and join the conversation; those who go into a defensive crouch when they make a mistake do themselves no favors.

And the ombudsmen still on the job seem increasingly caught betwixt the giant forces grinding down and transforming newspapers and the conventions still holding them back. In today’s New York Times, for example, public editor Clark Hoyt goes to great lengths trying to wave reporters off prematurely calling the election for Obama:

There are only two days left until the next president is elected. I think The Times would be wise, in the words of my former colleague Tom Fiedler, dean of the College of Communication at Boston University, to “forgo the temptation of the horse race” and focus on issues and what the candidates are saying. That is just what the paper did Thursday, with articles on their positions on student loans and summarizing their final stump speeches.

He’s right that it’s silly to write articles saying “it’s over” before it’s over. And I’m no fan of horse race coverage, with its endless focus on what might happen weeks or months in advance. But it’s different now: The horses are very close to the finish line. It would be ridiculous for reporters to ignore that one of them is ahead by a length. That reality shapes everything, from campaign decisions to voter behavior itself. In making the most predictable of all ombudsmanic pronouncements - cover the issues - Hoyt dispenses the strangest kind of journalistic advice: Cover your eyes! Ignore the facts!

And let’s face it: Obama is very likely to win. The odds of an election-night shocker are quite small. If you want an example, look at the indispensable 538.com, which runs 10,000 computer simulations every day incorporating the latest polling results, taking into account polls and election results going back to 1952. As of tonight, 538 gives McCain a 6.3 percent chance of victory. That’s not zero, of course, and the vote could turn out to be a black swan - that totally unanticipated outcome. But that must be weighed appropriately against the preponderance of the evidence.

Moreover, the cautionary examples Hoyt uses - the recent Rams upset of the Redskins and Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary - are weak analogies to a national election. A football game is not an election at all. And the New Hampshire primary had a small and volatile pool of voters. It’s a bobbing cork compared to the aircraft carrier of a national election campaign that, in spite of its drama, has not been close for weeks.

Update: 538.com crunched the numbers again overnight and now gives McCain a 3.7 percent chance of winning.

 

October 31, 2008

Whither Drudge?

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Has Drudge lost his mojo? If even Mark Halperin, once Drudge’s most devoted MSM acolyte, is turning against him, it must be a sign of some shift in the zeitgeist.

And it’s true. Drudge has been all but irrelevant this campaign season, flogging one pro-McCain story after another, each lamer than the next. The race is tightening! The B girl! Obama kicks the Washington Times off the campaign plane! His talent for the seizing on the most outrageous cable news-friendly stories — those having to do with the base urges of politicians, the darkest trenches of the culture wars and, of course, hurricanes — seems to have deserted him. Has the Drudge moment that began in 1997 with the Monica story finally passed?

We can only hope. I’ve always found Drudge interesting, but his influence over the cable news networks and political journalists is undeserved and arbitrary. They were lost in the wilderness and cowed by the success of Fox News, so they seized upon Drudge - who gave them those links and page views - as a kind of Moses to lead them to … what, exactly? The fallow point for Drudge-ism may have come in September, when the McCain campaign was dominating every news cycle with one outrageous, Drudge-tailored lie and misrepresentation after another. It became so ridiculous that media outlets, against deeply ingrained habits demanding a “both sides do it” false equivalency, began calling BS.

There are a couple of obvious reasons for Drudge’s fall from the pinnacle of MSM influence. As Eric Boehlert noted, this fall’s economic crisis instantly became the dominant political story and overall story — but it’s not a good Drudge story, despite of his fondness for tracking the Dow. Too complicated. Too policy-oriented. Drudge stories have a voyeuristic quality - you’re watching someone else’s trainwreck. But the economic crisis is everybody’s train wreck. We don’t want lurid headlines about how our 401Ks are evaporating.

The other reason is that Drudge went all-in for McCain. McCain is still running a Drudge-friendly campaign, hitting all the hot buttons it possibly can. But it is also a losing campaign, one a majority of people aren’t buying. The big story here is Obama, who’s all uplift and inspiration and cool. Also not a good Drudge story.

Bill Clinton was the best thing that ever happened to Drudge. Obama, who despite his star power cultivates a kind of strategic political blandness, could turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Drudge.

 

October 27, 2008

Don’t mourn the AP’s lost “neutrality”

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Jay Newton-Small has a piece in the Washington Post arguing that the AP’s attempts to bring more “attitude” to its political coverage are strangely out of character and that the AP is surrendering its brand, that of the down-the-middle “neutral abiter”:

“I worry that their strategy is too 2004 Web and not a 2008 approach to the Web,” says Dick Keil, a former AP reporter who spent 20 years working for wire services before becoming a political consultant. “It’s like New Coke — it seems cool now, but just wait. It could bring down the whole company: They have a recognized, respected and trusted brand and identity, and they are moving in a radically new direction likely to make the vast majority of their subscribers uncomfortable.”

…[I]n a world, and a Web, full of analysis, opinion and “accountability journalism,” what’s missing is a neutral referee. Which is a bit like living in a world with a North Pole and a South Pole but no equator. If there’s no one to set the standard, how will we know when we’ve crossed the line?

I wish Keil or Newton-Small had explained what they think a “2008 approach to the web” is, because the piece offers no ideas on that front beyond the rhetorical flourish. In any case, the problem with this piece is that it follows the classic line of reasoning of Jay Rosen’s bete noir, the newsroom curmudgeon: the past was great, the present scary, and the future, potentially apocalyptic.

Of those three notions, the first is by far the most pernicious. The past just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The piece ignores the crisis in credibility that has afflicted the media over the past generation. The idea of a media “neutral arbiter” - Walter Cronkite, the New York Times, the AP - is a fiction, harking back to a fleeting era of political consensus dating to the “Mad Men” era. This Olympian media ideal has been eroding ever since, and the erosion accelerated during the Bush years. It has hit two low points recently - the media’s credulous treatment of the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war with Iraq; and in the cable talking heads-driven, “everybody is equally at fault” approach to campaign coverage. (Though there’s finally been some pushback on the latter in response to the McCain campaign’s aggressive pushing of falsehoods.)

The AP’s attempts to bring more attitude to its political coverage, directed by Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, have been erratic. Sometimes laziness or outright bias has taken the place of substantive argument, and Newton-Small’s piece makes it clear that some AP reporters are uncomfortable with the new approach. But at least they’re trying. The traditional “AP brand” is already dead, and just wishing we could somehow reanimate it won’t address the problems that killed it.

 

September 25, 2008

What would Broder do?

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One more brief observation about John McCain’s decision to temporarily suspend his campaign. It’s hard to believe this will have any practical effect on the matter at hand, passing a bailout bill. It could have the opposite effect, by injecting presidential politics and posturing into an intricate, and politically volatile, matter of policy. But influencing the policy, for good or ill, doesn’t seem to be what McCain’s after. It’s all about optics: he wants voters to see him as a leader capable of overcoming the partisan divide.

This doesn’t make much logical sense coming on the heels of nearly six weeks of divisive culture war politics. But it amounts to an appeal to one of the most dearly-held big media assumptions - that partisanship is always the problem and bipartisanship always the answer. In this view (reiterated, predictably, in today’s David Broder column, which blames both Congress and the White House for the government’s lack of credibility in the crisis) grand bipartisan gestures - bringing everyone together to solve the nation’s problems - are the way out of gridlock. Making these gestures is a sign of true leadership. Needless to say, this is a highly symbolic and unrealistic approach in a political landscape largely shaped by partisan Republican policies.

The McCain campaign tried to exploit the media’s tendency to seek out false equivalencies in fact-checking its ads and rhetoric. When that didn’t work so well, it attacked the media. Now it’s betting on another political media tic, the yearning for a kind of bipartisan utopia. Will it work?

 

September 23, 2008

The newspaper-less city

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The Newark Star-Ledger’s financial troubles are obviously profound. It’s a daily newspaper in a poor, chronically troubled city - what more do you need to know? But things took a truly alarming turn when the Star-Ledger’s owner, Newhouse-owned Advance Publications, announced in July it would either sell or shut down the paper if it didn’t achieve the cutbacks it deemed necessary through buyouts and significant union concessions. This week, the Newhouses reiterated that they’re dead serious:

Is it a negotiation tactic, or real?

That’s what Media Mob asked Advance publications president Donald Newhouse today regarding the memo that Star-Ledger publisher George Arwady sent out to staff saying that if a drivers union didn’t agree to a new contract, the paper would be in danger of closing.

“That’s what we’ve told our employees and we do not bluff or lie,” he responded.

This is one scary game of chicken. It’s not clear there is a potential buyer for the Star-Ledger, so there is a not-insignificant chance the venerable paper - Tony Soprano’s paper! - may be shuttered come January. Of course, if I had to put money on it, I’d bet that it won’t come to pass - the unions will make concessions, or a buyer will come forward - or perhaps the Newhouses are, in fact, bluffing.

But the closure scenario is extraordinary. Through endless rounds of newspaper downsizing, it still seemed unthinkable that a major daily would actually shut down. No longer. And ponder the implications of a newspaper-less city. Dailies are part of the civic glue that make American cities …. American. They hold institutions accountable. They provide essential information about what’s happening in the business, arts and NGO communities, and the city’s connection to the state government and Washington. Their columnists, if they’re good, can become a voice for the city itself. Without all that, what happens?

Does Newark even have an alt-weekly? Not according to these lists. That means just local TV, radio - and bloggers - regularly covering the city council, the mayor, and agencies in a city of 300,000. And that doesn’t include the sprawling suburban areas also in the S-L’s circulation area that would also lose coverage - and an important source of local information. Many have their own local papers, but most of those don’t have the regional perspective of a major daily.

With a deep recession looming, things are going to keep getting worse for the newspaper industry. Even if the Star-Ledger stays afloat (and surely the Newhouses don’t want to be the first owners to kill a major American daily), other papers may well go under in the coming months and years. And we’ll have to think harder about the implications of the newspaper-less city.

 

September 22, 2008

Lost credibility in government and the media

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Expanding on one point in my Prospect piece:

The faux-objective style of the traditional newspaper is increasingly useless in a political landscape in which spin has leeched from campaigns into every aspect of politics and policy. The result: the prestige beats in Washington — campaigns and the White House — are increasingly detached from reality. The coverage tends to be impressionistic and insidery, a weird mash-up of Maureen Dowd, Karl Rove, Drudge, and cable news. And it has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day concerns of most people or the functioning of government itself.

It’s obvious to anyone watching cable that campaign coverage is its own universe, operating by its own internal rules, obsessed most of the time with hour-by-hour tactical advantage and hot-button cultural trivia. Not even hot button issues that matter, like abortion or affirmative action or the place of religion in the public square, but questions like Obama’s lipstick-on-a-pig comment. But has this same trend also shaped coverage of the White House and other more substantive government beats? I’d say yes.

With the Clinton psychodramas, one man’s personal failings became the stuff of right-wing obsession, and an impeachment effort that ignored the more judicious views of the public. The Drudge era began, and the media realized there was a reliable source of ratings gold in the mashup of the trivial and the presidential.

Later, with the runup the Iraq war, most of the media fell in line behind a series of spurious ideas: that Saddam Hussein was a strategic threat to the United States, that he had WMDs and was ready to use them, and that Rumsfeld, who deplored nation-building, could successfully manage the invasion’s aftermath. Meanwhile, as the Bush administration actively sought to delegitimize the “media filter” and pursued various radical projects - torture, the unitary executive, the surveillance state - the media reacted with caution and uncertainty. (There are, of course, exceptions to this - McClatchy, or the Gellman/Becker Cheney series, now a book.)

In a nutshell, both political institutions and media institutions behaved very badly, and neither has really recognized the problem, let alone done much work to acknowledge and recover from the inevitable loss of credibility. Most of the traditional media - the big papers, the networks - still go about their business as if they were still institutions commanding unparalleled respect and credibility, in part because they believe they are covering institutions that also have unparalleled respect and credibility. Today, after Iraq, Katrina, and the banking debacle, they don’t. You can sense this dissonance in many newspaper stories on the White House, which are infused with a kind of awe and written in the staid language of a bygone era.

 

September 19, 2008

Farewell to the newspaper Washington bureau

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I have a piece up on the American Prospect site on the demise of a venerable institution: the newspaper Washington bureau. I’ve read a lot of these pieces, which invariably lament the passing of an era, the threat to democracy, the human capital sucked out of the journalism world. All true. The problem is, though, that we’ve known for some time now that the traditional newspaper structure, including the Washington bureau, is doomed. Newspapers should have started thinking about this a decade ago, when the technology became available to blog, to post various forms of digital content, to tap into social networking. But they didn’t. Instead, they hung on, hoping to ride out the changes.

Meanwhile, the whole political-media ecosystem was buffeted by various political/social events. The Bush administration treated it with contempt. Cable news and Drudge drove political coverage, rewarding fluff and cultural hot buttons over the actual business of government.

The result: the whole Washington media infrastructure - bureaus, beats, and Broders - is in upheaval. What will replace it? A fascinating question.

 

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