Some of the issues I have with David Weinberger's "Everything Is Miscellaneous" are underscored in newspaper and Internet coverage of Heath Ledger.
In Chapter 7, "Social Knowing" Weinberger nods to the famous images of newspaper journalists gathered at what we call the budget meeting. That's where the fancy editors assign stories to a specific, first order place in the print version of the newspaper. Weinberger graciously mentions that social tagging sites like Digg allow anyone the possibility of letting readers become their own editorial board, their own insider's network of news. More on that in a moment.
Then, he proceeds to write: "Not all of these sites will survive...But some will survive and others will arise, because enabling groups of readers to influence one another's front pages not only brings us more relevant information, it also binds groups socially." (The italics are my emphasis.)
So, if I'm reading this right, if a story is popular to the users on these sites, then it's relevant. And that relevance helps bind people. This is counterintuitive to everything news stands for, everything news is and it grates my nerves to read it more than once.
The first problem I have with this theory is that it only works with feature stories. You know, stuff about jogging, think pieces about whether women will vote for Hillary Clinton or blacks will choose Obama. Pieces like these can bind people, because they can talk about their opinions, their habits, as they relate to the piece.
It does not work with news, something like Heath Ledger's death, for instance, which is based on facts.
When Heath Ledger was found dead in his apartment, a blog "broke the story": Essentially, because someone posted the suspicion of a rumor, they wanted credit for getting the story first. That's problematic in and of itself, but it was later only relevant in my opinion, because the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers followed up in the first order world of news gathering -- the time consuming work of being an "expert": by calling the police station, going to the scene to talk to possible witnesses, etc.
"If it bleeds, it leads" is true both in print and on the web -- the main difference is whether or not Ledger died from an overdose, which is implied based on hearsay, versus what the Medical Examiner in New York City will have to say when he releases the cause of death.
I'm not sure Weinberger understands or thoroughly encapsulates the problem of integrating the first, second and third order across platforms as it relates to time-sensitive information. Maybe this is in Chapter 10, but he has yet to give any good recommendations for navigating the first order world we are all used to -- one that exists parallel and in the media environment, in direct competition with, the third order.
News is a peculiar kind of information in the sense that its value seems to decrease as the news is disseminated. (Some of those men in the interior room might argue that the Internet has caused the massive layoffs that have occurred at most print publications in recent years.) Blogs, TMZ, RSS feeds, citizen journalists, list-servs. I'm happy to know that Weinberger believes that they bind us in some ways, and I know that's true because I love to share some articles with friends all over the world and hear their opinions about that work.
But all of my primary sources exist first in print, or they are from print-based media. I did not, for instance, believe that Heath Ledger was found dead until I read in it a print source. Why? Because I know that if it made the front page of a newspaper, or even a newspaper site, I could at least be sure that they followed some sort of protocol to report the Ledger's death authoritatively. Not based on something someone heard --widely known as gossip -- which may be popular but untrue.
I'm not sure if this is because I'm entrenched in the first order world of fuddy-duddy newspapers or if it is because I can appreciate social knowing on a deeper level than just someone's blog on a page that I hardly ever read because I'm not sure where they're getting their information.
Some say that journalists are jacks (or jills) of all trades, masters of none. But that isn't necessarily the case when it comes to organizing information in a uniform way -- according to the inverted pyramid, which in the third order, may not be any kind of way at all, with the news first and the story getting less newsy as a reader follows the column to the bottom of the page.
What will this look like when newspapers are no longer printed on newsprint, and how will a new model conform to users' expectations for how they find out new information? Now, news has become miscellaneous, but only partially, because TV sites and Google and other web sources rely on newspapers as gossip-vetting authorities -- even as they try to take credit for "breaking news."
As for allowing people to decide what is most relevant based on the popularity of a news story, if journalists cannot remain gatekeepers or experts when it comes to evaluating and explaining -- through placement, headlines and metadata that changes based on whether the story is in print form or online, what will that mean for what is considered news in decades to come? Who will become the authority, the source that not only knows that other people have read the story, and like the story enough to display it on their virtual front page, but the source who can say, "I know all of that is accurate"?
2 comments:
Good post. Here's a counterpoint:
It appears that you are mistaking solid journalistic ethics with lack of an agenda. Every blog has an agenda, sure. For many of them, it's breaking news stories in attempts to become popular, usually with the intent to increase ad revenue. (Whether Heath Ledger's death can actually be considered "news" is another argument entirely.) Every newspaper editorial board has agendas of their own as well. There's nothing wrong with this. I would distrust more the paper that claimed not to have one than the other way around. But it worries me when the people who make the agendas are so few and far between. The old men in the interior room wield enormous power, and the fact that most major cities now have only one daily increases that power exponentially. But those old men are just that: men. As fallible as the rest of us. (The fact that many of them lament their lot and place the blame at the feet of the blogs just presses home my point: that is naivety in extremis.)
You're right to lament the lack of ethics in journalism today. It depresses me greatly to see all of the TV news shows report every rumor they hear. Newspapers should continue to report the facts. But there is no reason that the editorial boards of the few remaining dailies should determine what's important at the expense of the opinions of the rest of us. In this respect, the blogs have a very important role: they represent competition for the dailies. Competition via "printed" news is something most dailies haven't had for years. Are the blogs as factually accurate as the dailies? Probably not. Do they have advantages over the dailies? Certainly. They can get the news out much, much more quickly than the newspapers. And if people latch on to one story or another via the blogs, is this such a bad thing? If anything, I think this would help the dailies know what their readers are interested in. If I'm an editor on the fence about which of two stories to run, why not look at which story is getting more blog hits? (After all, newspapers have to keep up ad revenue via circulation too.) The way for newspapers to continue to compete with blogs isn't to bitch about how blogs are killing the business, or how people aren't smart enough to know what they need to know. Instead, newspapers should redouble their efforts to be accurate. Don't run rumors. Get all the facts. Don't report blurbs, tell whole stories. This will distinguish them. If this is important to people, the papers will flourish (whether digitally or in print.) If these things aren't important to people, then the newspapers die off.
Thanks, Doug, for your thorough assessment of newspapers vs. blogs.
I'm not sure I agree with you that I'm mistaking journalistic ethics with the lack of an agenda, though. I say that particularly because blogs are attractive to people in part, because they allow people to be opinionated, to have their own voices, in ways that newspapers do not. Of course, newspapers have their own agenda, but journalists tend not to work for money or fame -- that era is clearly over -- but in order to strive for neutrality and objectivity. It may be impossible for any of us to truly be neutral/objective, but the reason we strive for it is because truth is ultimately objective, right? Something's either true or it isn't. People can push their agenda on it, but truth remains truth.
I never said that editorial boards should determine what's important to us -- ultimately, what the most people pay attention to is what determines what society thinks is important; and I agree that that has some element of relevance. But I also feel like we run the risk of excluding popular information that is not as sexy as death, drugs and mayhem from the masses without any kind of filter to shield them from overload.
By the way, I still don't think that blogs can compete with dailies when it comes to reporting facts unless there comes a time when bloggers embrace the nature of structure when it comes to reporting. The 'Net makes people crazy when it comes to jumping on what they consider breaking news: I'm guilty of it, when I contribute to the news blog at the Statesman at times. Because now we are not only required to get the facts, get them right, get them fast and get them first, but we are also asked to get them 100 percent right, lest we be compared to gossip bloggers who tout the fact that they don't have anyone telling them how to write without explaining that they also don't have anyone telling them how to be better bloggers.
I also want to be clear that I never said that people aren't smart enough to know what they want to know. My point was that in a miscellaneous world, people may drown in information and instead of sorting through it to get to information that could be most useful and also, accurate, they might just go with useful. I simply wonder what the consequences of that behavior would be.
And, I should say, our newspaper has about 80 blogs. So, I don't think we're bitching about how blogs are undermining the dailies.
But this does underscore the inability of the newspaper business and other traditional journalism outlets to integrate this third order of information across platforms -- we still don't know how to blog the way most people do : with voice, and with photos and links. We are clinging to the first order, trying to do third order things.
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