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Blogging cuts out the middleman for journalists who are used to working through one, two, even five editors before each story gets published. That simple thought gets right to the heart of the problem with the media industry: The news business is too concerned with control and not with content.
I'm certainly not knocking editing -- in fact, I live and breathe for finding a good mistake, which is why blogging can surely instigate my neurosis. I hope that more traditional editing for accuracy is given to blogs in the future. What I am criticizing is content control, or the endless need for editors and news organizations to control the information that people receive as if We the News Business are the omniscient voice. Blogging and user-generated content cuts some of that out.
As a new Nieman Report from Harvard University points out:
In generating story ideas, blogging journalists don't need someone to tell them who the readers are and what they want: They already know, because the readers are on their blogs, telling them who they are and what they're curious about. In this new blogging relationship, editors are the middlemen being cut out.
These past couple of years, I have struggled to understand why some people in the journalism world still seem skittish about jumping into the new user-generated universe of journalism. I used to think it was because old-school journalists just didn't have the skills. Now I realize that it's because they love the control of journalism -- perhaps it's an industry-wide narcissism. Editors and publishers leading the direction of content are especially wary of their dwindling degree of power over information.
It's as if we have all been operating on a stage, and suddenly the audience is taking over. This isn't about you anymore Journalism.
Recommended Media about the Media
You can't read news for more than 10 minutes without reading someone's revelations about the news media and whether it should undergo some sort of operation to go completely digital, or if it can exist for much longer with print chromosomes. Most observations are getting banal in fact. I do read 1,342 articles about the topic daily and here's who I would recommend: Virginia Heffernan (my claim to fame is that I once had the privilege of giving her a tour of Facebook when she was visiting my old newsroom), James Poniewozik (his magazine piece was headlined in the print version of TIME as "mediapocalypse," which will be in Merriam-Webster by 2010) and everything by Jeff Jarvis (if I had a nickel for how many times this guy has been quoted in every piece about new media, I could bail out the newspaper industry).
A key point in the whole discussion about the struggling media is that it needs to get out from behind the wheel and let the unquenchable thirst for news propel it forward. As Poniewozik writes, "The media business needs to see that the shovel it got whacked with -- the change in the way people communicate and the spreading of that power -- is not necessarily a weapon or a means to make our graves. It's just a tool. Time to start digging."
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Comments
01.12.09
Great post. This is a topic of great interest to me and I think you're right on target.
News agencies (especially newspapers) can't seem to let go of having control over what gets published. That will be their downfall. 21st Century media users expect to have a voice (and not just on the op-ed page.)
01.12.09
I agree. As a journalist, I can say that we can be such narcissists. I cannot count how many times I've turned on the news or read a story and asked myself "...and this is important, why?" Or even more, how many times I've debated with a co-worker over what people REALLY want to read. It wasn't until, as a consumer of the news, I grew weary of the sensationalization of this business that I realized the importance of letting every opinion be heard. (Well, not EVERY opinion, but I'm speaking in a general sense.) There's only so many times I can read about which puppy the Obamas will pick out for their daughters or watch Ann Coulter give some crazy edict about how 9/11 widows aren't really victims. Why does this kind of stuff get so much coverage? Because "we" in the We the News Business says so.
If all producers, writers, reporters, etc. acknowledged that any one with an idea can start a blog, the entire industry would have to admit that what used to make us so special--the ability to tell the news as we see it--is actually a universal endowment. But I, for one, think that's the way it should be.
01.15.09
Thanks for the comments about this! I'm glad others see what I mean.
@Brittany, I totally have had the same types of debates about what people want to read versus what we want them to read. I also agree with the narcissism comment. Unfortunately, blogging doesn't help that, because we do say "I" a lot ... But overall I agree with what you are saying about how moving towards a more blogging model would be good for the industry.
I am interested to see what happens going forward! I guess as a journalist I am trying to be patient and persistent. Meanwhile, I am trying to keep my own reporting fair as we transition into a new era of journalism. I guess that's all we can do!
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