ON MEDIA: Mark Day | April 03, 2008
WHEN it comes to (if I may borrow a Ruddism) navel-gazing introspection, no one does it better than the Americans.
They love to trawl through the minutiae of survey numbers, wrestle with old tech-new tech conundrums and come up with startling conclusions, such as: "The constantly evolving media landscape has created both challenges and opportunities for today's journalists." Whoever would have thought it?The Yanks tend to take their journalism seriously and their serious journalism very seriously indeed. Much discussion in the US at present centres on the task ahead for The Wall Street Journal as it seeks to broaden its horizons, as outlined in Media last week by its new chief executive, Les Hinton.
Hinton's job is to add significant new levels of political, lifestyle and general news coverage to broaden the appeal of the WSJ without offending its core readership attracted by its specialist financial information.
How? "By making it readable," says Hinton. "By making it interesting. By covering the news."
Now there's a novel thought. Trawling through a variety of US websites this week, I was struck by the amount of navel-gazing going on.
PR Week reports on its 2008 media survey in a 3200-word opus that begins with the "challenges and opportunities" finding quoted above. In many ways this report resembles the kind of turgid detail that makes reading US newspapers such an underwhelming experience: acres of grey type that makes the reader work hard, sifting for the few interesting facts that should have been honed, polished and presented as brightly shining gems of information.
The survey summary says the use of the web to disseminate news has created a need for journalists to file stories faster and more frequently, and has spawned a new form of communication through blogging. There are some problems here: faster means more open to error, and blogging means more open to opinion and bias. Journalists are working harder and longer and are being required to learn new technical skills, such as operating a movie camera or working in the internet HTML language.
The survey also confirmed a significant change in the way journalists find stories. Once, we used to joke, we found them by talking to people in bars; today, according to the survey, journalists acquire information from a variety of electronically accessible sources such as company websites (89 per cent), Google (74 per cent), press releases (72per cent), and personal emails from a PR person (70 per cent.)
Well, it is a PR Week survey, so perhaps we would be more surprised if anyone mentioned the old-fashioned idea of getting out of the office to talk to people.
Meanwhile, at the San Francisco Chronicle, former editor Phil Bronstein has taken up a new role with the paper's parent company, Hearst, one that will require him, among other things, to come up with finding ways to keep the news business viable when most people have classified it as a dying industry. "How (does) it need to change?" Bronstein asks, then answers himself: "Anybody who tells you they have the answer to that question, or the answer to the question 'What's the successful business model for journalism?', is lying to you because no one has it."
To underline his view about the future of his industry, he adds: "Newspapers are not viable in their current mode." It makes you wonder why anyone with that mindset would be asked to come up with a plan to reinvigorate the sector.
On his MediaShift website journalism critic and new media expert Mark Glaser lists what he calls the seven new rules of journalism. They include:
* "The audience knows more than the journalist", subtitled "news is a conversation, not a lecture". This means the writer is no longer the font of all knowledge and that anything published can be improved by the injection of further information supplied by readers. This presents the notion that news writing is part of an evolving process. In the old days we'd call it "doing a follow-up".
* "People are in control of their media experience." Personal recorders, iPods and the like mean we are no longer slaves of programmers, but by no longer sharing a simultaneous watching experience we lessen the value of "water cooler" conversations.
* "Amateur and professional journalists should work together." Glaser says bloggers and newspaper reporters used to be at loggerheads, but each can learn from the other: newspapers embracing "incremental journalism" while bloggers discover fairness and ethical standards.
There are other rules under headings such as "Traditional media must evolve or die", "despite censorship the story will get out", "anyone can be a media creator or remixer", and "journalists need to be multi platform."
I don't disagree with much of what Glaser says, but I raise my eyebrows at what is not said. A sin of omission, if you like.
Nowhere could I find a reference to the need for stories to be well told. The most fundamental thing we do is tell stories. Some are instant accounts of history as it is being made in the mould of: "Where were you when the twin towers collapsed?" Others relive people's personal or shared history, such as the stories of the families left behind after the sinking of the Sydney.
Reporting is much more than the listing of relevant details in a descending order of importance, a style that typifies much of the US newspaper diet. It should be compelling; it should attract the reader with an easily understood proposition, then tell the yarn concisely, with vigour and, if called for, a bit of wit. And it's all the better if the human dimensions are clearly framed, a way of enlivening even the most dull political or business yarns.
This does not mean the pudding needs to be over-egged or beaten up but it does mean reporters should strive to give their work some human colour, life and context.
Like every other practitioner and-or crystal ball gazer, I have no certainty about future forms of media, but I firmly believe the survival and growth of journalism does not depend on technology or new and different methods of delivery.
A rattling good yarn is a rattling good yarn whether it is created by quill pen, typewriter or computer and regardless of whether it is delivered on printed paper, by electronic transfer, by broadcast television or radio, or on the back of a tram ticket.
Technology details involving methods of delivery can induce much brow-knitting, but how the story gets to you and the form in which it arrives is ultimately irrelevant.
Today, as it ever was, content is king, and well-made content will prevail over turgid crap every time.
mday@ozemail.com.au