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September 28, 2009

A Building Theme In Media

David Carr double dips today, with his regular Monday media column and a bit in NYT's Media Decoder blog. Both entries into The Conversation strike me as being of a kind...

From the column, about moguls - "Some of the blame falls at the feet of those of us who walk around with notebooks. We love new, we love sexy, and we are all about the moguls and the grand pronouncements and tend not to worry so much about performance."

From the blog entry, about Twittering journos - "Every time a reporter hits send, he or she might do the following exercise: How would I feel if my mother and/or my boss read this? Because they well might, along with the legions of folks who sit, like crows on a wire, looking for any wiggle or wobble from media outlets they regard with suspicion in the first place. There will be stumbles and missteps on the way to a hybrid future, but if you can’t trust the women and men who put out your newspaper to use their keyboards wisely regardless of platform, what are they doing working for you?"

Carr, who is one of the few writers in Traditional Media who is daring enough to be publicly reflective on his own profession and not just the bosses, came to both quotes from different angles. The first is a legitimate sour note about how media gets blinded by The New. The second is actually a kind of push back against what he seems to see as overly aggressive restrictions being put on reporters in their presumably private Social Media lives and a lack of trust by The Bosses.

To be balanced, Carr really gets the Twitter thing, noting, "Lots of us who work for mainstream outlets thought we dug our own route to the ocean when we opened up Twitter accounts, but surely a big part of the reason that anyone follows us is precisely because of those day jobs."

And that is what is most interesting to me about both pieces... one speaks to a factor as old as media itself - reporters love sexy, even if it doesn't leas to good reporting - and the second speaks specifically to the new web universe and the challenges of the reporter/private person line getting blurred more than ever. But both speak to a big question that reporters - especially Old Media reporters who are still angrily trying to adapt to New Media - do not like to discuss in public. ("The first rule of Journalism Club is...")

Journalists are people, not a journalistic ideal. Ego, ambition, and self-pleasuring overwhelm good journalism all the time.

And the gaping suction of New Media - imagine the shell of a space ship being pierced and everything being sucked out into deep space - is exposing this relentlessly. Traditional Media writers are suddenly faced with what web-based writers have dealt with for years... everything placed on the web is content FOREVER. And comment on content becomes content as well.

Ten years ago, David Carr could write his fine book, Night Of The Gun, and then travel to Columbia the next summer. And when someone at NYT was having a third martini at some clever midtown bar, one colleague would joke to another about the former addict biking through the home of his earlier addiction. Chin chin. Thanks to Twitter, not only does The World know what David's vacation plans were, but there was a public discussion had by people who don't know David, and who have no vested interest in David's feelings or future. It was not collegial. But it was not important either. It was just more grist for the mill. And it all happened within hours.

Innocent enough.

But what about - as has been the issue with Twittering around some papers' writers - social and political issues being published for all the world to see?

Does it really matter - assuming that a reporter is not twittering about the stories she/he is working on - what a reporting thinks personally... what their experiences are?

Well... yes. It is the great lie of journalism that it is always impersonal. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is just doing the job, man. But when you work a beat for a while, you develop opinions. And those are often on view in the subtext of stories.

How do journalists and the world of people and institutions that journalists cover respond to this reality? How does reader awareness of this reality factor in to how they read stories?

Wrapping it up with a bow, this speaks to a theme as old as my life on the web... who is served by unlimited access to content, opinion, and mostly, process? How do outlets - which include both The New York Times and Movie City News - that are in the business of gathering all of the content, reported in-house and by other, deal with the explosion of content that now includes process and in response, all the commentary on that process?

The are important advantages to NOT being a celebrity reporter. There are important advantages to being THE NEW YORK TIMES and not some dude we know so well that we doubt things that should not be doubted... or conversely, never doubt things that should be doubted.

Carr has become iconic. Deservedly. He is a columnist, though he columns (new verb du jour) using reporting tools. But that's a different animal.

I am not saying that process means nothing. But I am saying - and have been screaming for years - that process done in public is a HORRIBLE idea and one of the worst things to come of the internet. If something fails or succeeds, please, feel free to deconstruct. Journalists used to hold information until it was relevant to a complete story. It was not unusual to not report every little thing that made it into your notebook. But now... fuggedaboudit. Info goes down the gullet and gets shat out onto the web faster than shit through a goose... no context... no relevance... no importance... just crap that mucks up the system.

And the system responds by sealing the windows and doors even tighter to keep even meaningless nothings that they would never have worried about a few years ago into becoming media spin-art.

The result, no matter how much more content there is, is less content of substance.

And, in an all too complicated, murky way, the two Carr pieces speak to this. A big part of printing what's "sexy" is that it is actually easy because almost every one of those stories is spoon fed, not dug out or heavily reported on facts. And Twitter? It shreds the veil. And the more up-close-and-personal we are with reporters, the less authoritative the work.

Posted by dpoland at September 28, 2009 01:02 PM

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Posted by: Crow T Robot at September 28, 2009 03:10 PM

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