The Political Whore

Today’s news that the South Florida Sun-Sentinel is killing its national/foreign desk and coverage caught my eye for a couple of personal reasons: I grew up in Fort Lauderdale; it was the largess of the pre-Tribune Co. Fort Lauderdale News (the now-defunct afternoon daily) that paid my way through college on a journalism scholarship; and the paper’s only national/international affairs reporter is a former Tampa Tribune colleague, Tim Collie.

Cutbacks in personnel or coverage are always a bad thing to see at any level of the media. We need more accurate, skeptical and courageous coverage, not less. But I’m especially troubled by something the paper’s publishers said, as quoted here:

“Today, we’re not in control. The customers are in control,” said Howard Greenberg, publisher of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

On one level, that seems a capitalistic truism; the market decides. What a paper covers is a function of supply and demand, meeting the point of equilibrium.

But journalism, real trained reporters and editors seeking out the truths that democracy needs to remain alive, isn’t — or at least shouldn’t — be treated like any other commodity, like a can of beans on the shelf. We’re the only commodity with a constitutional protection, and that little benefit carries with it some responsibilities that transcend the marketplace responsibilities.

Even more troubling about the idea that customers should dictate the content of newspapers is that we get awfully close to the troubling concept of collective decision-making, or the “hive mind,” that is already alive on much of the Internet. Better journalism will not come about by a popular vote of the masses; they’ve already spoken along those regards and like Fox News and Entertainment Tonight more than they will ever like international affairs coverage. The collective will “vote” not to seek the truth but to seek a point of equilibrium — in other words, not choosing what is true but the slant on the facts that they can live with, akin to the online collective mind displayed in Wikipedia or digg.

So what does all this abstract theory have to do with daily newspapers? It leads publishers to abandon their mission and hand over control to the collective mob. Don’t get me wrong; I am all for opening up the newsroom to more transparency, including more and different voices, changing our focus from the pseudo-objective he said-she said dichotomy, getting more aggressive and courageous in speaking truth to power. I like bloggers; they add to the richness of the community and provide interesting new ways of framing arguments or discussions. And I’m not saying don’t listen to your audience, since your primary responsibility is to them as citizens of the democracy.

But journalism (the act of finding new information and presenting it in readable and prove-ably believable ways to consumers) is not compatible with a collective, which will seek to impose the tyranny of the lowest-common denominator. Good journalism needs individual perspectives, human decision-makers, a real name attached to it that consumers can hold accountable. Unfortunately, that idea is losing out to aggregators such as Google News (which makes news decisions based on an algorithm) and meta-aggregators such as digg or reddit, where the online collective decides what is news and what is not.

Digital thinker and computer scientist Jaron Lanier writes of the danger of the online collective making news decisions, in a piece titled “Digital Maoism”:

Compounding the problem is that new business models for people who think and write have not appeared as quickly as we all hoped. Newspapers, for instance, are on the whole facing a grim decline as the Internet takes over the feeding of curious eyes that hover over morning coffee and even worse, classified ads. In the new environment, Google News is for the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the aggregated.

The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. (emphasis added) In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.

We’ve devalued the job of providing news. We’ve devalued the companies that do it. We’ve devalued, then, the information itself. Any wonder why one of digg’s top stories today from around the (English-speaking at least) world is about a dying boy who was voted homecoming king?

Is that kind of news going to keep W from invading Iran before the end of his term, or create any understanding in the public about whether Ahmedinejad is a real threat or not? Or explain the complicated nature of power in Iran.

Tim Collie could do all those. But the collective mind would probably vote against it and instead assign him to cover the No. 3 most popular digg story today.

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