Reporting that can be lost

This past week my ENGL004 class took a look at Gary Kamiya's "The Death of the News." In it, Kamiya takes on the now "old news" (to steal the aptly bad pun) that the newspaper/print media world is dying, but he does so from a slightly different angle, saying,

What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.

And so when Kamiya aptly says, "If newspapers die, so does reporting," we're left with a scary thought, or are we?

It's no lie that here in the logorrheaic mire of my mindspace that Kamiya's threat of an anti-reporting distopia becoming "a postmodern world right out of a seminar taught by Jaques Derrida...[where] Nietsche's credo that 'there are no facts, only interpretations' will become our epistemological motto" is one that I would whole-heartedly embrace simply for the sheer interest such an plural version of our reality would bring to me. But then again, good god it'd be hell to win an argument.

But I digress,
Kamiya says that newspapers and reporting are intrinsically linked. And to that I agree, but Kamiya is a professional, a journalist, and someone who knows the industry from the inside. His definition of a reporter is one that is perhaps too specific for "real" world application.

On the beat, reporters to all us gloamish nodes can range from true newspaper journalists in all their monochromatic glory to the tv pundits that irk Michale Lind so much (mentioned in my last entry here). So while Kamiya may be on to something, he's fighting the good fight.

I don't fight the good fight. And I don't think all reporters need saved. Newspapers aside, there's some sneaking shit that needs a severe kai-bosh. And what irks me the most (for the moment) is this whole process of growing speculative journalism.

Let me set the stage.
Wednesday, I turned on NBC to watch the State of the Union at about a quarter after eight, mainly because I couldn't remember if Obama's speech started at eight or nine. I was greeted with a craptacular "pre-game" show for the president's speech. I know this has been going on for a while, but what the fuck? Have we as a population become so incredibly bored that we don't even want to watch some shitty syndicated sitcom from the 90s until the State of the Union comes on? Couldn't NBC find something, maybe the Slap-Chop infomercial to air before Obama took the stage?

Yes, I could have changed the channel. But in my defense, I was only half listening (thank god for that), and I was chasing my daughter, so by not changing the channel, I could keep a lazy eye in the direction for the speech to commence whenever that was supposed to happen.

In my half listening, whatever hack journalist/pundit/guest/whatever happened to be talking began to go into this analysis of Obama's speech before it aired. Now, everything I've ever learned about cutting someone down revolves around the idea that you at least let the person you're attacking get an opportunity to make an ass of himself first.

Instead, I heard this jerkoff pundit going on and on about how Obama's speech is too long, and how the American public does not have an attention span for anything beyond 40 minutes or so. Now, without having seen the speech, which I'm guessing this guy hadn't (I'm sure the president had to release the timing so the networks could set up their scheduling, but I can't see why he'd say a whole lot else about it), how can anyone speculate on whether or not the speech will hold the collective attention of the country? Especially when Obama is relatively well-known for his ability to actually speak in front of an audience (unlike his predecessor). Secondly, the lesser masses of our country, upon hearing that 1. the speech is long and 2. they can't stand listening to something that long are going to take this guy (who has to be both smart and correct because he's on TV) as being generally correct, and thus tune out to the State of the Union.

This is a huge disservice to the American Public. Not only is it advertising a subversive bias against Obama and his agenda, but also it's undercutting our population as being both ignorant and too stupid to be able to make our own decisions.

This sort of journalistic speculation, of course, isn't limited to just the State of the Union; it happens all the time. Think about it. How many times have you heard reporters saying something like "President Obama is expected to announce X, today?" No harm in that. It's objective, and newsworthy, but often what follows is speculation on how whatever X may be will affect us. This, while perhaps ok for some talk show, isn't news.

But that's kind of the problem anymore, isn't it?

The news (on TV at least) has morphed into this monster, where every fact must be vetted through an unacknowledged bias before fed back to us. Can you imagine turning to any news network and seeing only objective stories for more than 15 minutes? Oh wait...that's CSPAN. But no one watches CSPAN.

So as I'm rambling here, let me cull things down to a single point: Kamiya wants to save reporting, but we need to make some distinctions, because the speculative crap on TV is some of that bathwater that needs thrown out. It's like a parasitic Siamese twin to real reporting...you know one of those things that's nothing but a heart, an empty brain case with teeth, no eyes, and a whole lot of hair growing inside your stomach like you're pregnant, but it's your twin, and it's eating you.

But perhaps, thinking back on Kamiya's argument, this is exactly why he he fears for the loss of the real journalists. The newspaper doesn't allow for this kind of inane speculation, as newspapers are generally behind the times, reporting on past events. Their analysis then can be based on objectivity, on some sort of traceable facts.

But it sure would be nice to turn on the State of the Union and not, even if you're half-paying attention, have to hear some jerkoff droning on about how much the upcoming speech is going to suck without any real proof to back it up.

And the speech? Obama's a charmer. I'd be real happy to see just about everything he said happen. But I'm jaded to. We need more than two parties to get any real change in government. I'm looking forward to some good times ahead, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Partisan Rant and Why Paywalls Suck

Backstory

Back around Thanksgiving, right when I was starting to plan out this class theme of News and the Age of Information, I remember hearing that Rupert Murdoch wanted to delist all of News Corporation's holdings from Google and put them behind some kind of paywall. To which I immediately said, "Awesome. If that keeps Joe Average from reading [un]Fair and [un]Balanced Fox News on teh Intarnets, score one for the world.

And before everyone goes off the handle calling me a pinko leftist commie, lemme say this: While I may disapprove of most conservative politics, I have no problem with conservatives. I DO however have a big problem with partisan news labeling itself "Fair and Balanced." You can't be fair and balanced and push a Republican agenda at the same time. And this is a long standing problem (dating back to Walter Lippmann's journalistic revolutions in the 1920s) with news media--they claim objectivity, but party politics always sneak in. My advise: broadcast your bias, and be proud of it; let the readers decide whether you're right or not. Hiding behind a mask of objectivity makes you look like a douchebag when someone (like George Carlin on O'Reilly) calls you on it.

On an increasingly off-topic parallel, Michael Lind posted this about the growing problem of political media pundits on cable news. His problem: "Most of the representatives of progressivism you see on TV are not really progressives. They are what might be called 'Democratists.' Most publicly prominent conservatives are not principled conservatives at all. They are 'Republicanists.' With the problem being more or less not the political spin, but rather the fact that these pundits spend their time defending their respective parties' actions, rather than actually preaching/believing/acting according to their political affiliation.

So perhaps moreso than a lack of journalistic responsibility in being forthright with your political bias, perhaps the pundits, as described by Lind, are the real downfall in newsmedia.

But I Digress

All of News Corp's holdings haven't yet fallen behind the paywall scheme kicked around by Murdoch in November (though the Wall Street Journal is already there). So for the time being, we can still celebrate the relative freedom as net surfers to choose just about any media-outlet-online-news-poison we want. But, as of Monday, this News Corp talk of Paywalls seems to be a growing fad. I caught this article in the New York Magazine about the good old New York Times starting to reconsider its current situation and undo the free state of the newspaper that's existed since 2005 when they realized no one wanted to pay for electronic subscription (the 2005, sorry, charging you was a bad idea letter to the readers is here). So here's their reasoning:

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."

While I understand the need for any business to want to push forward, turn a profit, and stick around, I have a hard time buying into the idea that some sort of "metered system [similar to the one] adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe" is the way to go.

When I search for news online, I like to browse headlines. Some days I won't get much deeper than headlines, others, I'll drill through several articles. The second that some form of paywall stops me, I'm gone. News isn't that important for me to buy an account--especially when I know that I can probably find something similar elsewhere, or as a last resort, use my university account to pull it out of a newspaper database from the school's library site. While every news source will have a different take on the news, there are certainly enough out there that are still free. Drop one behind a paywall, and another online paper that's free gets a spike in traffic. I see Salon, Huffington Post, Smoking Gun, and The Drudge Report all making out like kings from this.

Sharing is Caring

One of the big cornerstones of the net today is the ability to share. Almost every site of any import has connectivity links to all major social media outlets (facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), in addition to aggregators like Digg. If you block something behind a paywall, you just shut down all the additional traffic you're netting through social media. Why throw away potential readers? That sounds suspiciously like something Verizon would do (damn the customers, damn the employees, worship the profits).

However, all my whining and reactionary thinking against this paywall idea will mean nothing short of ranting unless I offer something up to remedy the situation. One of the best things I learned about whining is that people tend to accept your whining a little more if you try to pair your problem up with a solution. Back in my Verizon days, it united our department, when my boss made us carry around little notebooks that said "issues" on one side and "resolutions" on the other. We couldn't bitch word one until we had thought up some sort of resolution to the problem we had. But with resolution in hand, we had the floor. So, I've gone on and bitched for several paragraphs about this whole paywall idea. Here's my solution: If you want to generate revenue of some sort off of your online news content, and somehow advertising isn't cutting it, take a note from the music industry (and I don't mean those assholes over in the RIAA. I mean NIN, Radiohead, Madonna, Oasis, and all the other musicians who've cut their record company ties and gone solo), and put up a tip jar. When In Rainbows came out in 2007, Wired.com estimated that Radiohead pulled in as much as $10M on their CD, where they allowed fans to set their own price for the album (Van Buskirk). (I payed £10 for my copy, btw.). In any event, letting users contribute what they can when they can, still generates revenue, but it also generates respect and follows along with the sense of "giving back" (isn't that one of the great buzz words of the times?) to something you believe in. Sure, you won't be raking in bucketloads of cash, but for intangible content that people can already get for free, what more can you ask for than a tip?

New York Times, you have some good content. I've used your articles before in essays, but if you ask me to pay, I'll go away, and I won't be the one crying the river. I still have my Slashdot, BBC, and Salon (which I did start reading more regularly as opposed to what my last blog entry said [at the very least, I put its headlines on my iGoogle homepage]).

Somewhere off the Face of the earth

So in Early December, I posted here saying that I won at teh NaNoWriMo. And since then, it's been pretty quiet here on this blog. Sorry about that.

Call it a New Years Resolution, or perhaps a Interesting-challenge-because-it's-also-an-assignment, but my goal is to blog weekly for the next fifteen weeks in hopes that I get back into a more regular swing in updating the currently lacking ramblesnatch in this pitiful blog's existence.

Either way,

Here't Goes:

Between watching my now thoroughly insane (as in Holy-shit-kids-have-way-too-much-energy-and-why-can't-I-have-a-tenth-of-that insane) daughter sugar herself up into a Christmas frenzy (the first such frenzy [being the first year she was cognizant of holiday fun] of several impending frenzies, I'm sure), and trying to ease the discomfort of Sue's pregnancy (apparently all boys are Assholes [my term not hers] in the womb--I'm sorry mom), and revising the Shadowman project (I finished a solid pass just this past week -- W00t), I've been talking and thinking and prepping for classes, which started yesterday. (I just realized: In the above I listed a bunch of stuff, but not anything about work. It was there too; but that's the ignorable bit; it's like sleep, I guess--an interim between the other, more important stuff. Not that work is bad like it was in the Verizon days, but thankfully and blissfully, contracting has been relatively stress free, and thus totally ignorable like the fifth child out of six).

This time around I've picked up two, a Rhetoric and Comp and a Basic Writing. And it is because of the Basic Writing Course that I'm challenging myself to blog regularly, because that's exactly what they'll be doing. Specifically, I've beet talking to my friend Grace a lot about various topics related to my course themes. Most of our discussions have revolved around a mutual dislike towards Facebook (which started out with Grace mocking me for joining fb back in June or July, and ended with Grace saying "see I told you it was Evil" when I quit in early December). We've also spent a goodly amount of time talking about newsmedia and the current shift that's starting to happen between print and online content.

Personally, I never read a newspaper. I've always found them boring, and the size, formatting and layout annoys me, not to mention the cost. However, slashdot, Google News, and for a good long time BBC news have all replaced any sort of need for reading traditional newspapers. Granted, I'd like to pick up some more sources; in researching essays for class, I've found that online content on Salon, The Atlantic, and a couple other places is really top notch. But I am the king of taking on too much, so while I have good intentions, I don't really foresee my news reading circle expanding much (especially in the face of how much I've been lagging in reading fiction).

So with that said, I think online news is the way to go. I'm sure I'll cover my take on the whole Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation vs. Google bit here soon, probably next week, but I think print journalism is dying, and no one is really going to miss it. While I sit far enough into the tail end of Generation X to not fully understand the usefulness and ubiquity of Twitter and Social networking (perhaps because I'm just not that social--I like my cave, and I don't like to leave it), but I do think that them kids with their cellphones and twitter feeds will be getting most of their news from that. With each successive generation we become more attuned to multi-tasking. And as that becomes more of a necessity, doing things like sitting down to read the paper will become increasingly preposterous. More likely, we'll catch a bit of news in a deadspot between text messages, while waiting in traffic on the road, or have it shipped to us, pre-filtered and set up to our desires via Twitter, RSS and all that other fun Web 2.0 stuff that makes teh Intarnets useful to us.