Category Archives: Journalism

The struggles of a news civilian, cont’d: Three views on politics and tech news

Posted on April 21, 2012 | Comments Off on The struggles of a news civilian, cont’d: Three views on politics and tech news

My struggles as a news civilian largely fit into two categories:

First, as a civilian who lacks salary-supported info-consumption time, I struggle to get through the never-ending queue of smart/worthwhile/interesting news. And it feels like news soldiers, who do have that time and are otherwise consumed by info consumption, don’t understand that people outside the industry might be like me.

Second, there is also a never-ending queue of pointless/time-suck news, but many news organizations and journalists don’t distinguish worthwhile news from pointless news. (Or industry economics don’t allow them to distinguish the two.)

I’m not talking about TMZ and celebrity gossip. I’m talking about the extremely high percentage of “news” — from the AP, NPR’s daily news shows, tech news orgs, almost every news org that covers politics, etc. — that to the average person is literally trivia, as useful (and useless) to their everyday lives and thoughts as a game of Trivial Pursuit. As a news civilian, I don’t know why I’m supposed to care.

Because news orgs continue to shovel this trivia toward me without explaining why it’s important or rethinking whether they should be producing it, I grow to suspect and resent them and feel less bad about my lack of info-consumption time. Or I continue to waste time on this news  and grow to resent myself. Down that road lies some combination of info-numbness, self-hatred, and a (further) tuned-out citizenry.

Three recent blog posts illustrate my second struggle.

Here’s Brian Lam, in his awesome post about reducing “the overage of technology and noise” in our lives to increase happiness:

I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like “top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iphone” and “EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY.” And corporate news that only affects the 1%. Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don’t have time for this.

Ezra Klein, on the “tornado of idiocy that is American politics“:

“Most people don’t care about politics,” [UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck] said. “They’re not running around with these preformed opinions in their head. They worry about what they’ll make for dinner and how to get their kids to bed. And that hasn’t changed. For us, that’s an alien world. We think about politics all the time. But we’re not normal. The 24-hour news cycle has not really affected the average American who isn’t into politics. And that’s really important to remember.”

I think most people in Washington believe voters would make better decisions if they spent more time following politics. But I spend a lot of time following politics, and quite often, I couldn’t be happier that voters are tuning out the inanities that obsess this town.

And Om Malik, reflecting on recent news about tech executives changing jobs (via Alexis Madrigal’s awesome essay on app/tech stagnation):

Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts and often wonder to myself that have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

Something’s percolating here. Can anything be done about it on more than an individual level?

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Confessions of a news civilian

Posted on April 8, 2012 | 1 comment

I used to be a news soldier.

By day, I read dozens of news stories for my job as an editor. By night, I read dozens more for my then-current or assumed-future writing gigs, and for my perpetual gig as deputy assistant knowledge dilettante.

I read 90 percent of the Atlantic, New Republic, and New Yorker issues (front- and middle-of-the-book sections, at least) from 2002 to 2009. I religiously followed Talking Points Memo during the Bush years. Slate, video game blogs, why-am-I-still-reading-this runs of Rolling Stone — anything to fill my professionally and dopaminically mandated info quotas.

But I’m out of the game now. Been out for a couple of years1. I’m a news civilian. And I am lost.

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Data journalism needs to be more than external data sets

Posted on November 19, 2010 | 6 comments

Paul Bradshaw has a good column at Poynter about how the increasing availability of data will force journalists and news organizations to change:

Data journalism takes in a huge range of disciplines, from Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) and programming, to visualisation and statistics. If you are a journalist with a strength in one of those areas, you are currently exceptional. This cannot last for long: The industry will have to skill up, or it will have nothing left to sell. …

So on a commercial level, if nothing else, publishing will need to establish where the value lies in this new environment, and where new efficiencies can make journalism viable. Data journalism is one of those areas.

Journalists should read and heed everything Bradshaw writes. But it’s important to make sure the discussion of data doesn’t get too narrowly confined to external data, without considering how journalism itself fits holistically into the data-centric future.

The big challenge for news organizations isn’t just how to better ingest, analyze, and present extant external (if sometimes hard-to-access) data sets. Inculcating a new skill set industrywide may be non-trivial as a matter of scale and institutional-cultural inertia, but at least that skill set is pretty well defined.

Rather, the trickier and less-addressed challenge for news organizations is how to turn the raw materials and finished products of non-database journalism into data.

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How the Sunlight Foundation and PolitiFact can make ALL political coverage better

Posted on September 14, 2010 | Comments Off on How the Sunlight Foundation and PolitiFact can make ALL political coverage better

Today’s 2010 Knight-Batten Symposium gave me visions of political debates and speeches transformed from exercises in sound-bitery and emotion into civic lessons and conversations.

It gave me visions of political news stories that provide context not just about the issue at hand, but also context about the people at hand.

(Also, it gave me the vapors. But mostly just visions.)

Here’s one vision:

On TV, political debates display a fact-check tally for each candidate (how many true, truthy, lying-liar, etc. statements each candidate has made). Fact-check details about a particular statement are displayed as soon as they’re available.

No more useless meters showing allegedly uncommitted voters’ emotional reactions:

Instead, imagine if the debate screen looked like this (well, imagine a non-crappy-mockup version that looked vaguely like this):

Here’s another vision:

Online, any streamed speech, debate, or hearing displays a combination of fact-checking material, aggregated contextual material, real-time commentary and public reaction. Any story or video that mentions politicians displays some combination of:

  • Fact-checking details for that person’s recent statements (any of their statements and/or recent statements related to the story being viewed)
  • Campaign contributions to that person from individuals/organizations related to the story’s subject.
  • The candidate’s biggest contributors (individuals/organizations and industries).
  • Lobbying information for the person and/or their staffers
  • If in office, recent votes the person has taken related to the story’s subject.
  • Biographical information about the person.

Now here’s the great thing about these visions: The Sunlight Foundation and PolitiFact have pretty much already fulfilled them!

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In defense of the Pulitzer Prizes

Posted on April 13, 2010 | 4 comments

A few hours before the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday, Albritton’s Jeff Sonderman tweeted: “Food for thought: Is journalists’ pursuit of journalism awards (Pulitzers) bad for journalism? Does it mislead priorities?”

The question reflects a percolating cynicism toward, if not outright backlash against, the prizes and journalism awards in general over the past few years.

Journalism-sacred-cow-tipper Jeff Jarvis has written several posts criticizing various aspects of the Pulitzer Prizes and culture (distilled: they turn “the profession into a circle-jerk of mutual self-love”). Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton wrote an anti-Pulitzer post on the occasion of the 2008 Pulitzer announcement, arguing that “these self-congratulating awards, and the attention devoted to them, are symptomatic of the decline of the newspaper industry.” The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus joined the parade last year with an essay in Columbia Journalism Review titled “Newspaper Narcissism” (subscription required to read more than a preview; I don’t have a CJR subscription, but read a slightly longer bootlegged preview).

I’m a world-class cynic, and I’m all for tipping sacred cows when warranted. But I just can’t hop on this bandwagon (or bandtricycle — I don’t want to fall into the false-trend trap, either). While the list of the news industry’s problems and self-inflicted wounds is long, I don’t think the Pulitzer Prizes belong on it.

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Objectivity isn’t truthful — it’s pathological

Posted on January 30, 2010 | 6 comments

I’ve been a card-carrying member of the “Objectivity is dead, maaan” club since 2002*, when Jonathan Chait’s TNR essay about Bernard Goldberg’s Bias and “liberal bias” blew my young mind. Since then, I’ve read many more arguments for why objectivity is outdated, including a spate of 2009 posts. (Obligatory caveat: Good intentions and common sense underpin the objectivity enterprise. The problem is rigid adherence to a specific, previously unquestioned strain of objectivity.)

But I’ve never read a rethink-objectivity argument quite like Steve Buttry’s recent post on the subject. The language he uses is unexpected — and gets at the heart of why objectivity-at-all-costs is ultimately misguided.

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The journalist as curator, revisited: Curating your own content

Posted on July 30, 2009 | 4 comments

The idea of journalists, particularly editors, as curators has gained traction as forward-thinking news organizations realize the value of being a trusted filter for readers. (Though there are definitely detractors.) And while more news orgs still need to get comfortable aggregating content produced elsewhere, I think we’ve been missing a big part of the curation discussion: the growing importance of journalists as curators of their own newsroom’s content.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading (*cough* back in the spring *cough*) Martin Langeveld’s vision of how content will flow in future newsrooms, and Matt Thompson’s imagining the difficulties of implementing the alternative workflows such “content cascades” will require.

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Innovation-by-omission, and other thoughts

Posted on December 9, 2008 | Comments Off on Innovation-by-omission, and other thoughts

I’m writing most of my journalism-related posts at Publishing2.0 these days (“most” meaning the few that I get around to writing). So you should check out a couple recent posts: Why not writing a story is innovation, and how “scrapbook news” can help reframe the discussion about citizen journalism and crowdsourcing.

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Is Shepard Smith always so fair and balanced? (no, really)

Posted on November 6, 2008 | 3 comments

This video of Fox News’s Carl Cameron dishing on McCain insiders’ views of Sarah Palin has gotten a lot of attention today.

It is pretty remarkable that McCain staffers would claim to a reporter that Palin didn’t know Africa is a continent — remarkable if true, for obvious reasons, and remarkable if false because that would show an incredibly intense smear campaign. (It sounded implausible to me at first, but Andrew Sullivan* points out that nobody has denied the claim. Plus if it’s not true, why make it up when there are surely plenty of other true embarrassing tidbits they could have told instead?)

But something else struck me in watching the video. Two-thirds of the way through (starting at 2:05), Cameron switches to reporting the spin from those in the McCain camp who are still defending the Palin pick.** He says (or rather they say) that McCain was leading from the time he picked Palin until Lehman Brothers failed. In other words, the economy, not Palin, lost it for McCain.

Then, before you can say fair and balanced, anchor Shepard Smith smoothly counters:

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Journalism’s trouble with lies

Posted on September 12, 2008 | 5 comments

Why oh why can’t journalists call a lie a lie?

The question has come up repeatedly in this campaign season of depressingly typical he-said-she-said news stories — with increasing frequency since John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

In an ideal world, as Dylan Matthews points out, “When Sarah Palin claimed she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, the AP headline would be ‘Palin Repeats Lie about Infamous Bridge’.”

In the real world, even a Washington Post story that’s ostensibly about campaign lies has to resort to wishy-washy phrasing:

Palin and John McCain, the GOP presidential nominee, have been more aggressive in recent days in repeating what their opponents say are outright lies. Almost every day, for instance, McCain says rival Barack Obama would raise everyone’s taxes, even though the Democrat’s tax plan exempts families that earn less than $250,000. (emphasis added)

Notice how the story won’t call McCain a liar — it’s McCain’s “opponents” who say he lies. But in the very next sentence, the Post reporter accurately describes one of McCain’s lies. The facts aren’t in dispute: Obama has a detailed tax plan, and McCain has repeatedly falsely described that plan. He has lied about it. So why can’t the story just come out and say so?

The reticence to call a lie a lie is perhaps the most pernicious example of how modern journalism’s objectivity fetish has been taken to such extremes that it’s become meaningless.

Objectivity is no longer (if it ever was) a means to reporting the truth. It has become an end in itself. If the facts can be interpreted to reflect negatively on a subject (at least if that subject is a Republican or allegedly conservative candidate for office), then they must be avoided. Indeed, this twisted notion of objectivity has turned facts into mere subjective interpretations.

But facts are facts. The interpretation comes after. And journalists should not worry about how the facts will be interpreted.

For example, simply pointing out that someone is lying is descriptive, not normative.

“John McCain lied about Barack Obama and sex education” is a statement of fact. It does not render judgment on McCain — it merely points out that what he said about Obama was intentionally false.

Now, it’s true that in American culture in general and presidential politics specifically, people generally don’t think highly of liars. But that’s reason for John McCain to stop lying — not for the media to stop pointing out when he lies.

If the facts reflect poorly on a subject in the culture’s eyes, that’s the subject’s business — not the media’s. (The whole point of objectivity was that the media shouldn’t be in the reflection business!)

The good news is, there’s been so much outrage in certain quarters about the media’s fear of lie-detection that maybe things will change. And if a new AP story on McCain’s lies doesn’t quite reach Dylan Matthews’ ideal — the still-too-tentative headline: “Analysis: McCain’s claims skirt facts, test voters” — at least it’s a start.

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Newspapers should sell the press — and use the mailman

Posted on August 5, 2008 | Comments Off on Newspapers should sell the press — and use the mailman

I’ve been mulling over Doug Fisher’s intriguing and, at first glance, entirely sensible suggestion to disentangle newspapers from their printing presses. I wonder if this could be the first part of a radical two-step that might help papers prepare for or transition to the online future in a way they haven’t been able to do yet. Fisher writes:

Many smaller newspapers have had their printing done by contract for years. Headlines have come recently, however, as big-city newspapers (think San Francisco, Boston and now New York) explore outsourcing or consolidating printing, even in the absence of a joint operating agreement. Chains such as McClatchy and Media News are also consolidating printing, even if it means earlier deadlines and longer truck routes.

They should go one step further: Move their printing operations into a separate subsidiary with no ties to the newsroom. Newsrooms would pay to print the paper and be free to take their business to a less expensive or more responsive competitor.

This would get the albatross of “big iron’s” debt and depreciation off newsrooms’ backs. It would position those printing operations better for sale. And it would make the pressroom and the newsroom more efficient in accounting for costs and generating new business.

I would go even a step beyond that.

If, as David Sullivan wrote a couple months ago, “newspapers are essentially a logistics business that happens to employ journalists”; and if, as Fisher writes, “Newsrooms need an honest accounting of the costs and revenues associated with producing, distributing and selling the news,” selling off the press is only half a solution. Here’s a possible other half:

Newspapers should get out of the delivery business and send papers through the mail.

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What the Newseum’s $450 million could buy now

Posted on July 16, 2008 | Comments Off on What the Newseum’s $450 million could buy now

Back in February, Jack Shafer wrote a column for Slate excoriating the new $450 million Newseum building next to the National Mall. He finished his anti-ode to the “monument to journalistic vanity” by gently (compared to the rest of the piece) pointing out that there are plenty of better uses for $450 million, given the troubles facing newspapers:

I want the Freedom Forum to sell off their monument valley installation and use the proceeds to actually support journalism. Like endowing a newspaper, for instance.

Just one newspaper? Those were the days. Nowadays — a mere five months later, that is — $450 million could get you 3 or 4 newspaper chains.

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A reasonable defense of Family Circus

Posted on July 16, 2008 | Comments Off on A reasonable defense of Family Circus

Anyone who (like me) has ever made fun of lame comic strips and the newspapers that run them should read this David Sullivan post about audiences’ capacity and desire for cultural change. It’s the most persuasive case I’ve read for why newspapers stick with what I would consider outdated comics, features, and language:

A columnist or feature can occasionally be hip; but a newspaper can’t be hip. It can’t be the counterculture. It is the culture. It has been part of how new ideas are absorbed into the mainstream. …

But it can be hard to find one’s place in the culture, which grows more complicated by the day; the Internet, with its social networking and postings and chat, provides a new counterculture, or multiple ones, ones that make the mainstream look even lamer than “The Family Circus” did to me in the 1970s. The argument about the future of news is partly about whether the mainstream ends with the baby boomers, like the parents left behind in “Childhood’s End” as the children join the ubermind.

The problem is that newspapers have tended to do a poor job of figuring out how to satisfy both the Family Circus and the more modern audiences. Plus the younger mainstream audience is still hipper and savvier than the Baby Boomer Family Circus audience. But Sullivan’s point is well taken.

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The limits of Twitter’s 140-character limit

Posted on May 16, 2008 | 1 comment

Matthew Ingram and Mark Hamilton have written posts defending Twitter from a backlash stirred up by some outlandish claims made after the China earthquake. Both make good not-outlandish arguments for why Twitter is important for journalism and news consumers, but after reading their posts I’m still stuck on the arbitrariness of Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Ingram points out that Twitter isn’t going to kill old media — it’s just one of many new tools that are potentially very good at one of old media’s main functions (in this case, getting the news to people in a timely fashion). He writes:

No one is suggesting that Twitter replace the emergency broadcast system, or that Twitterers should be thought of in the same breath as “first responders” such as search & rescue personnel. … But why shouldn’t we talk about how Twitter can be used to get information out about disasters?

It’s a good question, but I would follow up with one of my own: If Twitter is going to become a primary tool for getting information out about disasters, why place an artificial limit on the length of each disaster-information post?

Hamilton answers part of this question in his post. He writes:

The common argument against Twitter, IM and all the rest is that while they can provide information, they can’t provide context and depth. But when news breaks, it’s information that I want, not the narrative-nutgraf stories and not the context. The steady flow of information as the story develops is what I’m looking for (and that steady flow carries with it a lot of the context that some newspaper reporters insist only they can provide). (emphasis in original)

But what about information that’s shorter than a narrative nut graf but longer than 140 characters? In other words, why should the steady flow of information that Hamilton wants be restricted to 140-character blasts? As I wrote in this post, if it’s okay to continue a thought (or a news blast) across multiple Twitter posts, why have an arbitrary limit at all?

There’s another aspect of the 140 limit that troubles me. In that same post I wrote, “Ultimately I’m not sure why multiple 140-character Twitter posts are better than a simple live-blog.” After reading Ryan Sholin’s Twitter coverage of this week’s E&P Interactive Media Conference (where his ReportingOn project won a Knight News Challenge grant!), I’m still not sure.

Here’s a page of Sholin live-Twittering Arianna Huffington’s keynote speech. Sholin’s Twitter followers saw a page and a half of Huffington posts instead of having one post they could click on if they wanted to see the minute-by-minute updates. Plus, because of the 140-character limit there wasn’t room for any (or many) of Huffington’s actual quotes. As I said in my original post, quotes are often unnecessary in stories like these. But Twitter’s character limit means people who don’t speak in perfect pithy phrases just won’t be quoted.

Fast-forward a year or two, when many more people and news organizations will be covering news this way. If you’re following a bunch of Twitterers and three or four of them cover live events at the same time, you’d have to scroll through dozens of news posts before getting to the other people you’re following.

Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Sholin. He did an awesome job covering the conference given Twitter’s constraints. But I think those constraints may limit the effectiveness of this kind of coverage — just as they may limit the effectiveness of disaster-news delivery and general breaking news.

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Why Dana Milbank is awesome

Posted on May 13, 2008 | Comments Off on Why Dana Milbank is awesome

I don’t always agree with Dana Milbank’s take on politics, but I always love reading his Washington Sketch pieces for the Washington Post. To me, he represents where newspaper journalism should be heading: reporters as honestly subjective sources unto themselves, rather than faux-objective conduits for he-said, she-said quote-getting.

My favorite Milbank pieces are sketches of congressional hearings. He’s not afraid of actually pointing out the absurdity and dulling obfuscation of government bureaucracy in action. I often wonder why the Post bothers running “straight” news stories about hearings — the kind of stories that dutifully recount “newsworthy” quotes (i.e. scripted boilerplate) — when Milbank’s sketch invariably tells you what really happened.

Milbank’s new piece on Hillary Clinton’s win in West Virginia isn’t about a hearing, but it’s one of his best columns yet. Not just because he uses Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch to frame Clinton’s dwindling candidacy, but because he finally reveals the hollowness of my all-time favorite stumping-politician move: the smarmily grinning point-and-wave (and its close cousins the grinning point, wave, and-thumbs-up; and the grinning point-and-nod, which Hillary Clinton does at the 8- and 52-second marks of this video and which Bill Clinton does three times in the first 21 seconds of this video).

Milbank’s description of Clinton running through the point-and-wave motions is almost poignant, despite the mockery of the story’s Monty Python framing:

A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she was waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

If there’s been a more succinct, perfect illustration of Clinton’s end-game — or a better skewering of the point-and-wave — I haven’t seen it.

UPDATE: Credit Bill Walsh for the terrific headline (“This Is an Ex-Candidate”) on Milbank’s story. Walsh posted some other headlines he considered; I especially like “White Americans and the Norwegian Blue,” but I think his final headline was poifect.

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