Monday, June 15, 2009
News / Chicagoland Chicago Media Future Conference: We mean it, man
Posted by Whet Moser on Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 12:03 PM
I agree with Athenae on a couple points about Saturday's Chicago Media Future Conference:
First, that the guy from Newser (meaning, theoretically, I guess, "a person who, um, newses" but unfortunately close to a portmanteau of "news" and "loser") was totally insufferable. Which will happen when your takeaway message is "only I will make money on the Web, muhahahaha! A toast, Jedediah, to love on my own terms!"
Also, his argument was totally wrong for completely transparent and simple reasons that Athenae addresses.
Second, that no one really knew what to do. But in fairness I think that's SOP for a general panel, which in my experience is really a jumping off point for further discussion and awesome Twitter discussion. So:
The most chilling thing that happened was a tweet from Hacker Journalist Brian Boyer, new data/programming honcho at the Trib:
"Defending cute headlines. As a *reader* I hate them. Only ppl who love them are writers. Screw writers. They're between me and my news #cmfc"
Okay, clearly this is hyberbolic, and his general point is well-taken: SEO'd headlines, which must be clear, direct, and contain searchy terms that computers can recognize as relevant, are not opposed to headlines that people want and will click through.
Just be sure to take it as hyperbole. This rule should, I submit, be broken when you have a truly deserving headline ("Headless Body in Topless Bar," "Stix Nix Hix Flix," "Too Many Basques for One Exit").
And: I really do think that in these whither journalism discussions there really isn't enough discussion as to whether there's a crisis of writing in newspapers and magazines. 'Cause I think there is. Just to take an immediate example, the New York Times, given basically anyone in America to fill a slot on the most valuable op-ed real estate in the country, chose Ross Douthat, who has not merely demonstrated problems with basic factual interpretation, he also writes like old people eat (I wish that was my line, but it's not; it comes from the best-written blog ever, Chauncey Billups).
Yeah: programs and data are needed. They might be a golden goose. But as newspapers scout the world for the next Adrian Holovaty, I can't help but wonder if they're looking for the next Dave Barry, Molly Ivins, or Bill Simmons (Brad Flora has more). It's difficult to answer a question as subjective as "has the quality of writing in newspapers declined, especially vis a vis the Web?" but I tend to think it has.
The question that got brought up that I most wanted to see addressed because I'm weird and ultimately more interested in narrative and critical interpretation than monetization (how's that for a job pitch!) was from Trib social media doyenne Amanda Maurer. Basically, she said that she got into a discussion with her roommates, who did not just graduate from J-school, about whether or not journalists should obsess about celebrity, and the impression I got, and I may be wrong, was that she felt uncomfortable about it because journalists are supposed to and they, as people who are not trained to hand-wring about such things, were confused. The subject got dropped.
I wasn't born yesterday, and I'm as well aware of anyone as to what drives traffic, so I'm not going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't write about. But I will tell you this: if you go into it thinking well, I want to write about pressing social issues but we must do snarky blurbs about starlets for the unwashed masses, your writing is going to stink of tortured condescension. You can write well about celebrities; read some Gay Talese.
Here's how I responded:
"@acmaurer re madonna: celeb coverage = pop normative ethics = news? A thought. #cmfc"
Basically, people read celebrity coverage not just because of the gravitational pull of celebrity or the basic pleasures of looking at pretty people, but because we tell ourselves these stories for the same reason we read and watch fiction: in order to live. It's like real-life Sunset Boulevard or, see above, Citizen Kane. This is not to say it is always done well, or for good reasons, and in fact it can be deleterious, cf. starlet coverage as schadenfreude and slut-shaming. But done well or badly, the import is the same. Whether it's Octomom or Jon & Kate or Kanye or Brad/Angelina/Jen, we hash out stories of love, infidelity, art, addiction, wealth, madness, how to dress - really, the fundamental questions - through these vessels because it's convienent to do so. It's more realistic to do it well than "fix" it.
The best thing that happened was Brad Flora of the Windy Citizen, in the midst of a discussion about how to make billions of dollars to stuff your pillows with, positively glowing that he was excited to be on the verge of turning his startup into a $60k business. Scale is what you make it, and there are other business models besides trolling for enough traffic to sell enough remnant ads to vacation in Vail. Not every idea has to Save Journalism: doing something good and making a respectable living off it is a great achievement.
And, God forbid, should Windy Citizen not monetize: so what, really? It's well-intentioned, well done, run by good people who are invested in their community, and that alone deserves credit, and if that doesn't make money, well, we don't sufficiently appreciate people who try awesome things that fail. Most people who succeed are heavily indebted to people who fail. If you are successful at something, you should be thanking failures every day for their contributions.
The thing that didn't really get discussed that sorely needs to be at some point is, as Athenae puts it: "I got kind of annoyed at the end of the thing, because I keep going to these things expecting them to be the Throw The Thieving Bastards in Prison Panel, the You Killed Newspapers On Purpose You Fuckers Symposium, a shame-the-greedy-corporate-assholes party that never really materializes." As always, it is worth keeping in mind that exceedingly ill-timed financial decisions (and, in the Sun-Times's case, actual Thieving Bastards) put a lot of papers on the brink.
During the afterparty, Steve Rhodes of the Beachwood Reporter had a probably futile but clever and resonant idea kind of along those lines that, I think, bears mentioning: journalists should make the median income for their community, max, because being in spitting distance of both comfort and poverty might help you understand, and thus communicate, both. (Also, it should go without saying, you can put more journalists to work, though if you are run by Thieving Bastards, it probably won't translate into that.)
It's worth thinking about. That's about where I'm at, salary-wise, and like everyone else, I think I'm underpaid, but I have friends who are teachers, and social workers, and pastors and who are similarly underpaid, and: they deal (having friends who are pastors will set you straight on a lot of things). Better, I think, than journalists.
This is not, of course, meant to undermine all my colleagues by saying that we on the ground floor should be grateful to make the median (although on some scale we obviously should), just to point out that resources across the industry are poorly deployed, and that if we've learned anything from the past couple years both in journalism and in America generally, it's that the argument that "the free market determines what you're worth" is a good way to lose your shirt if it's not stretched out over a longer time frame than Thieving Bastards wish to.
Comments (11)
Showing 1-11 of 11
Great wrap-up. I'm totally with you about the jerk from Newser (Patrick "the Pain" Spain.) Community-supportive he was definitely not. I think Chicago bloggers should host our own roundtable or strategy charrette to discuss where we want to go with our community news/niche news sites. Put it down on copious flipcharts, and then host our own conference to vet what we come up with. I'll bring the pizza if no one invites Spain. I suggested this on Chicago Carless today, here.
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Oops. http://www.chicagocarless.com/2009/06/15/bottoms-up-for-chicago-bloggers-time-for-our-own-summit-on-sustainability/
Hi, Whet. I'm the founder and proprietor of Ferdy on Films, etc., a Beachwood-affiliated blog and one of only two specialty blog sites includedi in the Chicago Community Trust study, "The New News." What you said about Ms. Maurer's comment applies more or less to most of the people who seemed interested in this conference. How do we get people to read what they should - meaning, hard news - and not what they want ? I would reverse that question. How do the rest of us get hard-news junkies to take what we do as a serious part of the social discourse? As you rightly point out, features subjects tell us the stories of our lives. They also push very harmful myths that are as important to uncover and combat as a political slush fund. As a film blogger, I believe what I do adds real value to the social discourse because I don't concentrate on the box office returns or celebrity fashion and gossip but try to burrow into the art of filmed storytelling. Yet, when our esteemed colleague, Steve Rhodes, links to my reviews, I normally only get about 5 hits from his site to mine. Clearly, the news junkies are as niche and oblivious to matters outside their niche as they accuse others of being to what they consider important. I was deeply disappointed in the old-style panel format, which proved as exclusionary and unhelpful as the projected tweets promised forward-thinking inclusiveness. How can I take these events seriously if they are so deeply products of a communications style I no longer respond to (if I ever really learned from it)?
I worry about the classist elements of much of our presumptions about the dominance of new technology/the internet and the downfall of the printed page. Despite what we usually assume, a huge portion of our society does not have easy daily access (let alone moment to moment access) to computers and the internet. For these people the old fashioned news paper is accessible and the world of blogs and blogging might as well be another planet. I have found some really great debates and interviews involving major journalists concerning the future of journalism at http://www.ourblook.com/component/option,com_sectionex/Itemid,200076/id,8/view,category/#catid69 People may find it useful.
A thought the antipathy to headlines was a bit odd. Thanks for your take. As a copy editor who likes writing fun (but appropriate) heads, it's nice to get some love. Although copy editors don't seem to have much a place in the the "media future" talked about Saturday. They should!
Julie, Copy editors deserve much, much love. I had the good fortune to intern at Slate.com while in grad school and the copy editors more or less run the show there. Little goes up on the site unless it passes through them for a look, some added cleverness, and often some clean-up and tidying. If it feels like copyeditors weren't getting any love, it's because they weren't mentioned by name. I think a lot of what they do is going to merge with what current "web producers" do at publications. What the new position will be called, who knows? As for the heads themselves, having spent months and months and months staring at analytics looking for insight into what people actually click on, I can say that what the machines like in their headlines appears to be what people like as well. Folks only have so much time in the day. Unless your publication is famed for its wit (like Slate), they're more likely to click over if you just give them the full story in the headline rather than trying to pull them in with a pun.
Despite what we usually assume, a huge portion of our society does not have easy daily access (let alone moment to moment access) to computers and the internet. For these people the old fashioned news paper is accessible and the world of blogs and blogging might as well be another planet. --- Bill -- I actually couldn't agree more. It was part of the point I was trying to make at the end of the event, that a newspaper, distributed well and marketed incessantly and operated by good smart people, is still the most efficient way of getting in-depth news out to the most people at once. It is still a mass medium, and anybody with a buck has access to it. But nobody wanted to hear that, really, because print is dead and the only thing we care about is which Tribune stories are going viral on Facebook. How do we reach millenials? Let's have an iPhone app! Gimme a break. Whet, thanks for the shoutouts. It's rare for me to disagree with Steve but I do in regard to the median salary idea. This, like making your reporters live in the towns they cover, is lazy management. Proximity is no guarantee of empathy. Which not for nothing, but a lot of small-town papers pay a wage so paltry the journalists would be lucky to move up to the median. A.
Bill and Athenae: You're absolutely right about access, though I'd also include over-the-air TV and radio, inexpensive or free one-time investments that give you access to the news for the working life of the product. Even if they're not the best way of *presenting* (I'm a print partisan, sorry) the news, they do reach a large audience, and can be done well. This is what bugs the hell out of me about RedEye: it reaches a large and incredibly diverse audience, and as a daily, free local newspaper, it could be an incredibly powerful tool, but it's written and edited almost exclusively for a young, privileged audience and with a palpable fear of actual controversy. I actually think an evolved RedEye would be a revelation and might set the journalistic world on its ear. It's a structurally brilliant publication, and I think we've all learned some positive lessons from it.
Well, I guess these comments are a microcosm of the problem I commented on. I'm still shouting down a deep well and my words will never reach the bottom. I give up.
Regarding access: While access to internet-enabled comupters is not universal, access to mobile phones is much broader. As the mobile web becomes more and more iPhone-like and less text message-like, the digital divide will hopefully be less of an issue. Marilyn: Have patience. Just because nobody's replied to your comments doesn't mean nobody heard them. (But hey, give up if you want. That's really productive.) I just took a look at your blog; it could be you get so few clicks is not due to a disinterest in films but a disinterest in the films you're reviewing. Most people, news hounds or not, don't read film reviews for fun -- they read them to find out which movie they should go to this weekend. A review of a 1970s classic might an interesting read, but it doesn't serve an immediate need. That aside, if Beachwood is the only place you're reaching outside the film blogging community, you're not doing much to reach these newsies you wish were reading you. Might I suggest linking yourself up on Windy Citizen for a start? But leaving the specific aside and getting to the general, I agree, it serves nobody for the journalism community to ignore or denigrate the "soft" news while we lament the state of the "hard." We're all in this boat together.
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