opening up

recasting readers as learners & citizens

In essays on 7 May 2009 tagged civic-journalism, journalism, marketing, media, mission, organizational-thought, social-media, swineflu with 4 comments

It has become clear that new media will to continue to supplant traditional journalism in many of its historical functions (ranging from offering classifieds to breaking news). But if you ask to see traditional journalism’s crown jewel, you’ll find a long-time interest in the public good and a professional code nurtured over years of civil service. Ann Landers can be replaced by blogs. Can I.F. Stone? If not, why not? What does that tell us about possible reframings of journalism’s mission? Might journalists instead be thankful to be relieved of that which they explicitly do not do best?

It would be a shame if this opportunity for reframing were overlooked, leaving us to remember journalism’s last moments of fragile unity. As it stands, the journalistic community is fracturing along fault lines of whim, trend, and financial viability. Journalism is not making a choice to diversify and split up. Its hand is forced by circumstance and the failure of a narrowly conceived advertising and subscription model.¹ Uncontrolled failure is always failure. Controlled failure can become success.

professional reformation and diversification: a mixed bag

As the field of journalism flounders, it is beginning to hemorrhage talent. Sue Schmidt and Glenn Simpson–both widely respected by their peers, having decades of well-regarded work behind them and a Pulitzer between them–recently left the Wall Street Journal to start an independent, investigative journalism firm: an exciting prospect.²

But, the journalistic profession’s uncontrolled transformation has its risks. What if Schmidt and Simpson’s departure heralds a slow exodus of traditional journalistic talent to virgin markets and models? What if that exodus cost journalism its professional identity?

Most discussion about the state and fate of journalism fails to recognize the community’s most valuable asset: its professional code and mission. Rather than competing with bloggers and newswires, traditional media might find guidance in looking to uniquely distinguish themselves. That involves capitalizing on the best aspects of their guild-hood, whether in a blog or magazine or newspaper or book. There’s no reason that “blogging” should mean anything more than “online publishing”–journalists have been caught up with form, when they are missing a coherent mission for their content.

Traditional media’s leverage has eroded with the democratization of media’s means of production, because their security was founded upon how hard it was to print a newspaper. Now, that difficulty is irrelevant. New media makes available an infrastructure better than newspapers’: breaking stories and publishing commentary are no longer easy marks to dominate. Instead of focusing on its old advantages, journalism needs find niche(s) the profession can dominate.

Journalism should be asking what the introduction of new media has not equalized. The democratization of media’s means of production has largely left hard things hard and made tedious things easier. In particular, creating carefully crafted, cross-cutting journalism is still remarkably difficult, even if it is now much easier to disseminate your solidly investigated expose. If anything, the focus on new media has distracted journalism from its core competency.³

The coverage of journalism’s dire straits has been so ubiquitous as to go meta. Yet for almost a decade, people have been talking about the misalignment between social trends and the structure of the profession of journalism.⁴ We need new models. And they’re emerging: ranging from the Huffington Post’s new fund to the ecosystem of models hinted at by entrants to competitions like the Knight News Challenge to new metaphors like the investigative strike teams” recently described by Aaron Swartz. But a model isn’t enough. A model says how, and sometimes what. But a model can’t tell you why.

peddling understanding instead of breaking news

In early March, a handful of editorials clobbered the Obama administration’s handling of the bailout’s public relations. The widespread reaction to Larry Summer’s interview on CBS–judged “tone deaf” by many–characterizes that brief turn of public opinion, now reversed.

But you know what? It’s hard not to come off as “evasive” when trying to describe something enormously complex and subtle (and probably not fully understood by any one person–a reality inadmissible on television) in a fifteen minute segment. Asking a digestible, accurate explanation of government policy and finance to fit between primetime commercials is ridiculous. Worse, setting that expectation does an active disservice to journalism’s unfulfilled role in our civic education.⁵

We’re confronted with a daily deluge of information that leaves little room for thoughtful consideration of most anything, much less an issue of the bailout’s complexity and nuance. But there are hopeful signs that a market for deep understanding is emerging.

a promising example: covering the bailout

Dozens of explanations emerged to address the burgeoning financial crisis. These explanations did not aim just to report on the crisis and bailout. They focused on creating the offering the clearest, most comprehensive understanding, distinguishing themselves in formand depth,⁶ not just content.

Two pieces particularly captured my attention: “The Credit Crisis Visualized” and an episode of This American Life, Ira Glass’s now-famed “The Giant Pool of Money”. Both aimed to provide authoritative, edifying coverage, recognizing the need to pay due respect to the complexity of the credit crisis.

An intersection of the information visualization subculture and mainstream coverage of the credit crisis? An hour long radio hit examining the financial instrument of collateralized mortgages? This is coverage people like Jon Stewart have been begging for.⁷

When was the last time gears of the media machine turned to teaching in difficult times? Iraq? 9/11? Clinton’s impeachment? The Gulf War? I haven’t thought of any.⁸ This isn’t to say that the media were monolithically irresponsible until the bailout. But mainstream media has rarely seemed to concern itself with its audience’s education.⁹ Why the shift? Maybe more excitingly, how?

the conditions of deep coverage

“The Giant Pool of Money” exemplifies engaging, nuanced coverage of a [typically] dry, complicated topic. And it was an instant classic. The Credit Crisis Visualized is a ten minute culmination of a master’s thesis aiming “[to use] new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world.”¹⁰ Both were compelling for straightforward reasons:

everyone cares about the financial crisis: Or at the very least, everyone feels they should. The unity evoked by crisis with clear perpetrators is powerful. The collectively felt gravity of the financial crisis translates into comparatively patient and demanding readers.
the financial crisis alienates no one: This may say more about my social circle than anything, but: it seems hard to manufacture a more compellingly stark but conveniently digestible drama than the financial crisis.

The crisis doesn’t polarize. Everyone is comfortable criticizing fiscal irresponsibility. Everyday people are pitted against wealthy financiers, but the financier’s role is systemic and personally deniable. Between critical economists like Peter Schiff and Nassim Taleb and villains like Bernie Madoff, Bear Stearns, and AIG, the stage is set for a widely engaging tale.¹¹
mastery of the medium: This American Life carved out in its listeners the expectation of an hour long show. Ira Glass is a fantastic storyteller. The story was contextualized as a natural outgrowth of the show’s positioning as rooted in the American experience. What is more evocatively American than the homestead and the suffering born of a threat to the homestead?

“The Credit Crisis Visualized” is gorgeous, ten minutes long, and embedded in a comfortable form: a Flash player where ten minute interactions are the norm.

These conditions highlight the power of marketing: a clear customer, a need, a positioning with accessible entry points, and a professionally mastered medium are all that were needed.

creating a market requires flexibility

When I first read Manufacturing Consent and later saw the documentary, I was dumbfounded by media leaders’ ignorance of the far-reaching repercussions of the constraints of their market, medium, and business model. Take a look at 01:51:18 in the documentary for an interview between Jeff Hansen¹² (H) and Jeff Greenfield (G):

H: What about just in the selection of guests, let’s analyze things: Why isn’t Noam Chomsky ever on Nightline?

G: I couldn’t–I couldn’t begin to tell you.

H: He’s one of the leading intellectuals in the entire world.

G: I have no idea, I mean I can make some guesses. Uhh–he may be one of the leading intellectuals, who, uhh, can’t talk on television. You know, that’s a standard that’s very important to us. If you’ve got a 22 minute show, and a guy takes five minutes to warm up–now, I don’t know whether Chomsky does or not–he’s out. When you book a show [you have to] know that the person can make the point within the framework of television. And if people don’t like that, they should know that it is about as sensible to book somebody who will take eight minutes to give an answer as it is to book somebody who doesn’t speak English. We need concision.

Chomsky goes on to point out that, “The beauty of concision is [that] you can only repeat conventional thoughts.”

These constraints haven’t let up. Our bandwidth has only become scarcer. But, the rapid diversification of media outlets and usage habits might mean that nuance isn’t a lost cause. There is symbiosis between production on democratized platforms (like software, and now media) and the “long tail” of demand. The costs of production drop off much more quickly than the distribution of demand. That is to say, whether you are writing for one million people or one hundred, Wordpress makes it just as easy to blog.

Lowering the cost of software development to nil to made the richness of the free and open source software (F/OSS) ecosystem possible. And now, lowering the costs of media production to nil gives us a chance to nurture a similar ecosystem.¹³

The comparison between journalism and F/OSS is often strained–their stakeholders, domains, and cultures differ deeply. Nonetheless, both offer insight into how a field’s transaction costs and barrier to entry can fundamentally determine the mechanics of cooperation and production. It is now free to put your media on “the market,” giving us an opportunity to reprogram traditional “market forces.”

In fact, reprogramming is too active a verb. It is no more reprogramming than Apple’s “reprogramming” of people’s design aesthetic. Markets are a constant feedback cycle between what’s available and what’s desirable. As the line between producer and consumer blurs, the classical economics of supply and demand need to morph to accommodate.

the back-and-forth of supply and demand

The feedback cycle between supply and demand becomes more interesting with the addition of open means of production, causing the range of attempts to satisfy demand to blossom. Because the very act of attempting to satisfy demand can create demand, new markets and customers are made.¹⁴ Historically, media choices have been limited by a small selection of media producers, meaning the single paradigm of traditional media created an enormous bottleneck in the evolution of people’s individual tastes.

We need a broader, more stimulating environment. Traditional media could take advantage of those who are willing to give media creation a try, using their efforts as an engine to churn out information about what people could want, where new markets might be. The less diverse an industry, the harder it is to learn about your customer, whose habits are by and large purely environmental:

Education & availability of choice play an enormous role in determining the objects of our pleasure [...] we enjoy what we are trained and conditioned to, and what our options allow us to.

– Richard Shusterman

We have the chance to use media to discover and nurture demand for deep, contextualized coverage, where there once was neither demand or coverage. Newsweek might not be able to afford to fail in guesstimating what’s stimulating.¹⁵ New media can. That means that there will be more opportunities to deconstruct the assumptions traditional media have made–and are forced to continue making–about the nature of their audience.¹⁶

Thanks to Will Bosworth, Shaunalynn Duffy, and Michael Nagle for reading drafts of this post and offering feedback on style and content.

We know that the current attitude toward advertising won’t cut it. And if we didn’t, the New York Times is proving it. The Times Co. just lost $74.5 million this quarter after taking a $250 million loan earlier this year from Mexican telecom patriarch Carlos Slim Helu and mortgaging its controlling interest in the Times Building for $225 million to New York City real estate developer W.P. Carey.

People talk about the failure of advertising as though it were a failure of a model as opposed to a failed campaign. The model hasn’t been fully explored. People should be saying, at most, “Undifferentiated advertising and walled-garden subscription models have proved untenable.”

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and one Aaron Swartz just explored from a different angle

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And others are beginning to ask for a similar refocusing. FAIR recently covered an interview on Democracy Now! with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive wherein Matt reaches a similar conclusion:

[Magazines], to the extent that they’re going to be able to survive and the Progressive is going to be able to survive, need to become more like books or need to take a higher altitude look at the news and do investigative reporting and give people analysis that they can’t find anywhere else. But if you just say what did Barack Obama say at his press conference yesterday, newspapers and magazines are going to go.

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to use Gardner et al’s language from the Good Work project

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I would say nascent, if it weren’t for the outdated claim that journalism is a civic organ of society: it’s a purpose that’s been long forgotten by too many. Excitingly, the theme is regaining currency–Phil Shapiro recently suggested MAKE magazine should supplant Newsweek in our public libraries on the grounds that:

When I read MAKE magazine, I not only learn new things, I become more creative. [...] It gets me thinking about constructing creative solutions to a host of different [problems in my life. ...]

The main reason MAKE magazine deserves a place in our local public libraries is that it brings real value to our communities. We want our children to be reading that magazine. We want our adults to be reading that magazine. We want everyone to be reading that magazine.

Shapiro goes on to suggest that not only should libraries stock MAKE, they should have hackerspaces on-premises. Given the positioning of MAKE as “The first magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects, MAKE Magazine unites, inspires and informs a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages,” that’s an inspiring confluence of the aims of public media and education.

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What I’m letting slide for “deep understanding” here is a little scandalous. In my wildest dreams, acknowledging the need to deeply understand the bailout leads to a thoughtful, pluralistic consideration of economic theory and practice. No such luck, yet.

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The very fact that Jon Stewart’s interview/showdown with Jim Cramer garnered such wide attention is an indicator of professional integrity’s growing cultural currency.

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I’d be excited
to hear about other opportunities for media-driven civic edification which were not overlooked. Although, with the creation of sites like Tracking Swine Flu by “old media” like the Austin-American Statesman, it looks like that track record is quickly improving, complemented by the trend toward fantastic visualizations like those produced by the New York Times and more recently, NPR

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What if journalism is becoming more about talking to your constituency than at it? To take an analogy from education: maybe the audience is no longer a vessel to be filled, but a citizen to be kindled

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Jonathan Jarvis’s work highlights a trend I only recently noticed in the world of academic design and media studies: people are creating real, immediate value which is deployed outside of academia. Media and design studies do more and more work in real marketplaces as more than just an experiment. DestroyTwitter is the product of a thesis. The LilyPad Arduino provides real value to the DIY community, and it started out as part of Leah Buechley’s academic research. It’s an exciting trend.

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Bitter irony: the simplicity of this morality play is in direct tension with what I’ve been calling a shift to “deep” understanding and nuance. Hopefully, these are the first, tentative, baby steps.

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I haven’t confirmed that this is the same Jeff Hansen as the excerpt from Manufacturing Consent, yet. I’m waiting for a response from KUOW and will update as soon as I know.

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Free and open source software is one of the best developed and most richly studied examples of the effects of democratizing a field’s means of production. But, F/OSS’s history is unique. It is a rich analogy that is often overused and overextended in discussion of the “network society,” and I don’t mean to contribute to that overuse.

In an upcoming post, I’ll explore some of the most common failures in people’s usage of the F/OSS analogy. Looking at F/OSS’s lessons and understanding how its position differs from journalism’s has a lot to offer.

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Where we mean specifically Drucker’s sense of creating a customer

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Worse still: the shallow engagement promoted by ad-based models creates a tight coupling to users’ conception of their tastes, leaving little room to explore subtler, unrecognized hungers. If you are constantly fighting to increase readership, you have scant room to deepen readership.

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That rigidity is a cost that has not been limited to traditional media. There’s a lot more to say here about the chance for democratized platforms to change industries into market-making commons. But more on that in a later post.

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