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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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, 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.
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. 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. 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.” Both were compelling for straightforward reasons:
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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.
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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.
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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 Hansen (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.
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. 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. 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.
Thanks to Will Bosworth, Shaunalynn Duffy, and Michael Nagle for reading drafts of this post and offering feedback on style and content.
In edumication, essays, science on
22 November 2008 tagged art, artists, careers, credentials, education, expert, expertise, music, pop-music, professions, science, scientists with no comments
The idea that knowledge can be effectively broken down into categories is deeply rooted in our attitudes about the world. We taxonomize knowledge and skill very early on, and we see it everywhere. Driven by the increasing economic pressure for specialization and the fundamental role we let career play in defining our identity, “the field you work in” is a unit of knowledge that we take for granted. People find it hard to answer simple questions like, “What does it mean to be a scientist?” When you exclude someone’s career, the question, “Who are you?” gets much more uncomfortable for many, because we get so little practice thinking of ourselves as more than our career, much less more than what we do.
The illusion of a neat set of bins into which you can place all knowledge and experience is reinforced and rehashed in school, where the entirety of your school experience is defined in terms of concrete units of time given names like “Math” and “English.” As the underlying structure behind the defining, dominant activity for most youth (i.e., school), this classification exacerbates the confusion between activity (what you do) and identity (who you are). People grow up being “good at math” or “a talented athlete.” For a decade, we’re asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and simultaneously told that we are “students,” further reinforcing the coupling between an artificial organization of knowledge and our identity. Then we head off to college, where that relationship deepens, giving us the language to discuss our intellectual curiosity and muddling that with what we do and who we are.
A lot of collateral psychological damage is incurred in this long narrative of assumptions about the nature of expertise. Unfortunately, simply being aware of these problems and articulating them is not enough to insulate you from their effects. People have talked about the need for cross-disciplinary thinking in science for years. And with the arrival of “design thinking” on the education scene, more people are beginning to use that type of language. Nonetheless, the disempowering role of the idea of expertise is still well-entrenched across every domain in which an institution dominates that domain’s definition. Plenty of people identify as parents and can incorporate that into their identity. But for most, calling yourself an artist because you draw and paint is a much harder jump. In part, this is because people differentiate between activities defined by doing and activities defined by being. That difference does not exist. It is a myth entirely perpetuated by the very idea of expertise being something intrinsic to a person, and therefore inaccessible to some people.
I can work eight hours a day as a waiter and go home to play music with my friends and call myself a musician, or paint portraits in my spare time and call myself an artist. This is possible only because there exist infrastructures and narratives which I can comfortably integrate myself into that permit me to do this. The musician-trying-to-make-it-big is an archetype: they play gigs and long to become part of the mainstream media so that thier identity as a musician can be validated by an external definition of success. The “starving artist” has a bit easier of a time permitting themselves their identity, because the starving artist narrative has some amount of counterculture built in at the ground floor (i.e. that is, to some extent, some people feel like rejection and marginalization are a necessary part of being an artist. Not that they’d turn down a gallery showing.)
But what if I just paint? Or fiddle with a guitar every now and then? Why can’t wielding a paintbrush every now and then be enough to call myself a painter? Or even better, why do I need to call myself a painter? Why can’t I just be painting?
I’m ignoring plenty of complicating issues, not the least of which is the fact that activity is strongly correlated to identity, particularly when a community grows around an activity. The group of people who associate themselves with classical concert performance share not only an activity, but an entire culture and mindset. Unfortunately, people usually lack the language to differentiate between an activity as an indicator (something which is correlated to membership in a certain culture) and an activity as an identifier (something which is part of that culture’s definition).
How do we change this? The end goal is to empower a person to approach an activity without comparing themselves against some sort of stifling, mental standard, requiring the activity to be common or otherwise unmysterious, diversely peopled, and open to engagement at many levels.
The typical pop song involves an enormous amount of work to create. The fact that all that work is hidden from people means it is difficult to feel empowered to create music, because an entire industry is devoted to making it seem easy, effortless. The conflation of the artist and their art only exacerbates this problem. Even in a pop song, because it is seen as “accessible” [for listening, if not writing] suggests that classical music is even further removed.
Within a field, this raises an issue for everyone who’s not at the top of the artificially defined hierarchy of expertise. Musicians who haven’t “made it” wonder about the workflows of musicians who have ["made it"]. Even if they understand that it isn’t an issue of talent but of work, the mystery surrounding the workflow is disempowering.
Turning to science, we find the same problem: for motives different than the music industry’s, producing papers which hide all your mistakes and mis-steps is [mis-]incentivized. so strongly that we have given a name to scientists’ particular insecurities.
The situation is the same everywhere you turn: doctors, artists, athletes—everywhere an expertise is defined, the fact that “experts” in that field feel the need to maintain and extend the importance of their identifying skill means that there is a feedback loop encouraging the increasing commodification and obfuscation of indicators for that particular skill. The art industry is infamous for the disconnect between quality and credentials—when people are in a museum complaining that, “my toddler could paint that,” what they are revealing is a deep ignorance, disempowerment, and resultant bitterness about the artistic process. Experts cannot exist without defining amateurs, and that will always set up a disempowering dynamic if it is seen as a component of identity.
These problems are generalizations of the process of artificially defining poverty. In Deschooling Society, Illich wrote (emphasis mine),
Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one’s own home and to be buried by one’s friends. Only the soul’s needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers. Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve.
Instead of technologies separating the rich from the poor, it is more abstract commodities like access to credentials or studio labels or museum galleries. And I think that this generalization highlights the first, concrete step in addressing these issues.
During the 2008 election, a plethora of musical and visual works were created by “everyday” citizens to support Barack Obama. From the polish of Yes, We Can to the parody of No, You Can’t to the antics of Obama Girl, dozens of music videos of all levels of skill were created to communicate a message and define a community. Graphic designers and artists and “simply” excited people with Adobe Illustrator came together in parallel and created hundreds of powerful designs advertising for Obama. At this point, despite the fact that there are thousands of academic, professional blogs and videobloggers, blogs and YouTube are generally regarded as fundamentally vulgar. This access has meant that thousands of people feel empowered and secure enough to dip their toes into an activity and medium that was otherwise off-limits.
Taking this as a blueprint would suggest that for a given domain there are a few components to empowering people broadly:
- Recontextualize the activity :: Blogging doesn’t have to be about Writing, it’s about writing-about-what-I-ate-for-lunch-today. A video with music in it doesn’t have to be about Music, it can be about how much I like Barack Obama. Drawing doesn’t have to be about Art, it can be about my enthusiasm for anime.
- Expose the process :: When people realize that the distance between high quality video productions and films and your daily dose of YouTube is more about hard work and small details than anything else, it’s a big deal. People realize that trade secrets are powerful, but knowable.
- Take back—or relinquish—linguistic real estate :: Just because Tradition has already homesteaded words like “scientist” and “artist” and “philosopher” doesn’t mean that needs to matter. You can either attack that problem directly—makers and hackers have been calling themselves engineers for years—or you can make the question irrelevant. Even if I’m a Writer because I blog, I don’t need to care about that identification, rendering the distinction powerless to make me insecure.
I still need to concretize what this means for individual domains in which I am interested (in particular, science and education—what’s the difference between a good teacher and a good communicator? Between a scientist and someone who explores their world in a rational, curious way?).
Comments and critiques welcome. Poke holes in these claims!