Scripting News - Latest Comments in Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Julia Ward — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:10:01 -0000

"imho" could be viewed as an alternate signifier to "in my humble opinion." In which case when encountering and not knowing it, we can fix the not-knowing by looking up the definition (by say typing it into Google since we might not find "imho" in a dictionary and typing it into Google will be like looking it up in a dictionary AND like typing it into Google). That seems an approximately equivalent act (temporally) to encountering, not knowing, and so looking up (same method) a single word we don't know. Like "humble." For example. For the reader/individual/user/person-in-the-world, this does call upon the same self-reliance that's summoned if we turn away from "collective newsroom opinion" (Kurt, above) and try instead this mainlining of stories. Like many people here in these other comments are doing. That the "collective" and its many layers are long-standing is the complicating fact. But THAT'S what's changing. The times (yes, pun!), they are a changing -- cue harmonica--Yays!

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

dave — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:32:12 -0000

Bravo!!

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Robert Cox — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:16:37 -0000

Shel - I love the movie "All the President's Men" but...it's a movie.

Now, consider that we today know that Mark Felt, the number two guy at the FBI, was leaking information to Woodward. There were many people who knew that the Nixon campaign was using illegal contributions to fund dirty tricks and were not comfortable with it. In today's world there would be no need to Woodward to meet Deep Throat in a garage. They could send each other DMs on Twitter or SMS or otherwise communicate without actually meeting up. More to the point, Mark Felt could have set up an anonymous blog (deepthroat.blogspot.com) and posted information to the web. Staffers at the Committee to Reelect the President who wished to could have done the same sorts of things. There would be no need to Ben Bradlee to take the heat when a Woodstein story turned out wrong. There are many bloggers that would publish these sorts of stories.

If you think this is not happening then you are too focused on the big blogs and not paying attention to what is happening at the hyper-local level. I do some work on such a site called New Rochelle's Talk of the Sound. we ran a story recently in New Rochelle, NY about the Mayor telling The New York Times that he was a "full-time" Mayor. A reader sent us the files from the local Congresswoman showing that during the time the Mayor said he was "full-time" he was actually getting 40% of his income working as a consultant for our district's Congresswoman. After we ran that story, another reader -- someone in City Hall -- sent a copy of the Mayor's employment form in which the Mayor had checked the "Part-Time" box on the form. We will be running that story on Monday. On Tuesday, there will be a City Council meeting where consideration will be given to either raise the Mayor's salary to make him an actual full-time employee or change the City Charter to make it clear that the Mayor is a part-time employee so that the Mayor will not misrepresent his role to the media and/or the public.

Similarly, we obtained a copy of the City's stimulus package request list sent to Albany. We made it available to readers who were able to help us show that about 20% of the projects on the $97.775 mm wish list were actually ineligible for funding. In response to our story, the City told us they would file a revised list with the State of New York. Think this doesn't matter? By replacing those ineligible projects with eligible projects we helped increase the likelihood that some of the stimulus money will flow to our City.

Almost every bit of these two stories came about through readers inside the government or with connections to the government getting information to our site. As Dave correctly points out, today's technology permits the disintermediation of sources and the public. Today, Deep Throat would not need Woodward to get his story out; any whistleblower inside government can now drop information onto Wikileaks, sent to a blogger or publish their own blog.

I would also note that all for the claims about "investigative journalism", I can tell you that in New Rochelle our local newspaper is the Gannett Journal News which covers all of Westchester County. I can count on one ~~hand~~ finger the amount of investigative reporting they have done in New Rochelle in the past decade. The so-called reporting that we get here from traditional newspaper is almost exclusively high school sports, police blotter stories and stories spoon-fed to reports by local officials (otherwise known as propaganda). Our little web site has broken more stories in New Rochelle in 3 months then the traditional media has broken in the past 5 years. Why? Because we actually have people in New Rochelle contributing to our site whereas the "local" media has not assigned a single reporter to the New Rochelle beat.

Let me help put this in context. New Rochelle is the 7th largest city in New York State and we do not have -- and have not had for many years -- a single reporter who covers just our City. We did not "leave" journalism behind -- they left us.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Kevin Sablan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:37:34 -0000

Regardless of the actions of the news PUBLISHING industry, the "next version of journalism" is already booting up -- with or without traditional news organizations. If journalism is dead, we are witnessing the (shameless plug to related post) dawn of the dead journalist ...
http://almightylink.ksablan...

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:15:29 -0000

Classic. Maybe you should watch 30 Rock for an idea how it *really* works.
:-)

Or how about old reruns of Mary Tyler Moore or Lou Grant!

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Shel Holtz — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:37:32 -0000

It's not always about sources. Sometimes it's just good, old-fashioned legwork that most bloggers aren't willing to do in their spare time. Consider the revelation by The Los Angeles Times of state employees charging personal expenses to their expense accounts. That required a tedious, line-by-line review of expense reports. News organizations will fund such investigations. Are you willing to pay for it yourself, or just hope some blogger will take the time?

Maybe you should watch "All the President's Men" for a reminder of what goes into professional journalism that simply can't be duplicated by the crowd. There's room for both and they'll become comfortable with each other.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Jack Foster Mancilla — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:08:56 -0000

I read all my news on the web. TV news is background noise when I have nothing else I want to hear. If something overheard, read, sent to me via email or twitter, catches my fancy, I look deeper through many online sources. A newspaper, or a TV show could never inform me that well.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

boblq — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:08:05 -0000

So how out of all this disintermediation do we find trusted sources?

Of news, of income, of relationships, of ... ? Well you get it.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:26:35 -0000

I think those are just transitional and they will be undermined by the
inexorable process of disintermediation. It's amazing we're floating in a
sea of disintermediation and people think it's an experience unique to them
when they get wet and then drown. It's been going on for a loooong time.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

boblq — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:17:31 -0000

Newspaper like federations will regroup as collections of blogs, e.g. Huffington Post, InstaPundit. The economic model appears to be the same ... advertising. The basic transformation is essentially that the economics of electrons is cheaper than paper.

People do want aggregation of trusted sources. That is the only advantage a newspaper can claim and as DW points out that is being lost fast as they cling to outmoded and costly forms of production. The best journalists are leaving the sinking ships.

So it goes.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Montjoie — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:25:09 -0000

This is why I dropped my subscription to the Chicago Tribune. At one point I found myself writing an email to a reporter telling him about all the facts he left out of a story that he clearly got from a press release. As I was writing I suddenly realized: why am I, a reader, telling him, a reporter, what the facts are? Plain truth of it is, I already knew more about the story from other news sources than what was in the paper. So who needs it?

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

PersonFromPorlock — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:18:36 -0000

Bias aside, there's also the question of the quality of the news. Journalists at the one state-wide Maine newspaper I read routinely rewrite press releases as 'news' and barely bother to disguise the fact. It's understandable. It's the cheapest way to fill the 'news hole' and that's what journalism has become - the craft of producing cheap, entertaining filler to go between the ads - but it isn't news as most of us mean it, or as the MSM want us to believe they mean it.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

person of choler — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:55:00 -0000

I took a look at Rogue Columnist and gooznews. The authors view the news through the same left wing filters used by the traditional news industry. More Obama cheerleading. Snore.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Bernie — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:58:57 -0000

One person commented:
"if you read one newspaper you are still more likely to get a more accurate view of reality than if you read one blog. "
WELL. . .InstaPundit beats The New York Tiimes any day.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

malatmals — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:34:22 -0000

Rove ate a lot of people's lunch by the looks of him (I'm sorry I couldn't resist and don't I condone that sort of thing). When you are right how else are you supposed to preach than out of certainty?

This is odd because the research I've seen has generally cast conservatives as pretty much the opposite of what you describe, maybe not specifically with respect to debating, but overall. See http://www.newsweek.com/id/... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id... http://www.freerepublic.com... and http://www.huffingtonpost.c...

"...A much stronger link exists between political orientation and openness, which psychologists define as including traits such as an ability to accept new ideas, a tolerance for ambiguity and an interest in different cultures. When these traits are combined, people with high openness scores turn out to be almost twice as likely to be liberals."

Now if we take Bush as an example of a conservative then I can point out dozens of cases where he seems to have intentionally swept facts under the rug (or invented new ones) to get his way. Aren't a high percentage of scientists (whose livelihoods are made from facts) liberal? Aren't a lot of conservative tenets begotten from faith and religion - some using the same fact-less arguments that lost them, in a court of law, the ability to teach creationism in the classroom?

If you want to have a debate with facts go ahead - bring 'em on. I hope you're under no false pretense that the outcome of the debate is possibly in your favor. You'll probably end up like this guy http://archive.redstate.com...

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

justcorbly — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:21:01 -0000

I'm still waiting for someone to explain why people who publish on a website are immune from all the evils that so many say afflict people who publish on newsprint? If people believe newspapers are failing because of character flaws among journalists and owners, how are businesses on the web going to be different?

My point is not that newspaper people are or are not poseurs and monopolists, but that, if they are, why would we expect a change of publishing technology to render the new guys invisible to such demons?

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

justcorbly — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:53:59 -0000

Did you lose trust in them because they made factual errors or because they took a political stance you did not agree with? If the latter, do you then assume that any newspaper that takes a disagreeable editorial position cannot be trusted to deliver the news?

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

justcorbly — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:49:51 -0000

None of those people you mention are running the news. They're performers hired and paid by corporate executives whose only concern about the product they deliver is that it make a proift.

And your list needs to include people like O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Chris Wallace, Kristol, and seveal others to be complete.

Historically, TV networks considered their news departments as public services, and did not expect them to be profitable. Not anymore. If you want to place blames the network boards and all of us who think some talking head yammneing on about what he thinks is news.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Kurt — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:44:47 -0000

Why? Defective product. Journalists are printing collective newsroom opinion as analysis and masquerading it as news. This is not journalism, it's propaganda.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

dave — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:22:09 -0000

Hey I'm not a liberal.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Jahaziel Maqqebet — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:51:32 -0000

Rocky Mountain News == schadenfreude for me, baby.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Linda — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:48:51 -0000

I know I'm not very linked in but please don't make me look up imho. Just write the words and make what you are saying easier to read. Especially when you are singing a death knoll for bad journalism.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

PD Quig — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:36:57 -0000

This is what happens when a profession that had few barriers to entry becomes one with zero barriers to entry. Over the years, the anointed in the media constructed a mythology around news gathering, when in reality it is nothing much more than being able to write clear, basic prose about a topic that you have adequately researched. They have really not appreciated being challenged by brash newcomers, having their premises picked apart, and having their supposed strengths (editorial review, experience and judgment) exposed as an elaborate sham. This has led to increasingly shrill denials, counterattacks, and a final abandonment of all pretense of fairness.

When the customer is always wrong, the supplier will eventually become extinct—no matter how entrenched the monopoly. I am ready for the brave new world. How could it get any worse?

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

hardaway — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:13:50 -0000

Well, Merrill Goozner still attends the same hearings he used to when he was a reporter to produce GoozNews. Does he have resources, no. But in his segment, where he reports on Big Pharma, he is able to produce both news (what happened at the hearing) and interpretation (why it happened.

Re: Death of Journalism, part 3 (Scripting News)

Bill — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:55:36 -0000

Who says blogs don't break news? Thanks Mr. Winer, for informing us that there's this entity called "The Wall Street Journal" which, from what I gather, is either a blog or a Facebook page or some other such thing, but most certainly not a "news-paper."