The Death of the News

Good piece in Salon, by Gary Kimaya, on what we lose when newspapers die, namely, reporting.

At the same time that newspapers are dying, blogging and "unofficial" types of journalism continue to expand, grow more sophisticated and take over some (but not all) of the reportorial functions once performed by newspapers. New technologies provide an infinitely more robust feed of raw data to the public, along with the accompanying range of filtering, interpreting and commenting mechanisms that the Internet excels in generating.

As these developments expand, our knowledge of the world will become much less broad. Document-based reporting and academic-style research will increasingly replace face-to-face reporting. And the ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness will increasingly crumble, to be replaced by more tendentious and opinionated reports.

The brave new media world will be one of tunnel vision and self-selected expertise, in which reported pieces are increasingly devoid of human interaction or human stories, often written by individuals who do not pretend to have a neutral stance. Raw, non-mediated video or audio will provide primary stories to anyone who is interested in them. In this imagined future, the New York Times will have died and only one or two wire services will still have reporters in, say, Gaza. In lieu of edited stories will be video interviews with Gaza inhabitants, as well as commentary and analysis from a vast army of experts, semi-experts and kibitzers. Consumers can set one info-dial to "Middle East primary feeds," set a commentary dial to "expert," "kibitzer" or "shuffle," set yet another to a targeted archival search of every academic paper written about Gaza. It will be feast and famine: There will be far less primary reporting done by professionals and far more information available to ordinary citizens.

Which, as the common reference goes, can be good when, say, reporting on Hurricane Katrina, to get authentic voices on the ground rather than those of parachute journalists. But not so good when reporting, as the David Sander did last month in the Times, on the US rejecting aid to Israel when it wanted to attack Iran's main nuclear complex. It's a stunning, complicated, years-in-the-making article that only someone with connections deep and broad and the experience to know how to use them can write. Will we continue to support this sort of reporting? If so, how?

Comments

[Zev]

And the ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness

Which is a wonderful ideal, but does not exist.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

I might concede that, the news not, after all, being written by machines (which would still have been programmed by a human!).

That said, I think experience tends to make any serious journalist (i.e., not Bill O'Reilly) bloviate less rather than more, because one has seen more of the world/issue and, one would hope, knows what must inform the story.

[Alice Bachini-Smith]

How depressing. I'm hoping people will continue to want and pay for good, informed reporting. Journalists may need to find different ways of reaching people if the newspapers stop paying, though.

[Hillary]

Lots of good stuff here. My comment grew into a blog post, which is at http://www.xoxiety.com/blog

[Timothy]

"I think experience tends to make any serious journalist (i.e., not Bill O'Reilly) bloviate less rather than more"

Really? Are these the same "serious journalists" who "flood the zone" to see if they can break down the walls to a men's golf club or dig up dirt on Sarah Palin, but cared nothing about Rahm Emanual's actions at Fannie Mae, for example, or other close Obama associates who were part of looting that institution for that matter. Haven't heard a lot about Barney Frank's "Let's roll the dice a bit more on Fannie Mae" either.

"Name that party" is a game Republicans always play when reading about scandals involving Democrats. With Republicans, party affiliation is in the headline, with Democrats, it is generally missing.

Newspapers are getting what they deserve for completely slagging of the 50% of their audience that knows there are other sides to the story.

Journalists have abdicated their role as watchdogs and become cheerleaders for Obama.

[Timothy]

Also, you will notice that most of the sorrowful, elegiac pieces about the death of the news come from the left, who know they are losing an important political ally which never fails to refuse to ask the burning questions the right has, or to even acknowledge them. A question I would love to hear asked of Obama is "If intense regulation of markets would have prevented this disaster, why are things even worse in Germany? Or socialist Iceland? How did George Bush destroy their economies?"

This question will never be asked because the only interest the press has in Obama is the pretty photos of him with a halo that accompany their daily, real-time hagiography.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

I have zero idea why you made this post about your dislike of Obama, and the incisive, never-before voiced opinion that the Left and Right sometimes clash and sometimes prefer their news from different outlets. I do know you have no idea what I do as a journalist, nor do you seem to have gleaned what the article I linked to is about. So be it. Enjoy Pajamas Media.

[Zev]

Timothy is saying that the track record of newspapers on objectivity and fairness is pretty weak when it comes to their political leanings, which are almost always left, and that many of their vaunted resources are used in the service of their political objectives.

[Jason S.]

This is depressing, but I sorta scratch my head on the subsidizing answer. Heck if I know, though.

There was a link I followed just now that went to an article about the need for "individuated" papers. Sounds plausible. http://www.clickz.com/3632848