Ed: Jack Shafer of Slate fame came to talk to the J-school today. He challenged the audience to live-blog this at the beginning, so I did. This is a rough account of his talk.
The joke is on the people who aren’t new media people.
In the last 10-15 yrs, we’ve seen a convergence of media all into one. It begins at a New Media project. They’re weaving a new media before they rebroadcast it as a newspaper. That’s really new. that’s a totally big deal.
If you look at the history of media, you have 3 or 4 different vertical enterprises, broadcast against broadcast, what happened with the personal computer, they were reduced to one lingua franca: bits. Today’s NYT at its bedrock nature is a new media. The same with broadcast. All broadcasts assemble in digital form, ultimately the things that used to be separate can now be stored on magneto-optical media and sent through the air or through wires. I don’t think people think about this enough. If you have a successful career, your job and your role is going to change. I can’t predict that. I’m not in the prediction business. The digital storm that
I think the two of you who have declared new media are the sharpest and the others are dullards.
The media that I work in now is at least 10 years old. I first saw the web in 1994.
Most people maybe saw this when they were seniors in high school or in college, it’s a native media to you. If we were to compare it to TV we would be in the year 1958. Broadcast TV really gets going in the post-war era. 10 years later there have been huge strides.
There were whole documentary units, and they developed a new grammar.
Day one of broadcast news is a newsreader. There’s no pictures. There’s no inflection. Plain-rat presentation. 10 years they developed a grammar. I’m very dissapointed as to what the Internet has accomplished in its first 10 years. So in that sense this New Media has not been creative or as much as it could be. I think it’s left the people who are coming in the second or third wave the great opportunity to shake this thing into something new. All of you are fundamentally going to be Internet journalists. It’s going to be created and available in a web fashion.
What sort of ideas do I have? Watching the Matrix, one of the ways I thought would be to put a data port in the back of everybody’s head. [Shirine: “Is he serious?”] Another idea was to have robots perform them as musicals.
I want to encourage people to think of the Web as their natural media. I know that history is a big part of what they teach at Columbia. When you’re studying history, look at ways that old ways of conveying information were disturbed and uprooted and transformed and think about doing that with the Web. Thought I’m dissapointed with what the Web has done, I’m pretty happy with how the Web has assembled and created a brand new audience.
Newspapers were traditionally local. Likewise broadcast were mostly local. But since its founding the Web has been an international medium. I would not underestimate how important that is. The good news for journalists is that you have a potential audience of 6.5 billion. [Ed: Not true.]
Reuters recently announced that they were going to offshore various journalism jobs to India. So that’s sorta the downside.
Which sorta brings me to the vocational part. Everybody here is of average age 27/28 and you’re about the age I was when i decided that I was going to be a journalist. I packed groceries, drove trucks, moved furniture. I don’t know if any of you have such a distinguished background. What’s differrent from you is that when I entered journalism boundaries were much harder to crack. You could get an internship at a newspaper or radio station. You couldn’t be a sole proprietor. What we’ve seen is the success of people being sole proprietors.
Matt Drudge with very little education but lots of chutzpah created a tablod sensationalism and rumor mongering and gumshoe reporting to create something brand new. The real pioneers in journalism tend to be these outsiders. They don’t have the constraints of the profession binding them. That gives them sort of leverage over their career.
He’s taken the gossip forum and the snarky observation and he’s applied it to Washington politics and city living in NY and products of Gizmodo and Hollywood. You would never find a major media company saying that we could use this technique to use this new enterprise. Time Magazine would spend 3 years and $15 mil, Cond� Nast would take a year and half to launch it. Nick Denton has taken a simple idea with great execution with a valuable new kind of journalism.
I would encourage people once again to breaking those rules. Bob Woodward: “All great moments are when defying authority.” He had to struggle and fight his bosses.
My background and my qualifications for doing what I do are nil. I was no more of an expert on the press than anyone else. What qualified me to be a press critic was that I had a strong interest in journalist and I liked answereing questions on how it was put together. I wrote this press column mostly out of interest. I started in 1986. At first I tried to get other journalists to write about the Times and the Post critically. They were worried that they would alienate people. Because I thought it was a fluke I thought that maybe I have no career beyond this job maybe I should burn all the bridges before I encounter them.
What the Press afforded me was to do something no one had ever done, which was real time criticism of the press. So much of what has been appeared is months or years old.
I think that this would be like writing about the World Series six months after the fact. That’s what the New Yorker was doing, with Roger Kahn. When we got started at Slate, we had just come to a time it was possible for me to have access to hundreds of newspapers that have been published that day.
In a fast-paced world, I’m addressing and criticizing the performance of my peers much as a theatre-critic would, someone who appeared in a play that day.
one of the things that I wrote about in the column today is about, that we’re at this age now where press criticism is easily accomplished if you sit down and read those newspapers. Why don’t more newspapers avail themselves to this? No press critics. I tried to figure out why that is. Though I’ve been practicing this, it wasn’t until yesterday that I ran across this great quote. There is this enormous blind spot that newspapers and broadcasters willed upon themselves.
You almost never read the NYT criticize the Post or ABC take on CBS. The New Yorker rarely slashes and burns another publication. They want to vilify politicians. I think that my success has been a function of the fact that I’m the only person who seems to be that willing to do it on a regular basis and in real time. The others are at Vanity Fair and Tim Rutton at the LA Times.
Talk about how I form a column and where ideas come from.
I read in April 03, Judy Miller encountering this mounds of dirt where the precursors to WMD are found. I couldn’t believe that a pile of bullshit that it was. I ventured that 90% of the people in this room could analyzed this thing. She won’t name what the precursors are. She hasn’t spoken with this Iraqi scientist. What’s more is that she has submitted this article to the army for vetting and censorship before it’s published. I was astonished that it was on Page 1. I continued to follow the journalism of Judith Miller that summer and found that she had published piles of bullshit before and continued to do so. This is from what I consider the best newspaper in America. Anybody who looks at her stories would say “you’ve got to be kidding.”
I kept a campaign against the NYT arguing that the Times owed it to its readers to correct the record. We have a right to get it wrong because you can wait four or five years for a PhD dissertation. It took the NYT almost a year to acknowledge what I said and what other writers on the Web to finally go back and take a look at her reporting.
It still strikes me as very bizarre that a handful of people writing on the Web in a profession that’s as large as ours were criticizing Judith Miller and the NYT. One of the reasons that I think that my writing and the writing of William Jackson were able to make a difference was that the NYT could not ignore what we were saying. If you go back 10 years ago, if I was a Washington City Paper it would be very easy to ignore. It’s a newspaper that’s printed 100,000 a day. Journalists and policymakers aren’t going to be alerted to it.
Jim Romenesko’s site at the Poynter institute. Romenesko has made our profession much more accountable than it’s ever been. CJR and American Journalism Review do great work. If you’ve thrown a turd in the punchbowl and it takes three or four months, a lot of people are going to drink it and get sick from that. He has a very ecumenical view of the press. I have a lot of respect for him.
This isn’t part of my talk but there’s another current controversy which newspapers are turning their eyes away from. Newsday and its sister paper Oy! and the Dallas Morning News have committed huge circulation fraud. In the case of the Chicago Sun Times they’ve exaggerated their numbers by 25%. The press has largely reported this in brief things in their business pages. These aren’t just accidents. There are people in these newspapers who basically told lies about their circulation so that they can command a higher advertising rate so that those corporations can make more money. If this had happened in natural gas or airlines or the making of Barbie dolls there would be well-sourced journalism coming out of all papers. The newspapers are ignoring this. I think that this is because this is one of the great uncovered frauds.
My email is pressbox@hotmail.com
I’m getting close to the 45 min mark.
One of the rules that changed with online journalism is that online journalism are able to harness the wisdom of their readers in a way that newspapers can’t. 15 years ago if you had the phone number of a journalist you could call them at their desk, today you have caller ID. Journalists have closed themselves off and have insulated themselves from the greater culture. I get so many great ideas from publishing my email address. Or they bring me down when I get too full of myself. That doesn’t happen to newspaper or broadcast journalists. Right down to the Letters to the Editor now. They’ll cut out all the vibrant exciting and telling words and will reduce it to monosyllables and destroy your argument. No strong opinions need be stated unless the editors want it stated.
I want to give a bright parting sun-shining optimistic send-off and that is to really praise Russ Kick who is the Matt Drudge of the early 21st Century. Russ Kick is a guy with not much journalism training. He started a website called the Memory Hole. It’s paradoxical. In a time where all information are being digitized, has been week by week been pulled down. The reason why he is one of my heroes is that he and others have recorded this and have put it up on mirror sites. I’m sure everyone’s followed that the war dead need not have a photograph of their caskets. Laws really are on the side that the dead person has a right to privacy. That’s been our government’s desire.
Only one journalist had the balls to FOIA that information. Something that any journalist or me could do.
I really urge you to go to his site. He’s shown that there is a dark side to the Web and the Web visionaries thought it would be sweetness and light, that it would be obliterating evils and turds in punchbowls but what we’ve found is that the govt can co-opt the Web to reduce the amount of information. He’s a guy who is bringing a kind of enlightenment.
Thank you.
