The survival of quality news calls for a new approach to writing and reporting. Inspiration could come from blogging and magazine storytelling and also bring back memories of the 70′s New Journalism movement.
News reporting is aging badly. Legacy newsrooms style books look stuck in a last Century formalism (I was tempted to write “formalin“). Take a newspaper, print or online. When it comes news reporting, you see the same old structure dating back to the Fifties or even earlier. For the reporter, there is the same (affected) posture of effacing his/her personality behind facts, and a stiff structure based on a string of carefully arranged paragraphs, color elements, quotes, etc.
I hate useless quotes. Most often, for journalists, such quotes are the equivalent of the time-card hourly workers have to punch. To their editor, the message is ‘Hey, I did my my job; I called x, y, z’ ; and to the the reader, ‘Look, I’m humbly putting my personality, my point of view behind facts as stated by these people’ — people picked by him/herself, which is the primary (and unavoidable) way to twist a story. The result becomes borderline ridiculous when, after a lengthy exposé in the reporter’s voice to compress the sources’ convoluted thoughts, the line of reasoning concludes with a critical validation such as :
“Only time will tell”, said John Smith, director of the social studies at the University of Kalamazoo, consultant for the Rand Corporation, and author of “The Cognitive Deficit of Hyperactive Chimpanzees”.
I’m barely making this up. Each time I open a carbon-based newspaper (or read its online version), I’m stuck by how old-fashioned news writing remains. Unbeknownst to the masthead (i.e. editorial top decision-makers) of legacy media, things have changed. Readers no longer demand validating quotes that weigh the narrative down. They want to be taken from A to B, with the best possible arguments, and no distraction or wasted time.
Several factors dictate an urgent evolution in the way newspapers are written.
1/ Readers’ Time Budget. People are deluged with things to read. It begins at 7:00 in the morning and ends up late into the night. The combination of professional contents (mail, reports, PowerPoint presentations) and social networking feeds, have put traditional and value-added contents (news, books) under great pressure. Multiple devices and the variable level of attention that each of them entails create more complications: a publishing house can’t provide the same content for a smartphone screen to be read in a cramped subway as for a tablet used in lean-back mode at home. More than ever, the publisher is expected to clearly arbitrate between the content that is to be provided in a concise form and the one that justifies a long, elaborate narrative. The same applies to linking and multi-layer constructs: reading a story that opens several browser tabs on a 22-inch screen is pleasant — and completely irrelevant for quick lunchtime mobile reading.
2/ Trust factor / The contract with the Brand. When I pick a version of The New York Times, The Guardian, or a major French newspaper, this act materializes my trust (and hope) in the professionalism associated with the brand. In a more granular way, it works the same for the writer. Some are notoriously sloppy, biased, or agenda-driven; others are so good than they became a brand by themselves. My point: When I read a byline I trust, I assume the reporter has performed the required legwork — that is collecting five or ten times the amount of information s/he will use in the end product. I don’t need the reporting to be proven or validated by an editing construct that harks back to the previous century. Quotes will be used only for the relevant opinion of a source, or to make a salient point, not as a feeble attempt to prove professionalism or fairness.
3 / Competition from the inside. Strangely enough, newspapers have created their own gauge to measure their obsolescence. By encouraging their writing staff to blog, they unleashed new, more personal, more… modern writing practices. Fact is, many journalists became more interesting on their own blogs than in their dedicated newspaper or magazine sections. Again, this trend evaded many editors and publishers who consider blogging to be a secondary genre, one that can be put outside a paywall, for instance. (This results in a double whammy: not only doesn’t the paper cash on blogs, but it also frustrates paid-for subscribers).
4/ The influence of magazine writing. Much better than newspapers, magazines have always done a good job capturing readers’ preferences. They’ve have always been ahead in market research, graphic design, concept and writing evolution. (This observations also applies to the weekend magazines operated by large dailies). As an example, magazine writers have been quick to adopt first person accounts that rejuvenated journalism and allowed powerful narrative. In many newspapers, authors and their editors still resists this.
Digital media needs to invent its own journalistic genres. (Note the plural, dictated by the multiplicity of usages and vectors). The web and its mobile offspring, are calling for their own New Journalism comparable to the one that blossomed in the Seventies. While the blogosphere has yet to find its Tom Wolfe, the newspaper industry still has a critical role to play: It could be at the forefront of this essential evolution in journalism. Failure to do so will only accelerate its decline.
– frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
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13 Comments
Very well put Federic. Digital news are and need to be essentials driven and published, in any platform, not hard news simply reformatted.
I dont miss ur monday notes
Journalism should go the way of the presentation of the game “the walking dead”.
Regarding your paragraph about Readers’ Time Budget your article is already too long for a quick read…
Great post. Re: “By encouraging their writing staff to blog, they unleashed new, more personal, more… modern writing practices.”
Also more entertaining and/or engaging. Which can lead to more page views. Which directly affects the profitability of a web site. Less authoritative, more personal, leaving more room for feedback from readers in the form of comments. And more feedback means longer time-on-site and multiple visits to check reponses to comments.
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I think you must take care to remember that readership is not a zero-sum game. In the United States, smaller community daily and weekly newspapers (all with websites) are flourishing — both in terms of readership and profit. There is no greater brand loyalty than to an under-1,000 circulation weekly — and we have thousands of them.
Some types of news are still read for relaxation and communal connection. The old style seems to work well here. Other types of news are read for quick surveillance, requiring another style of writing. And some types of news are read mostly out of habit — where style matters less than brand.
The trick is to adopt the new while finding the best use for the old.
Hi, I posted this comment on another blog that discussed this post: http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ontherecord/2013/02/18/the-wrap-of-the-week-2/
…so I figured I’d post it here too (slightly edited) for a bit of debate:
So here goes:
I think there’s a lot of value in the news journalist “effacing his/her personality behind facts”, and in solid structure and format. One thing that worries me is that digitial journalism seems to be driving a personality-driven format, with the journalist-as-celebrity. Look at Guido Fawkes for politics, Milo Yiannopoulos for tech (including posting about this weight loss on his online magazine, The Kernel) or Perez Hilton for celebrity news, even. Social media seems to drive a certain form of narcissism, where everyone is desperately trying to cultivate and show off an online personality, and to an extent that same culture seems to influence digital journalism too. Of course there were always plenty of narcissistic personalities in old print media, but the required structure of reporting — the impersonal who/what/why/where/when — meant that it didn’t influence their journalism as much. I like the stale old structure to an extent, it serves a purpose. This morning I went to the Guardian website to find out the latest on the Pistorius case, but rather than being able to find the information I need quickly — in a simple, short news story in the traditional format — I had to scroll through an endless live blog to find out what had happened in the courtoom.
I guess my point is that I think there is value to structure in news writing (surely it means more concise news stories for one?), and I’m skeptical about whether letting a journalist’s personality into news is a good thing.
That said, I’m a huge reader of the kind of longform, narrative journalism you seem to be encouraging. I’d love to see more of it, particularly here in Ireland where it’s always been a rarity. But I reckon that kind of journalism belongs on the features pages or in the magazine, rather than in the news section.
Frederic,
You say “When I pick a version of The New York Times, The Guardian, or a major French newspaper” and “When I read a byline I trust.” This identifies you as a thoughtful reader with the time to read a good deal of news and make a smart decision on whom to trust. If only most people in the world had this amount of time and leisure! For many people, news is not the center of their lives. They encounter information here and there. And when they do, they expect transparency, like quotes and information that are clearly attributed. I certainly wouldn’t defend unneeded and silly quotes. But je ne jeterais pas le bebe avec l’eau de bain. See also http://www.ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/tag/objectivity/
Frederic,
You say “When I pick a version of The New York Times, The Guardian, or a major French newspaper” and “When I read a byline I trust.” This identifies you as a thoughtful reader with the time to read a good deal of news and make a smart decision on whom to trust. If only most people in the world had this amount of time and leisure! For many people, news is not the center of their lives. They encounter information here and there. And when they do, they expect transparency, like quotes and information that are clearly attributed. I certainly wouldn’t defend unneeded and silly quotes. But je ne jeterais pas le bebe avec l’eau de bain. See also http://www.ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/tag/objectivity/
When I pick up a copy of the New York Times, I know I will usually find in depth articles, but only ones which support the political and social views prevalent in the New York Times and most of the major media. I know that if the subject is, say, gun control, that the article will always present “evidence” for it, even as the journalist gets important details wrong, because few journalists use guns or understand them. And that sort of mess is spread through most topics.
In other words, the problem with journalism is not just digital media, it is credibility. On national polls, journalists come out very poorly. People properly do not trust them.
Once, in the US, journalism was openly biased. You knew where the reporter was coming from, and so did he. Now, it is quietly biased, and usually even the journalist doesn’t know his own biases. In the past, journalists came from the ordinary population. They didn’t get a J-school degree – they just turned out to be good at journalism.
Now journalists are a self selected club, and as such comprise an echo chamber – their biases are reflected by their peers and as a result, are invisible to them. “Everyone thinks that way.” Journalists are trained with the conceit that they are objective observers – something no human is capable of. They are taught to avoid bias by balance – contrasting viewpoints – a deux ex machina which fails in its job.
In the last 60 years or so, journalists in the US have created the myth of objectivity. This gives them the moral authority to resist “editorial influence” by the owners of the media. But they also resist correcting their own biases, because they believe themselves unbiased.
So in the new digital media, we see a new group of journalists – younger, with the biases they picked up in college and the mass media – themselves imagining that they are objective, and that they too are “speaking truth to power” – as long as the power isn’t… say… Islamists, or even Obama.
I would be much happier if the news was reported by ordinary literate citizens.
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