Manifesto
Manifesto – a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization.
I think I fall into the “sovereign” category, as I’m neither a government nor an organization. I certainly don’t speak for anyone who does not want me to speak for them, so this is merely a personal position. That should go without saying, as the name on this site is my own, but this is the Internet, and people are touchy here.
It seems that all people concerned with themselves have a Manifesto, right? Well, this one is mine. I’ll start by describing what I think the problem with news and information is, offer a solution, then finish by demanding that you live the way I live. That’s about the way a Manifesto should go, so let’s get after it.
Contents
Modern Information Exchange
Since the Internet became the enormous wealth of information that it currently is (for people who care to use it that way) there have been some executives at media companies doing one of three things.
- Ignore this fact and continue on doing things the way they know – a way, mind you, that they believe to be the “right” way
- Embracing the Internet and all of its potential for changing the way all information is distributed and (gasp!) gleaned
- Something in the middle
Far, far, far too many of those executives are doing that thing in the middle. They see the Internet as a way to utilize a new medium to do the same things they’ve always done. Sure, sometimes they post stories now that allow readers to comment on them. And sure, many news organizations are “embracing” the cool new thing that everyone is hip to, called “blogs.” But very few are actually getting down and interacting with the people they claim to care so much about—the readers.
It’s tragic, honestly. We see the decline of newspapers as they desperately try to keep readers by throwing more and more content online, add comments to existing stories, put video on their websites, and attempt to localize their content to the extreme. But still they are hemorrhaging readers and wondering why. I have an idea why that is.
Their culture has not changed. They are using business models to try and keep people. They are not using innovation. Their “tried and true” methods for adopting the latest crazes (blogging, comments, online distribution) are they types of things old-school MBAs are telling them they need to do. They aren’t concerned with figuring out how the people who have had success online have done it.
Newspapers are built around the communities they serve. They are a part of the community and they act in the interest of the community. The history of a particular newspaper is embedded int he community. They are generally trusted by the members of the community, and their presence generally enhances community life. With that said, one of the faults of newspapers has always been that, as a rule, they act as that mythical Fourth estate. They tend to be above what the normal citizen is doing and act accordingly by disseminating information from higher ups to the regular people. Essentially, they are a part of the ruling class that has a tendency to emerge in any community. Reporters are not concerned with what their readers have to say—only what the important people have to say. Experts and elites rule the paper’s printed pages.
The attempt to move content online and accept comments from readers about stories is merely a grasp of desperation by newspaper companies. Read the comments connected to a story on any newspaper site in the country and you’ll see roughly the same things everywhere: people talking to one another. What’s missing in every single comment thread related to newspapers is the presence of someone inherently educated in the topic of the article—the article’s author. It is so rare that a reporter chimes in to correct fallacies asserted or assumed by commenters on a story that often those fallacies begin to carry weight. Plus, without the inherent expertise (I know, the word is a little off-putting, but when a reporter writes a story, they become more expert than you or I, on average) of the story’s author, the readers are left to the same devices they have always had—each other. The community as a whole is not served with an increase in knowledge. The opportunity to better the thought processes of all members of the community is lost.
My Solution
It’s simple, really. Educate journalists. Okay, it’s not really that simple. You can sit around educating journalists all damn day and they probably won’t care. So the solution might not be to educate journalists, but to grab hold of educated journalists. When I say educated journalists I mean those journalists who understand where the Internet is taking information. They can’t be the same journalists who have long written stories and left them out there for the rest of us to discuss. They need to jump in and discuss those stories with us.
As has been noted by others, I am supposedly a “journalistic philosopher.” Forget the rest of what was said because it’s not nice and shows a lack of understanding by the person saying it. But I’ll take the philosopher part. The philosophy that I try to promote is that communities can only thrive when there is full engagement by the people who work to make them better. Journalism inherently tries to make the community better. And there is a place for all types of journalism—investigative, feature, informative, and interactive. I’ll even go so far as to say that those first three I listed should all be interactive in nature.
As I researched interactivity and community life for my masters project I learned that this type of thinking, while not exactly applied to journalism specifically, is hardly new. Many people concerned with civic life have heard of and read Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.” In it, Putnam describes how the proliferation of organizations that advocate for causes in the community has actually caused the loss of social trust. How can that be? Well, the reason is that while the organizations have grown in number and size, the local efforts of the organizations to engage the public has decreased. It seems to me like that’s at least partially due to the amount of money that can be made without expending a ton of resources on a local level. Does that sound at all like the newspaper business? Local efforts have tended to decrease while the industry seeks more cash. Meanwhile, the local communities become more and more frustrated with their local product and social trust is lost.
Solving that problem might be incredibly difficult. But it might also be easy. If local papers (and by extension, reporters) began to converse with their readers instead of merely talking to them, social trust could be earned back. I see in the increase of citizens who have joined the blogging phenomenon an increase of criticism of news coverage and even a specific criticism of the reporters who write the stories. Would it be imprudent for those reporters to respond and back up the position taken in the story (and yes, stories take positions by virtue of what’s in them)? Some may say so, for sure. Anytime you seek to change the way something is done, you’ll be met with fierce opposition from somewhere. That opposition might even come from the reporters themselves in this case.
My solution to the problem is for news to stop being about one-offinf stories and letting them go from there. Reporters and the editors that tell them what to do need to start engaging the people they write for. The community is as much a part of the news as the papers that print it, so the papers that print it need to start acting like that. Without the back and forth between reporters and readers, we lose a vital component to improving public life—the collective knowledge of the community. This little change in the way reporters and editors approach the stories they are telling might just get the exodus of the community from their products to slow down and maybe even stop. It will also mean that sometimes the reporters and editors will be wrong and have to own up to a mistake or two. In the end, however, the community will be better off for it. Isn’t that what we all want?
Now Go Live Like Me
As I detailed in the previous two sections of this Manifesto, journalism and news organizations have to change. In order for the change to work and make society a better place, the public has to change as well. If we are unwilling to accept that journalism is going to look different, journalism can’t work in this new fashion. So here is what I propose to you as a way to live your life:
- Understand that journalists are people with opinions
- Participate, participate, participate
- Respect that the point is to learn more—on a large scale
- Don’t try to shut people down
- Criticize the ideas, not the person
- Do it above board
Some of those are totally simple and seem like common sense. Unfortunately, they are not common sense. Online participants break those guidelines all the time. Conversations turn to personal attacks, people employ suspect tactics to shut others down, and too many people are unwilling to say something at all.
A major topic in all of this is that journalists are far too easily attacked. And they’re attacked for everything. Bloggers as a whole seem to want to beat up on somebody, so they often choose “clueless” journalists. Or, they don’t like that a journalist has maybe started down a different road so they attack them for not being professional. This needs to stop. We should be encouraging the most open and transparent journalism we’ve ever seen at this point. If a journalist does something that gives us insight into who they are, we should recognize it and not criticize them for it. Go after their ideas, not their method of delivering them.
Of course, if these guidelines were to be followed, some people wouldn’t have anything to say anymore. So I fully understand that people will not follow them. They’ll continue to do things the way they always have and claim that they should have lesser standards than the journalists they love to criticize. That’s a shame.
If you are interested in moving the community forward, follow these guidelines. Also, feel free to add to them. This is not some sort of code of ethics, nor do you need to adhere to these in order to do good. It’s my idea for how we can change the community for the better and build knowledge as a result of everyone’s efforts. That should be the goal, and this is the way I see that we can reach that goal.