| Author's Podcast
1 February, 2006 - American News is Comedy 2 February, 2006 - A Uniformly Uninformed Citizenry 7 February, 2006 - ... Nor Any Drop to Drink 8 February, 2006 - Reader Comments 10 February, 2006 - Lead by Example: OUR STORY 15 February, 2006 - Kidnap & Ransom: Perspective 23 February, 2006 - Kidnap & Ransom: Conclusion |
7 February 2006: What did you think of that recent in-depth series run in your local paper on how too many innocent people end up behind prison bars because of the incompetence of the court appointed lawyers they are assigned? You didn't see that one? Oh. It wasn't thereä
Okay then, how about that great investigation the news magazine did on the network of locations across the United States and Canada that gangs from the south of China, especially from the Fujan region, have had established for years to facilitate their human trafficking? What do you mean that that there was no such series? Both of these are stories that have legs and have been ripe for the picking for years!
Oh. I understand; news is a business and those stories don't have the entertainment value that most daily newspaper publishers and any of the national Mouthpiece Media (MM) organizations in the United States want to waste their time presenting. I'm always sorry to hear that.
How about the Web then? The overhead is certainly low enough and most Bloggers I know seem to have a great deal of time on their hands. Certainly they are busily producing informative, well-researched investigative pieces, yes?
No?
My own experience on this medium, the World Wide Web (Web,) where some people claim I have lived for most of its existence, is that - though it began as a research medium and a means of sharing investigations by academics - when the Web went public in the mid-1990s it became a medium of extremes. Or, more accurately, those Web sites that had the most pronounced successes were the ones that catered to the extremes. The two extremes that appear to have had the most success over the years are those that exhibited anger (first known as "rants" and nowadays best demonstrated by the plethora of places in the Blogosphere that specialize in political diatribes and polemics) and laughter (see most of the entrants here at the Contagious Festival.) I'd venture a guess that, even looking at the true "Killer App'," e-mail, a good thirty percent of that traffic is forwarded jokes. But investigative journalism on the Web, well-researched stories that inform and inspire? The evidence would suggest that most surfers simply don't support it.
But I don't agree.
Just as there were certain shibboleths for creating "sticky" Web sites eight to ten years ago that we now know were bogus, today's against deep content on this medium seems invalid to me. Can you remember when these were The Rules?
- Nobody will read an article over 500 words on their computer.
- Don't put lots of graphics on your Web pages, people won't wait.
- Shockwave Flash will never catch-on, it's just a gimmick.
- Don't put links on your page without a "target" tag because people will click away and never come back.
We all know these Rules were not true and were shortsighted. As broadband becomes more ubiquitous in the United States, Europe, parts of Asia and Africa, every single one of those Rules becomes more invalid.
What hasn't caught up is how we define and present content on the Web, particularly those of us who are running sites committed to news or advocacy.
Only three places immediately come to mind when I think of in-depth investigative work on the Web:
- The Smoking Gun, which recently broke the Jim Frey hoax story and has distinguished itself over the years for this willingness to dig;
- Amy Goodman's DemocracyNow! which will often run a series of installments on a story, and;
- Some of the work produced by Danny Schecter at The Media Channel.
Other than those three places here on the Web, I've learned not to expect very much in terms of depth of research on a story. Even worse, I find that most Web publishers and producers have bought into the notion that it is not worth the effort.
At my own magazine, we've tried to address this issue by having an annual Focus Issue. Various of our columnists and contributors produce work on this Focus Issue throughout the year so that we can provide our readers some depth and perspective. Last year we did a series of articles on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This year our Focus Issue is an investigation into the looming crisis of potable water on this planet. But, once again, that puts us in a very small and - as I said in the introductory post here - marginalized group of Web sites.
What does that mean for this medium, as more and more people migrate here for news and information? Sadly, I believe, that says that what is being provided in terms of journalism, even "citizen journalism," is spotty, shallow, incomplete or misleading. Matt Drudge is a classic example of how much of what is foisted as journalism is more likely rumor and innuendo. (Sometimes, I suspect places like the latter of actually producing out-and-out hoaxes. There is no way to be sure.)
That leaves you and I, if we are getting the majority of our "news" on the Web, spending most of our time reading people writing about what other people are writing about. That's an echo chamber, that's not journalism; no new ground is broken and no new information is imparted, a sorry state of affairs when you contemplate it.
What has happened on this medium is that we now have millions of Blogs, tens of millions of Web sites but - to paraphrase Coleridge's Ancient Mariner - Web sties, Web sites everywhere, nor any deep journalism to "drink."
A number of Web sites have made themselves very successful following exactly the parrot model. Their daily business is to offer up a précis of what is written somewhere else and give it the high-falutin' name "aggregation." And the users/readers fall for it. How much aggregation do we actually need? I suspect about twenty percent of what we're being offered now. How much actual reporting do we need and would we appreciate? My guesstimate here would be 100% more than we can get on this medium today.
The argument can be made, and you'll find many in the offline version of the MM all-too-willing to make this argument, The Web is not built for news delivery or serious investigative reporting. Nobody likes reading from a monitor or spending that much time at any one Web site. Besides, most of the so-called journalists on the Web are just vain bloggers who think their opinions on any given topic is "news-worthy."
There's a lot of truth in all of the assertions of the foregoing argument. However, that perspective misses a larger point and an emerging trend. It is a fact that more people get their news from the Web (emerging trend) which means that the larger point is that there are established and emerging Web journalists.
Four years ago, I produced a series of lectures for the Novi Sad School of Journalism in the former-Yugoslavia. My mission was to prepare a group of graduate students for the possibility and potential of building their careers as ONLINE ONLY reporters and editors. (This project was funded by IREX, an organization committed to expanding the reach of the free press in Eastern Europe.)
In these lectures, I tried to make the counter-case to the one presented in italics above. My thesis in these lectures was that the basic principles of good journalism cross the boundaries of media. At the heart of good journalism, as Davis Merritt so trenchantly asserts in Knightfall: Knight Ridder And How The Erosion Of Newspaper Journalism Is Putting Democracy At Risk (AMACOM, 2005) are the best practices, independent of the medium, the tenets of good newspaper journalism, digging, fact-checking, working multiple sources in the search for Truth.
It's a laborious task in some cases - unless you're covering a breaking story, doing on-spot coverage, like covering a war zone, but its rewards to the public are inestimable.
But also, and as importantly, as we laud ourselves for the good journalism we do accomplish on the Web - and also as the "citizen journalism" movement gains more adherents and clout via the Blogs - we need to challenge ourselves to recognize when we get the story "right" and when we're just whistling in the wind, so to speak. Some of us are beginning to take these issues seriously. The mere fact of the existence of the Online Journalism Review (OJR), produced by the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, speaks to a commitment to quality work on the Web. This March, a number of independent Web publishers, myself included, will be getting together to talk about many of the issues I'm raising in this project for the Huffington Post.
Underlying all of these concerns are other issues that those of us who love this work take very seriously:
- Are we being watchdogs on government?
- Are we "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted?"
- Are we really serving the function of a Fourth Estate? (In the non-pejorative sense of that term.)
In my next post, in a day or so, we'll take the next logical step in this "Manifesto" of mine about the media, especially online publications.
Thanks for dropping by.
Go to First Post - AMERICAN NEWS IS COMEDY
Go to the Second Post - A Uniformly Uninformed Citizenry
Go to the Next Post - Reader Comments
Go to the Fifth Post - Lead by Example: OUR STORY
Go to the Fifth Post - Kidnap & Ransom: Perspective
Go to Final Post - Kidnap & Ransom: Conclusion
© 2006, Rod Amis.
E-mail your comments to rod@g21.net.
