John Darnton is a good novelist, and was a superb journalist in a long career at the New York Times. Now he’s curator of the Polk Awards, one of only a couple of journalism prizes that means anything. (Journalists have a tedious tendency to give themselves prizes, more so than any other business I can name.)
The Polk awards have been ahead of the game in recent years. Two, notably, have recognized that journalism has moved squarely into the Digital Age, even though most of the kinds of journalism achievements that win big prizes — notably investigative reports — continue to be done by organizations willing to spend serious money and devote serious time to the efforts.
The first pathbreaker, which falls into the category of organization-based media that happens to live on the web in this case, went to Josh Marshall and his team at Talking Points Memo in 2007. The one making waves this year, and the more relevant here, went to the still-anonymous person who captured the video images of the death Neda Agha-Soltan in the Iranian election protests early last year.
Darnton, interviewed by Mediaite, an online publication, offered left-handed compliments to the Neda video — making it entirely clear that he doesn’t really believe average people (as opposed to journalists with years of experience) have much to offer beyond bystander status. From the column by Willard C. Rappleye Jr.:
“(Darnton) does take umbrage, though, against the term ‘citizen journalist.’ ‘If you’re walking down the street and somebody collapses in front of you and somebody else runs over and administers CPR because they happen to know it, and saves the victim, you wouldn’t go home and say you saw somebody saved by a citizen doctor. You’d say you saw someone saved by a bystander who happened to know CPR. Right? ‘Same thing here. I like to call them bystanders — not journalists. Just good bystanders.’”
I’ve long since stopped taking umbrage when people don’t get it. But to hear stuff like this from someone with Darnton’s track record is dismaying.
He clearly does not understand — or if he does, he deeply regrets — that journalism is no longer the province of the people like himself, who rose on well defined career tracks through a business that was comprised mostly of big monopoly organizations or a few members of an oligopoly, businesses that achieved their economic power due to conditions that no longer apply.
The regular people who capture important videos and pictures — or who blog authortitatively what they’ve seen, etc. etc. etc. — are not journalists. But they have committed acts of journalism, profoundly important acts of journalism. That is their role — or more accurately one of their roles — in the ecosystem, and it’s becoming at least as important as any other role including the one played by the people who do it for a living or for a few freelance dollars.
Just as reporter shield laws (assuming we should have them) should protect journalism, not the people who are accredited or licensed to be journalists, in these awards — and in everyday life — it is the act of journalism we should be celebrating.
Darnton’s instincts are sound. And his wish to recognize the values of great journalism is absolutely correct. But I hope he’ll expand his field of vision. And I hope he’ll join those of us who are working on ways to help those people he relegates to bystander roles become even more active and knowledgeable participants in the journalism sphere.
Citizens who commit acts of journalism: Instead of semi-sneers, they deserve our support in every possible way.
Before terms like podcasting and citizen media were common, several sites and public radio storytellers were already on top of helping non-professionals tell their stories. The sites I want to list here offer great examples of what amateurs can do with a recording device and a bit of encouragement.
Transom.org is produced by Atlantic Public Media and is a site for welcoming newbs into the world of public radio. In 2003, it was the first website to win a Peabody award and did so by offering great examples of audio storytelling and solid instruction on how to produce such stories.
HearingVoices.com is a series featuring the best of public radio. It hosts its own “Learn Radio” list with great links related to both storytelling and production.
SoundPortraits.org hosts a great Interview Checklist by David Isay. Its beauty is in its brevity and would make a great pre-game rundown before interviews until you get the hang of it.
The Teen Reporter’s Handbook at RadioDiaries.org is another great reference for getting started in audio. As well, Radio Diaries itself is a commendable project replete with good examples of citizen storytelling. The goal of the project is to find folks whose voices are rarely heard and get a recording device in their hands to begin a personal diary. Hosted documentaries include the voices of prisoners, unique teens and carnival retirees.
If you’re still hungry for digital storytelling links, McLellan Wyatt’s list will keep you busy for weeks.
Finally, check out Ira Glass on Storytelling. He gives an excellent breakdown between merely reporting and telling a story people want to hear:
NY Times Public Editor: The Olympics? Don’t Tell Me: “‘Could you please ask the editor of the front Web page to not name the winners within the headlines/sub-headlines?’ asked Ken Waters of Phoenix. Matt Gooch of Harrisonburg, Va. said he was disappointed when The Times reported the results of the men’s downhill before NBC showed the event. ‘This is not Taliban news, nor TARP news, or even Paula Jones type news,’ Gooch said. ‘There is no meaning to this except the anticipation and suspense that sports viewers feel watching the event live. Please help me understand why your organization needs to spoil the experience.’”
Good. Grief.
The fact that the ombudsman of the New York Times needs to explain to readers why his newspaper reports actual news as it happens — and Olympic results are actual news — is a depressing commentary on our nation’s entertainment-driven culture.
NBC bought U.S. TV rights to the Olympics, and NBC has chosen not to present live coverage. It wants to put the high-profile events on at night in the U.S. when it can score the biggest audience. It’s entirely about money, as the Olympics are in a general sense at this point.
But to suggest that real news organizations should defer to NBC’s greed is beyond idiotic. It’s pathetic.
Mr. Waters of Phoenix and Mr. Gooch of Harrisonburg, and others like them, need remedial education in at least three respects. First, they need to understand that news organizations are in business to report news. Second, no one is forcing them to look at the Times website in the first place.
And, third, remember: The spoiler here is NBC, which wants you to live in a fantasy world. Blame the entertainment moguls there, not real journalists, if you learn who won an event before NBC deigns to show it on TV.
Any news organization holding back on news because entertainment consumers want to live in their fantasy worlds deserves utter contempt. As a (very small) shareholder in the New York Times Co., I’m glad to see that America’s best newspaper has the right standards in this regard.
UPDATE: Several commenters have defended the notion that news organizations have some kind of duty to hold back their reports or put reports on pages where news viewers won’t have to see the reports. One commenter, who says he’s a journalism school graduate, even suggested a “civic function” in such a method. This is head-slappingly strange logic (as I responded):
To suggest there’s some kind of civic function in asking news organizations to withhold breaking news of an entertainment event (I agree the Olympics are entertainment more than anything else) is bizarre. There is no civic value in two corporate media giants colluding to help one of them make enough money to justify its overpayment for TV rights. NBC has absolutely no interest in performing a civic function; its entire motivation is the bottom line.
Your idea of “timeliness” is equally odd. No one is preventing you from structuring your news the way you want to. If you prefer not to learn about news events until later in the day, or tomorrow or next week, you have an easy way of doing this: Don’t read, listen to or watch news reports until you’re ready to learn what’s happened. You will also need to stay away from the water cooler and conversations with friends and colleagues who don’t share your desire to learn about the outcome of ski races only when a giant media corporation deems it most profitable.
I watched the skiing last night on NBC. The network severely edited the race, ignoring the runs of roughly half of the top seed (first 15 racers) because the women crashed or were otherwise deemed uninteresting to the American audience by the NBC entertainment editors. It inserted a vast number of commercials into what little of the event it decided to broadcast. This is the civic virtue you want to reward? Please.
Throughout my print-journalism career, I worked hard to stay at the edges of organization charts—the lower edges. I had opportunities to run several publications, but in the end I decided that my best role at the time was reporting, writing and (as a columnist) being an advocate. I admire many of the editors I’ve known, and have had some great bosses. But I’ve steered clear of the hiring and firing role, and—though I ran the business affairs of a group of musicians in an earlier career—I never had to make a payroll in the print media business.
Most traditional journalists have also been insulated from the business side of journalism, but not because they’ve chosen to steer clear of it—others have steered them away. Management requires them to keep away from the advertising department, as if they’d get a terminal disease if they had much contact.
This separation of church and state, as we journalists called it with such hubris, came from good motives: not to allow the advertisers—the main customers of the newspaper, if the people who supply the most revenues are the main customers—to dictate or, allegedly, even influence news coverage. This separation was always something of a fiction, given publishers’ and broadcasting station managers’ business duties and influence over the people who worked for them, but it did serve a purpose.
Unfortunately, ivory-tower isolation had more than one downside. In particular, it served, especially during the monopoly and oligopoly decades, to insulate journalists from any semblance of reality about the industries in which they worked. So when the financial underpinnings started getting shaky, more than a decade ago, the journalists were too willing cover their eyes and ears and pretend nothing was wrong. And, later, when reality arrived, layoffs and staff buyouts gathered momentum, and news organizations started getting sold to even greedier owners, the journalists suspended belief as the new owners promised they had “no plans” for further cutbacks.
My experiences on the business side of life, both early in my adulthood and more recently as co-founder of a failed startup, investor, and co-founder of a successful startup, persuade me that one of 20th century pro journalism’s cardinal flaws has been the church-state wall. By all means, tell advertisers (and mean it) that they don’t run the news operations. But a journalist who has no idea how his industry really works from a business perspective is missing way too much of the big picture.
If I ran a news organization today (or a journalism school), I’d insist that the journalists understood, appreciated and embraced the new arena we all inhabit—and that emphatically includes how business works. They’d understand the variety of financial models that support media, especially the organization they worked for, and would be versed in the lingo of CPM, SEO, and the like. I would not ask journalists to grub for the most page views, a new trend that tends to bring out the worst in media, but would very much want them to know what was happening in all parts of their enterprise, not just the content area.
YouTube Project: Report is holding its second contest for aspiring journalists, offering $10,000 grants to five winners. Partnered with the Pulitzer Center, the contest asks journalism newcomers to film a day in the life of a compelling person. Because of this newbie focus, the YouTube page offers several videos with basic, but solid production advice for amateurs. You’ll find videos on camera basics and lighting tips, but this one on reporting composition gives an idea of what they offer:
Keeping in spirit, I’m producing this post on my G1, using the app described.
The new WordPress app for Android has been released and it’s quite nice. While blogging from a phone still feels a bit limited, this app is a good option for blogging away from a machine.
The application integrates with self-hosted blogs and features tabs for managing comments, posts and pages. The screen for writing posts integrates with Android’s image gallery. (Here, it becomes an even greater travesty that Android doesn’t provide an easy way to take screenshots.) Once written, posts can be published or uploaded as drafts.
Also nice is the comment alert feature, allowing the user to get updates when new comments show up. If you require comment approval for new posters, this can free you from your machine and frequent dashboard refreshes.
In all, it’s nice to see this app taken seriously with bases well-covered in its initial version.
Next week I’ll be attending a one-day conference at the Paley Center for Media in New York. The center and the Carnegie Corp. are asking what the future of journalism education should be — who should do it, how it should be done, and for what purpose.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and have blogged a number of ideas in the past several years, and one chapter in my upcoming book, Mediactive, will look closely at media education. Here’s an excerpt:
If I ran a journalism school, I would start with the same basic principles of honorable, high-quality journalism and mediactivism, and embed them at the core of everything else. If our students didn’t understand and appreciate them, nothing else we did would matter very much.
With the principles as the foundation, I would, among many other things:
Emphasize undergraduate journalism degrees as great liberal arts programs, even more valuable that way than as training for journalism careers. At the same time, focus graduate journalism studies on helping people with expertise in specific areas to be the best possible journalists in their fields.
Do away with the still-common “track” system for would-be journalists where students focus on print, broadcast, online, etc. These are merging. There would be one track. We wouldn’t just recognize our students’ digital future; we’d immerse them in it.
Encourage, and require in some cases, cross-disciplinary learning and doing. We’d create partnerships around the university, working with business, engineering/computer science, film, political science, law, design and many other programs. The goals would be both to develop our own projects and to be an essential community-wide resource for the future of local media.
Teach students not just the basics of digital media but also the value of data and programming to their future work. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to become programmers; but they absolutely need to know how to communicate with programmers. We’d also encourage computer science undergraduates to become journalism graduate students, so they can help create tomorrow’s media.
Require all students to learn basic statistics, survey research and fundamental scientific methodology. The inability of journalists to understand what they’re reading is one of journalism’s — and society’s — major flaws.
Encourage a research agenda with deep connections to key media issues of today. More than ever, we need solid data and rigorous analysis. And translate faculty research into language average people can understand as opposed to the dense, even impenetrable, prose that’s clear (if it really is) only to readers of academic journals.
Require all journalism students to understand business concepts, especially those relating to media. This is not just to cure the longstanding ignorance of business issues in the craft, but also to recognize that today’s students will be among the people who develop tomorrow’s journalism business models. We’d discuss for-profit and not-for-profit methods, and look at advertising, marketing, social networking, and search-engine optimization, among many other elements.
Make entrepreneurship a core part of journalism education. Arizona State University, where I’m working, is among several schools working on this, and the early experiments are gratifying. Several of our student projects have won funding. At City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis has received foundation funding for student projects to continue after the class is over, based on semester-ending competitive “pitches” to a judging panel of journalists and investors. We need to see more and more of these and other kinds of experiments.
Recognize that not all, and probably not most, students will end up as entrepreneurs. But they will all come to appreciate two key elements of entrepreneurship. One is the notion of taking ownership of a process and outcome. The other, which may be the most important single thing students — of all kinds — need in this fast-changing world is an appreciation of ambiguity, and the ability to deal with it. This means reacting to changes around us, being flexible and swift when circumstances change. Ambiguity is not something to fear; it is part of our lives, and we need to embrace it.
In a related area, recognize that many of our best students, particularly the ones with a genuine entrepreneurial bent, will not graduate as scheduled, if ever. They’ll create or join startups while they have the passion and energy, and we should encourage them to try.
Appreciate our graduates no matter where their careers have taken them. If we understand that journalism education is a valuable step into any number of professions, we should not just celebrate the graduates who’ve gone on to fame (if not fortune) in journalism, but also those who’ve made marks in other fields.
Persuade the president (or chancellor or whatever the title) and trustees of the university that every student on the campus should learn journalism principles and skills before graduating, preferably during freshman year. At State University of New York’s Stony Book campus, the journalism school has been given a special mandate of exactly this kind. Howard Schneider, a former newspaper journalist who now is dean of Stony Brook’s journalism school, won foundation funding to bring news literacy into the university’s broader community, not just those enrolled in journalism courses.
Create a program of the same kind for people in the community, starting with teachers. Our goal would be to help schools across our geographical area bring mediactivism to every level of education—not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school. We would offer workshops, conferences and online training.
Offer that program, or one like it, to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves, to help turn them into better media consumers and to give them ways to help their children.
Keep what we now call public relations as part of the mission, but move it into a separate program. Call it “Persuasion,” and include marketing and other kinds of non-journalistic advocacy in this category. As we recognize that the lines are blurring, sometimes uncomfortably, we’ll require all journalism students to learn the techniques of persuasion. But Persuasion majors would conversely be steeped in the principles of honorable media creation.
Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies, governmental organizations, and others. If they could be persuaded that the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more reality, and we’d all be better off for the exercise.
Enlist another vital player in the effort to help people appreciate the value of solid, ethical journalism: local media of all kinds, not just traditional media. Of course, as noted earlier, they should be making this a core part of their missions, given that their own credibility would rise if they helped people understand the principles and process of quality journalism. But we’d very much want to work with local new media organizations and individuals, too.
Advise and train citizen journalists to understand and apply the principles and best practices. They are going to be an essential part of the local journalism ecosystem, and we should reach out to show them how we can help.
Augment local media with our own journalism. We train students to do journalism, after all, and their work should be widely available in the community, particularly when it fills in gaps left by the shrinking traditional media. At Arizona State, the Cronkite News Service provides all kinds of coverage of topics the local news organizations rarely cover, making our students’ work available to those organizations. Soon, we’ll be publishing it ourselves on our own website.
All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. It also suggests a huge opportunity for journalism schools. The need for this kind of training has never been greater. We’re not the only ones who can do it, but we may be among the best equipped.
Note: Seth Lewis at the Nieman Journalism Lab is looking for ideas in this space. He’s dead-on in wanting to see students come out of the experience with great flexibility, and his piece has already attracted some excellent comments.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, has published a lecture he gave this week. He asks, “Does journalism exist?” — and his answers, as you’d expect, are a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of journalism.
I’m tempted to quote from pieces of his talk. But it’s so meaty that I want to encourage you to take the time to read it for yourself. The lecture ranges widely — including the question of who’ll actually pay for information in the future.
When you’re done reading it, you’ll understand better why the organization Alan leads has deservedly become one of the most widely followed news sites in the English language.
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