PressThink: Dispatches From the Un-Journalists

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists

Bloggers who will be filing reports from Boston don't know in advance that what they are doing is meaningless. This can be an advantage. Here's my "convention preview" piece that ran in Newsday today.

This was published Sunday morning in the Opinion section of Newsday— without links, of course. It ran under the title, “Bloggers will file reports from Boston that could close big gaps in the media’s coverage.”

BY JAY ROSEN

July 25, 2004

Richard Benedetto of Gannett News reported the news on July 11: “Conventions today are little more than weeklong, made-for-TV infomercials and pep rallies for the party, its candidates and its luminaries.”

Brian Faler in The Washington Post had the story earlier, on July 5: “The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties’ nominees to the general public.”

On July 15 it was Reuters, quoting “political experts,” who have discovered: “What was once an exciting and occasionally unpredictable way to pick presidential and vice presidential candidates has descended into empty ritual - set-piece events that are infomercials for Democrats and Republicans.”

But back on May 25, a Boston Globe editorial had the scoop, with an upbeat twist: “Even though everyone knows that conventions have become staged events with little real drama, the nominee usually gets a lift in standing from a week of being bathed in favorable publicity.”

You get the drift. Starting today, about 30,000 people will begin assembling in Boston for an event - the Democratic National Convention - that, according to the press, is “staged,” a “set-piece,” an “infomercial,” an “empty ritual,” and, perhaps the cruelest characterization of all, “little more than a reality show.” That was Rick Lyman in The New York Times, July 4.

As proof of this sad state of affairs, observers cite the dwindling hours when the conventions are broadcast in prime time by the major networks. What used to be “gavel-to-gavel” coverage, in the 1960s and ’70s, is now down to three hours - one a night for three nights. That’s how bad it’s become.

Still, there are facts in open view that don’t quite fit this picture. One of the odder ones is that 15,000 journalists and media hands will be in Boston for the big infomercial shoot.

A regular citizen, trying to take seriously what journalists say about political conventions, might have trouble understanding the mobilization of this army for an event declared newsless in advance - by its own scouts!

Roger Simon of U.S. News (who’ll be in Boston) tried to explain. “Even though 99 percent of it is predictable,” he told Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post, “you always have to be prepared as a reporter for something unpredictable. That’s why we’re there - just in case.”

An army of 15,000 protecting against the 1 percent chance that reality will break out? It seems kind of odd. (Reporting and analysis of a pep rally - that’s odd, too.)

Look a little closer and other puzzles present themselves.

Take this comment from Gannett’s Benedetto, who said conventions do still have value: “Voters who really want to know who the candidates are and what they stand for can get a pretty good primer if they watch the conventions.”

Apparently, then, “infomercials and pep rallies” - his words - make for a good briefing on the election. (“Hey, how was the pep rally?” “Great, I learned so much!”)

And what’s the difference, finally, between contempt for an “empty ritual” and contempt for those millions who are influenced by it, watch it, learn from it, attend and participate in it? It’s the kind of question I would like to ask Benedetto.

And I may do that, if I see him in Boston, because I will be there, with credentials to report on the event, along with 30 to 40 other authors who write and publish their own weblogs - some with an online user base nearing 100,000, others far less (mine is 5,000 or so in a good week). This is the first time the “bloggers,” as they’re called, will be invited to join the media crowd.

Often called “online journals,” blogs are self-publishing in action: Web pages, typically written by one person and updated several times a day, with commentary on the news, links to what other blogs are saying, reactions to major events, and—for the successful ones—a devoted following on the Web. Some have comment sections where the users debate things.

There are more than 3 million weblogs on all topics, but the ones that have drawn the most attention, and won credentials in Boston, are mainly about politics and public life - with no pretense of neutrality. Dave Winer, who has been doing his blog since 1997, calls a weblog “the unedited voice of one person.”

I think the bloggers have something to add:

They don’t know in advance that what they are doing is meaningless; if they did, they wouldn’t do it.

They don’t assume that a ritual is an empty ritual simply because it obeys a script, since this is the very essence of ritual, as any Boy Scout or churchgoer can tell you.

Although we’re told that “bloggers wear their politics on their sleeves,” and things like that, politics is a personal matter for most of them - not a professional interest. Their communication style is citizen-to-citizen, rather than expert-to-layman or media to “mass.”

Journalists are sent by their editors and bosses to cover the convention. Bloggers are “sent,” in effect, by the people who read their accounts and find use for them. Some bloggers heading to Boston have been asking their users, “What do you want to know about when I get there?” How many reporters do that?

People have subscriptions to newspapers. People have relationships to the blogs they follow. Here’s what Amy Wohl, a blogger herself, wrote on July 21: “Those of us who are watching the (convention) from afar will be counting on those of you who are blogging from ‘inside’ to try to see the real story - the one the official journalists won’t write. Be curious, be candid, be passionate, and try to tell us not just what you are seeing and thinking, but why.”

Journalists have learned to split themselves off from the public, and talk about it as an “other,” almost a thing with behavior patterns of its own. Bloggers are more embedded with the public, which to them is not so much an “it” as a “we.” David Weinberger, whose blog reports will run on the Boston Globe’s Web site as well as his own, wrote: “I can’t even anticipate how cynical or filled with spirit I’ll be; I am, after all, perfectly capable of crying at a good political speech.”

Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It’s a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence.

What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed. For journalists the politics at the conventions is no mystery - this is a marketing moment and there is nothing to discover. To the bloggers, or at least to this one, there is always mystery when hope and belief coalesce around a human being, a candidate. And even though I know that will happen, I am still going there to discover it.

Jay Rosen is chair of the journalism department at New York University and the author of PressThink (www.pressthink.org), a weblog.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links….

Listen here to NPR’s On the Media report on bloggers and the conventions.

David Weiberger in comments: “I’m approaching this primarily as someone traveling to a new country, reporting back to friends on the strange habits and rituals of the locals.”

This one, I thuink, is going to cause a big stir in the blog world: Daniel Okrent, public editor of the New York Times: Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?: His answer: Of course it is.

And I am gone… to the train station. Next dispatches will be from Boston.

Posted by Jay Rosen at July 25, 2004 9:12 AM Print

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Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

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The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

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Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

Thanks for the story and the plug, you spelled my name right, but Scripting News started on 4/1/97, not 99. I'm leaving for the airport in seven minutes. See you in Boston!

Posted by: Dave Winer at July 25, 2004 9:38 AM | Permalink

And what's the difference, finally, between contempt for an "empty ritual" and contempt for those millions who are influenced by it, watch it, learn from it, attend and participate in it?

Now, now, this is exactly the sort of pseudopopulist criticism I've noted before:

"And what's the difference, finally, between contempt for "empty calories", and contempt for those millions who buy it, savor it, eat it, consume and are fueled by it? [you pointy-headed elitist "nutritionist", you!]"

Note also that - with a few exceptions - most of the credentialled bloggers are very much of the same general pundit-cloth as the rest of the mediafest (of course, they're almost all freelancers rather than employees, but I don't find that so fascinating a difference).

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at July 25, 2004 9:39 AM | Permalink

I'm approaching this primarily as someone traveling to a new country, reporting back to friends on the strange habits and rituals of the locals.

Of course, my attitude may change once I get there. I genuinely don't know what to expect.

Posted by: David Weinberger at July 25, 2004 10:56 AM | Permalink

The DNC, The RNC, And The False Choice

It was an important moment in journalism: a staid institution, the RNC, was attempting to control a new medium and was quickly learning it could not … that ultimately, they had to embrace a medium they could no longer control. It was a stark contrast to the DNC just four years later, when TV openly captured every hostile and shocking moment in Chicago, and conventions (and the world for that matter) changed for forever.

...

The printing press made us readers, the personal computer made us writers, and now, with weblogs, the Internet is making us reporters. The conventions will be blogged … of course they will … whether the DNC and RNC wish it or not, and they can never again remove the reporters from the floor.

Posted by: Tim at July 25, 2004 5:09 PM | Permalink

Jay...it seems rather sad to me that 15,000 journalists are going to attend an event on the idea that they had better be there in case something (bad) happens. Well, speeches happen--speeches full of propositional content. And those proposition, if acted upon, could change the lives of real citizens for better or worse. Seems like those 15,000 journalists actually have much to cover.

Posted by: acline at July 26, 2004 10:08 AM | Permalink

If 15,000 reporters declare the convention "empty ritual" and yet make sure to attend -- and if we understand that rituals are by definition loaded with meaning whether the participants get it or not -- then we should ask questions about the ritual role played by reporters who dismiss conventions.

The cynical view is that they're just covering their asses, declaring that there's no story because they can't get one. The ritual view is more complicated. Reminds me a little of the way hasidic women count their kids: nisht eyns, nisht tsvey ("not one, not two") -- denying their existence lest they attract misfortune. The press has no such maternal motive when it comes to conventions, but it does resort to a similar sort of ritual doublespeak.

If we assume that the convention ritual is run by a party priesthood to insure a safe campaign bump for its chosen, then perhaps the press's ritual role can be understood as keeping the public focussed on the master narrative in which it's most invested: the "contest" between two basic worldviews, Dem and Republican. That storyline must, at this point, ritually jettison any remaining nuance of internal party politics, of the uncountable worldviews within just one party. The candidate must be anointed, declared potentially "presidential," if there is to be a continuing story.

By dismissing the convention, the press helps achieve this effect of inevitability more surely than if it skeptically reported internal wrangling, disgruntled losers, could-have-beens, and all the other on-the-ground business of politics. This isn't cynical collusion, but rather, a ritualized genuflection to the story that sells and makes careers.

Posted by: Jeff Sharlet at July 26, 2004 12:25 PM | Permalink

I've got it, Jay. Here's what bloggers at the conventions can do:

Make a table with two columns. Label the first one "Noise". Label the second one "News".

Now help readers recognize the difference between entries in each column.

Oh. And have fun!

Posted by: sbw at July 26, 2004 1:46 PM | Permalink

Lines like this one: "For journalists the politics at the conventions is no mystery - this is a marketing moment and there is nothing to discover" need to be qualified, perhaps replacing journalists with "national political journalists." For other reporters, conventions have much to discover that can and does improve reporting. My experience working for Congressional Quarterly at the 2000 Republican convention gave me a wider range of sources, insights that I would not have otherwise had and even some news. Most reporters don't write for the largest outlets, and many readers don't regularly read them. You paint with too broad a brush - ironic, given that you say the bloggers can bring everything that [journalists] have removed from their coverage.

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