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June 26, 2008
Migration Point for the Press Tribe"Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable."(This is a revised version of the talk I gave to the Personal Democracy Forum, June 23, 2008. Originally published at TechPresident, same day. I have been using the “migration” image for a while, but felt it needed fuller expression. Hence…) We are early in the rise of semi-pro journalism, but well into the decline of an older way of life within the tribe of professional journalists. I call them a tribe because they share a culture and a sense of destiny, and because they think they own the press— that it’s theirs somehow because they dominate the practice. The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, to say what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed to the population at large. Projects that cause people to exercise their right to a free press strengthen the press, whether or not these projects strengthen the professional journalist’s “hold” on the press. The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on—also called their business model—no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform. Migration-which is easily sentimentalized by Americans—is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don’t want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons, a reactionary group. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism. Many are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses. A few are admitting that it’s time to panic. And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the old world but may be unnecessary or a handicap in the new. They have to ask if what they know is portable. What life will be like across the digital sea is of course an unknown to the migrant. This creates an immediate crisis for the elders of the tribe, who have always known how to live. That’s hard enough. But even more difficult—and more challenging to the political wisdom of the tribe—is that on the terrain where the press has to be re-built, there are people already there, like Jane Hamsher, Roger L. Simon, Arianna Huffington and Glenn Reynolds. And they’re busy, building a kind of alternative civilization to professionalized news and commentary, which nonetheless makes use of the old press and its industry. One of the most perplexing questions journalists today face is what to make of these determined settlers and their ways, how to stand toward them. Across the digital divide the conditions for doing journalism are quite different. I’ll give you the highlights. Communication is two way, and many-to-many. Horizontal sharing is as important as top-down messaging. Readers have become writers and the people formerly know as the audience are flourishing as content producers, expert sharers and self-guided consumers. This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration. Today, the press is shared territory. It has pro and amateur zones. This is appropriate because press freedom is itself shared territory. It belongs equally to the amateur and the pro. Online the two zones connect, and flow together. (Go to Memeorandum to see how.) It still works vertically: press to public. It also works horizontally: peer to peer. Part of it is a closed system—and closed systems are good at enforcing editorial controls—the other part is an open system. Open systems are good at participation, community formation, and locating intelligence anywhere in the network. They are good at sharing, and getting good at surfacing the good stuff. The two editorial systems don’t work the same way. One does not replace the other. They are not enemies, either. We need to understand a lot better how they can work together. And that is where the idea of pro-am journalism comes from. I think the hybrid forms will be the strongest—openness with some controls, amateurs with some pros—but that means we have to figure out how these hybrid forms work. Arianna Huffington, Amanda Michel, Mayhill Fowler, Marc Cooper and myself, along with 3,000 signed-up members are in the midst of one attempt, OffTheBus. Arianna and I wanted to join forces for the election, but we didn’t have a clear idea for how to do that until we had the name, OffTheBus. We felt the on-the-bus press had failed to innovate and wasn’t going to open itself very far. We wanted to extend the powers of the campaign press to those outside the professional club, people without credentials but with convictions and a participant’s pride in politics. What Huffington Post did to column writing by signing up thousands of bloggers we wanted to do to campaign journalism by signing up thousands of helpers. Our idea: you can report on politics from wherever you are within it. You do not have to be located in the “press” zone to be part of the campaign press. We would filter their best stuff to the front page. From there we could inject it into the national conversation via Huff Post. We would try a distributed reporting model for campaign coverage. Toward the horse race narrative, we would “begin anew,” as Zephyr Teachout said to open this event, something “off” the usual path. As Clay Shirky told us, “Group action just got easier.” We wanted to put that insight into practice, for somewhere in there is a new press. Finally, I think it’s time we expanded the press, don’t you? This means we have to expand our ideas about it. And that’s what conferences like this one are for. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links… This post was translated into French. Thanks, Jean-Marie Le Ray. It is also in Italian. C-Span taped the Personal Democracy Forum events. You can watch it here. Scott Rosenberg thinks that this analysis is “accurate as far as it goes, and offers a useful metaphor, but that it lets the ‘tribe’ off too easily.” A must read and possibly the best bloggers vs. journalists column yet written: Roy Greenslade: Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution. (Before they migrate, I might add.)
Posted by Jay Rosen at June 26, 2008 1:40 AM
Comments
This is a great metaphor. It perfectly reverses the dominant press view which is 'barbarians at the gate'. In the 'barbarians at the gate' scenario, any compromise with the 'others' is treasonous and defeatist. In a 'migration' scenario, you can hold on to core values will adapting to the new situation and borrowing good ideas from your new neighbors. Posted by: William Ockham Jay, I like that metaphor - I made the migration pretty early - in '95 - because of opportunity, not because of forced change. I saw that I, a lowly journalist but nonetheless a proud one for the clan membership you reference - decided I could own my own printing press. So I departed the clan, half-way at least (freelancing helped me pay to run my particular online press). Fast-forward to the current panic. Funny thing is, I had a long conversation with Mayhill Fowler at PDF and she was every bit as serious about her work as the leaders of my old clan. Could it be that the curmudgeons and hold-outs will soon find themselves part of a much larger - but no less self-organized and self-regulated - clan of semi-professionals? I'm not too sure of either metaphor, migration or holding the fort. The press has gone through a series of collapses and has ceased to serve its customers. It was the 1950s and 1960s that killed off hundreds of newspapers, and by the 1980s, there was only one political view on sale in the typical urban area. The press consolidated and every year served fewer people. Radio and television went through a similar transformation, though with different mechanics. Stations were not closed outright, but were standardized and hollowed out. Local news coverage weakened. International and nation news coverage vanished. By the mid-1990s, the U.S. press was a lot like the press in the U.S.S.R. There was one standard set of opinions, one viewpoint, lousy coverage of real issues and an incredible fluff to news ratio. Americans marveled as the Soviet press played down or ignored Chernobyl, but our modern press would not do much better. In the 1960s an alternate press developed to provide for the anti-war viewpoint. Later, it was co-opted by the more traditional press. We have a similar situation today, except the alternative press can do one better than the traditional press. They don't need to try and copy the old formats: newspapers, magazines or radio shows. They can provide information and opinion to millions of unserved customers using web sites, blogs and newsgroups. The traditional press looks at the new media and tries to follow, but they have their old baggage with them. Jerry Della Femina put it nicely. Watching an old line ad agency adopt to the 1960s was like watching some [male] executive's fifty year old wife getting a face lift and squeezing into a mini-skirt. It wasn't really the effect she had in mind. Posted by: Kaleberg at June 28, 2008 3:31 PM | Permalink If a single perspective were to prevail at OffTheBus that would definitely suck. It would be bad service.I thought these statements set up an interesting contrast for measuring the success of OffTheBus. I think a single perspective at OffTheBus did succeed in covering the Republican primary and candidates, and therefore sucked. I don't think anyone was (is or will be) surprised by that coverage. I was surprised at the disaffection expressed by others about a single perspective. Ferdy's is representative: By making OTB such a close subsidiary of the highly partisan HuffPost, OTB has de facto delegitimated its experiment, as Steven Rose implied in his letter (which I agree with only partially, but certainly in his assessment of HuffPost). Jay, everything you are saying makes sense. There's just one thing you didn't mention, and that is: Mayhill Fowler and her OfftheBus colleagues are not getting PAID. They are covering the campaign on their own dime--or at least that's what has been reported in my own local newspaper of record, the Washington Post. I'm all for the concept of pro-am journalism; I welcome the "amateurs" to the party (since in many cases they are better than the pros). But I still want somebody to tell me: how do the pros get paid? Posted by: Tracy Thompson at June 29, 2008 5:09 PM | Permalink And what if I cannot tell you that? Am I supposed to make up an answer? Tim: see the history of Hot Soup. Sure! Why not?...But seriously: does Arianna Huffington ever wonder how long she can keep getting all this content for absolutely free? Or how long it's going to take before some Norma Rae of the blogging world stands on a table with a sign that says "UNION"? Posted by: Tracy Thompson at June 30, 2008 9:46 AM | Permalink I still want somebody to tell me: how do the pros get paid? You want somebody to tell you? Or what, Tracy...? You're going to hold your breath until you turn blue in the face? Try informing yourself instead of demanding magical answers that at the moment don't exist. Then maybe you can be part of the solution. Why don't you study up and tell us how the economic crisis in your ex-business is going to be solved? Here's Mark Potts on how newspapers got into the mess they're in. Good place to start. Does Arianna Huffington ever wonder how long she can keep getting all this content for absolutely free? Here's a journalist--Rachel Sklar--who works for the Huffington Post, writes a column and gets paid. Here's another, Sam Stein. Here's a third: Tom Edsall. A fourth: Nico Pitney. So you tell me: does Arianna think everything at her expanding site can be done for free? From my post, Where's the Business Model, People? It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods, the future production of which is in doubt, are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?” Recently I heard one such person say, “Society should be worried about this!” You want somebody to tell you how the pros get paid. That's exactly the problem. In, "Where's the Business Model for News, People?" I explained why I find this a frustrating question. One shouldn't lose patience with a question, but in this case I have. The reason is we are all currently in a situation where, no matter where you are on the editorial compass, there is at the moment no grand or obvious solution to the problem of... the next business model for public service news. Lots of people want to find it it. Lots of people smarter than us in this thread are looking for it. All manner of experiments are alive, which is good. Just to be clear, Tracy, I am one of those who believes that a paid professional press is completely essential to a modern democracy and since it cannot be the work of even the most wholesome government, making it sustainable is a job for civil society as a whole. I would love to know how people who do it very well will, as the new platform develops, get paid to report on public life, because they are likely to become more valuable to us that way. (See my post on Walter Pincus for more.) But whether you are an investor, a technologist, a publisher, an editor, a reporter, a sports writer, a stand alone news & opinion blogger, an Internet newspaper, an upstart local news provider or a team leader for the investigative projects that are the lifeblood of public service journalism, there just isn't a stable solution right now for an Internet-age economy of news. Moreover, this has been the situation for at least 4 to 5 years. All we can do is try to peer at ambiguous and often sudden developments and try to discern some sustainable shapes. Maybe one of them is a ship. Jay, I do not know who spit in your bean curd this morning, but I hope you get over it soon. I did not pose that question as if I were making a profound statement; I was looking to elicit some thoughts from the community which reads your blog that might enlighten me. I'd already read your post on "Where's the Business Model, People?"--so I knew YOU didn't know. I'm not exactly going to be evicted anytime soon, but I am a freelance writer who has one check coming in the mail and after that...nothing. I get invited to write about this or that all the time, but nobody seems to want to pay me anymore. The last thing I wrote was an essay for a book, which turned out great, and I'm pleased to be in the anthology, but I got paid a whopping $150 for it. I could spend 40 hours a week writing for people who want me to write--online. For free. Yeah, I'm sure Arianna pays those guys you mentioned, but for every one of them there's 50 at least who are working for nothing. I've never met a rich person who didn't know how to exploit labor, so I guess this is not surprising, but I still find it kind of mind-boggling that nobody on the labor side of the equation seems to find this at all objectionable. In fact, they seem downright honored. If this business model were applied to the sex industry, the world's oldest profession would go out of business in a week. Why buy the cow....? So, yeah, I get it that we're all groping in the dark here. My own career has gone from mainstream big-corporation journalism, to "retail" (i.e. freelance magazine writing). It's looking to me like the next step is "micro-retail"--or, as the bloggers say, "monetizing" my blog, which means beating the bushes for advertisers--a weird thought for an old-timer like me, but what is life without a challenge? I'm curious what others in my position have to say. Posted by: Tracy Thompson at June 30, 2008 3:52 PM | Permalink I still find it kind of mind-boggling that nobody on the labor side of the equation seems to find this at all objectionable. In fact, they seem downright honored. Do you have any theories as to why the several thousand bloggers at the Huffington Post don't find it objectionable to speak their minds and comment on the election without hope of being paid for it? What do you think their reasoning is? It's looking to me like the next step is "micro-retail"--or, as the bloggers say, "monetizing" my blog, which means beating the bushes for advertisers. What I think we have learned is there's a flaw in that micro-retail system: for most bloggers and would-be advertisers, the search costs are too high for the bloggers to find the right advertisers and the advertisers to find bloggers that they are comfortable advertising with. Most people who have studied it think that stand alones will have to join networks and advertising deals will be made to all blogs in a network, so that advertisers can lower their transaction costs. But again, we are not there yet. Do you have any theories as to why the several thousand bloggers at the Huffington Post don't find it objectionable to speak their minds and comment on the election without hope of being paid for it? What do you think their reasoning is? If I had to guess, I would say that a) they have day jobs topay the mortgage and b) they are thrilled to have a platform. And do I blame them? I do not. When I worked at the Washington Post I was thrilled to have a platform, too. I take your point about blog networks. Posted by: Tracy Thompson at June 30, 2008 7:01 PM | Permalink That's right. They have jobs. They do not intend to make a career of journalism or punditry. They are thrilled to have a platform. Possibly they also know that the Washington Post wasn't about to give them that platform. You said you find it "kind of mind-boggling that nobody on the labor side of the equation seems to find this at all objectionable," but is your mind really boggled by the mystery of it all? There have always been people who wrote for free. There have always been people who wrote for money. There has never been a constant way of making that happen, however. At least some of the people who want to write for money today--as reporters--should in my opinion learn how to work with large and small groups of amateur watchers and diggers and other people of fact who will only "work for free" if you offer them an opportunity to contribute something of value on a story that really matters. "Thrilled to have a platform" doesn't do it justice. People are desperate to have a voice. We've been ignored or taken for granted by our various civic systems for so long, it's amazingly cathartic to say something in a public forum and have somebody, anybody notice. Voting by itself doesn't really cut it. Especially in a society where the vote is a commodity to be pushed around like poker chips by the mass media and monied interests. People want to have a nuanced say. People want to participate in their democracy. As Jay says, many people have always been willing to forego the paycheck to get that, and some will even pay to have their say. The internet has lowered the price tag substantially, and the country has lost its way, so yeah, people are talking. Whether they get paid or not. The traditional media think they've been run over by a technology bus, but the crisis in journalism is self-inflicted. The traditional media have alternated between lulling us to sleep and scaring us into hiding in the basement. Either way, they haven't been interested in actually serving the public interest. Surprise! The public still has an interest. The patient has a pulse. Posted by: jayrayspicer at July 3, 2008 12:51 PM | Permalink Jay -- Your longstanding and noble insistence on using the term “press” rather than “media” to refer to the institution that journalists work in has in this case, I feel, prevented you from rendering an wellrounded portrayal of the players in the pro-am field. Yes, there are professional journalists, now forced as a tribe to migrate. Yes, there are amateurs, formerly known as the audience, who are eager to be “watchers and diggers,” who are “thrilled to have a platform.” You do not mention a third group of professionals -- media professionals -- non-journalists, whose trade it is to exploit journalistic content to advance their agenda. I refer to the public relations industry, corporate flacks and interest group lobbyists, entertainment promoters and political spinmeisters. To the journalist these people act as “amateurs” in that they are not paid by press institutions. For no fee, they contribute a soundbite or a statistic or a press release lead or a story idea or an interview guest. In this sense even the most traditional form of MainStreamMedia journalism is a “pro-am” exercise, with the paid correspondent obtaining he-said-she-said quotes gratis from sources in the Golden Rolodex. As far as the “press” is concerned those quotes may be free -- or amateur. In the “media” world, inserting them into journalistic content is the work of professionals. These media professionals are parasites on the good name and credibility of the traditional press. Their status is enhanced by their ability to find themselves included in content that appears to be evenhanded, authoritative, fair-minded, proportionate -- all the attributes long claimed by the tribe of professional journalists, that tribe that is now migrating. These media parasites, I suspect, have even more to lose from the collapse of the press as a trusted mainstream institution than journalists do. If the press continues to fragment and its civil status continues to erode, flacks will lose the imprimatur that journalistic institutions can impart, giving plausibility to their spin. How, then, will a publisher place an author on a book tour? How will a baseball team seem indispensable to a local market without highlights at 11pm? How will a politician seem to be advancing the common good without Meeting the Press? How will Hollywood sell its latest star vehicle without respect accorded to the clout of celebrity? How will interest groups and lobbyists frame themselves as representing an honorable point of view in an evenhanded debate rather than merely promoting self interest? Speaking optimistically, forcing media parasites to invent their own forms of authentic communication -- unable to rely on professional journalists to whitewash their flackery -- may even liberate the journalists themselves to become reporters of news rather than recyclers of publicity. The press may seem smaller after this migration but it may turn out to be right-sized, having successfully divorced itself from the media. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at July 3, 2008 1:44 PM | Permalink Interesting take on this, Andrew Tyndall. Maybe, just maybe, the shouting heads on CNN (nonjournalists, all) will simply disappear if people stop paying attention to them because they're too busy reading or writing blogs. I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but it certainly seems as though a large and growing chunk of the electorate is tuning out the irrelevancies of the MSM. I gave up watching TV news quite some time ago. Somehow, I don't feel any less informed. Even my houseplants seem perkier, less despondent. Posted by: jayrayspicer at July 3, 2008 9:22 PM | Permalink Hi Jay, Brilliant post! Would you authorize me to translate it and publish it on my blog (linking back to you, of course), where I'd like to share it with french spoken people. Jean-Marie Posted by: Jean-Marie Le Ray at July 4, 2008 9:30 AM | Permalink Yes, of course, Jean-Marie. Just let me know when it has a url. Andrew: I like your addition. Here's a link that illustrates it in action. The flacks want the old order to continue. Jay, Here is the link, thanks again. Jean-Marie Posted by: Jean-Marie Le Ray at July 5, 2008 7:32 AM | Permalink Andrew Tyndall, I thought you might be interested in Journalism and Morality from The Atlantic in 1926: The establishment of a formula in composition makes [the reporter] lazy. The lack of competition makes him flabby. He loses initiative, gets so he takes things for granted, ceases to inquire closely. He lacks that effective skepticism which goes to the root of things. He accepts listlessly the statements handed out to him by lawyers, well-meaning propagandists, and publicity agents. |
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