Saving the news: many ideas, but what is the goal?
One of the hot topics in journalism these days seems to be journalism itself.
No wonder: Newsrooms and newsroom jobs have disappeared by the thousands across the country. In Washington, a more complicated dynamic is at work, with media enterprises rising and falling with dizzying speed.
Brian Stelter documents some of the roiling and the chatter surrounding it in his Reliable Sources newsletter this week, quoting, among others, Deborah Turness, formerly of BBC News and NBC News:
“Established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth — that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism,” she said, in a speech in London.
Meanwhile, the news startup Notus — soon to be expanded and rebranded as the Star — queried 16 former Washington Post journalists, some of whom are presumably suffering from … wait for it … Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, on “what they would change about D.C. journalism.” Veteran journalist and media critic Margaret Sullivan contributed, and added some thoughts in a separate piece on Substack.
Two threads dominate these conversations: how to improve the news, and how to make money providing the news. They are observations by journalists who know a thing or two because they’ve seen a thing or two, if I may quote a piece of cultural ephemera. And their suggestions would, without a doubt, improve news.
These conversations also are steeped in the assuredness of the importance of journalism, and the unarticulated yearning to see newsrooms restored to the secure place of authority where they once resided. Some studies have supported the belief that, as local journalism has disappeared or been hollowed out, local governance has suffered, has become less democratic.
But is that what the news is for?
Newsrooms don’t have metrics for democratic success. They don’t organize themselves around community goals. News organizations broadly depend on business models using the traditional metrics of commerce: attracting an audience they can sell to advertisers and getting some members of that audience to subscribe.
In the face of that onslaught from market forces, journalists and their advocates beseech readers to subscribe to the publications of their choice, pointing out, reasonably enough, that quality journalism requires quality journalists. Which is to say, paid.
And we need quality journalism, they say, to play the critical role of keeping citizens informed. They’re not wrong about that, but it’s a little disingenuous. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory glance at most newspapers to recognize they are not primarily democracy-support services. They are businesses producing narratives intended to capture our attention during our leisure time.
Yes, some of that content is fuel for a functioning democracy. But by tomorrow, that critical-to-democracy story will have moved from the top of the home page to the bottom, then to the section index, then to a netherworld known only to the search box. In its place will be something new — if we’re lucky, another critical-to-democracy story. But it’s equally likely to be an attention-grabbing story whose only virtue is its novelty, distracting us, and, perhaps, leaving us with a slightly more distorted view of our world.
If the metrics to measure newsroom success are commercial, then journalists can claim only whatever value the market assigns in the competition with every other attention-claiming activity.
If we want more from the news, then we have to more explicitly design information and business models to accomplish that.