And so goes the Luddite's first foray into the blogosphere. With so many widgets, SEO, java-scripting, and "shared revenue" options to choose from, one would think even the most serious writers today cater only to audiences with click-happy attention deficit disorder. My hope for this decidedly non-blog blog is to capture potentially worthwhile thoughts in a way that challenges the vintage obsessions with listicles, TLDR, and inflammatory language -- perhaps even in long-form.
Given the anywhere capabilities of the Internet, I wonder how we remain so entrenched in the 24-hours news cycle. Save for the comparatively few publications that still go to literal print, the need to produce content according to hard-and-fast deadlines now seems antiquated. My interest in following the news -- and I mean this strictly in the old-school, non-Twitter sense of the word -- is to stay apprised of new developments related to the topics and issues I care about most. (I also attempt to follow news stories apart from where my sincere interests lie, but more about that later.) When journalists are forced to generate content-at-any-cost in order to satisfy the demands of the hyperactive news industry, what readers are left with is an extensive rehashing of old news with a smidgen of non-newsworthy progress, often in the form of a hyperbolic quote from an association executive or political candidate. Most journalists today, in essence, are asked and incentivized to make something out of nothing.
As a reader, this type of journalism frustrates me. I long for news coverage that assumes its readers are aware of the context of an issue, relieving those who have been following a story from the start (or even recently) from parsing through paragraphs of background that churn out ever-creative ways of rewriting the same facts over and over again, searching for that singularly novel nugget of information. I dream of encountering headlines that are brave enough to admit: No New News Today, Check Back Tomorrow.
Rather than a denial of the perpetual existence of newsworthy topics, for there is always a story somewhere waiting to be uncovered, this restructured news cycle would foster a more valuable news environment for all parties involved, whilst responding to the economic incentives at play in the current media landscape. Without the need to publish a story each morning/afternoon/day, writers would be free to make honest-to-goodness judgment calls about whether a "breaking" development is worthy of sharing with his or her readership. In my opinion, what a particular presidential candidate said about some deliberately pointed letter that an outraged trade group sent to an obscure federal agency twenty months before an Election Day is unlikely to rise to the level of alerting the masses. On the other hand, one can imagine a situation where such comments may indeed make the cut. The point is that the specifics of a discrete event, taken together with the larger context of the issue, determine its relevance to our individual and collective decision-making as citizens, and it is for this determination that we should be able to rely on an industry of sharp, critical, and thorough journalists. Their objectivity should be tantamount insofar as they are able to maintain nuanced, well-informed coverage rather than mindless copy/paste.
Now with more time on their hands for non-deadline-driven content production, journalists would be able to devote more time to actually pursue a story. They could have the space to think creatively about what is missing from the broader context and how to bring these mysteries to light. They could spend time polishing their work, with support from editorial teams that would in turn have more time for fact-checking and wordcraft. Presumably the same stretchy dollars that support these writers could back these more creative endeavors, should the environment come to accept less frequent copy.
Strategic communications and public relations teams, which have grown to near ubiquity in every field in the modern era, would no longer have incentives to create outrageous talking points to pitch to the press, because the press would no longer be interested in peddling filler stories to their editors. Imagine a world where journalists have the wherewithal to dismiss the vapid musings of every quasi-celebrity, and where they can take a stand on behalf of the public for serious intellectual debate on issues that matter. (Our current environment makes it hard to believe that such journalistic judgment actually has thrived in this country before!) PR firms would instead be encouraged to produce facts to back up their clients' statements, knowing that such facts must both withstand rigorous review and have real potential to add to the current conversation.
The greatest beneficiary of this revised system of journalism, however, would be the readers -- the American citizenry itself. Not only would we hear less static on a particular topic, but we also would be presented with the clear tones of a new issue or topic that journalists previously had not been able to pursue. As an electorate, better press coverage, with criticism reserved for legitimate topics rather than superficial ones, would enable us to make more informed decisions in the ballot box and elsewhere. Not coincidentally, the likelihood of Herman Cain-type figures reaching electable status would diminish as the press asks more worthwhile questions, in turn reducing the chances of such unqualified individuals from gaining access to the sacred halls of democratic governance. Once elected to office, government officials would find that their explosive language and petty grievances fall on deaf ears -- or at least deaf pens. Modern technology may afford lawmakers the ability to sell their own spin to constituents directly, but we still would be able to take solace in the fact that our army of ethical journalists would have none of it. The rightful gate-keeping power of professional journalism would be restored.
The problem, as always, is money. Covering the costs for journalists and news teams to conduct this type
of investigatory research would be difficult in a market of
ever-shrinking resources, which is partially how we got to where we are in the first place. News companies and the advertisers who support them are eager for eyeballs and clicks, and serious journalism rarely pays the bills. Fast-paced Twitter-ers and Buzzfeed junkies are more likely to click on a video of a cat playing a piano than about the cataclysmic potential of climate change. To top it off, the free-for-all digital battlefield that not only enables but encourages any inexperienced and unthoughtful "citizen journalist" to put pinky to Return key fosters professional journalists' near desperation to shout the loudest over the noise. We are a nation overrun with blogs.
With all the trappings of irony and discomfort, I hereby jump into the fray.
