The Price of Objectivity
Rebuilding Media
Posted by Dorian Benkoil
At the Brian Storm (of MediaStorm.org) Hearst Foundation New Media Lecture at Columbia J. school. Brian talks about the fallacy of objectivity, or at leas the fallacy of being unwilling to be an advocate, pointing to Darfur, and that it was extremely hard to produce a piece for the non-advocacy Council on Foreign Relations about what’s happening there. “I think Bashir is a bad person,” and should go, he says of the Sudanese leader.
“If you’re a journalist and you don’t have an agenda, you don’t have a pulse,” Brian says much later. Sometimes you have to push hard to get [an audience] to give a shit on the things they should care about,” whether its the Sudan, Rwanda, post-Katrina New Orleans or danger to elephants.
Fascinating to hear him toe this line, which must be anathema to many in these hallowed journalistic halls. Brian notes how when working at MSNBC he was not allowed, for example, to put music in documentary work -- something he does regularly now (and a question about which sparked the discussion).
“Ethics, I do have them,” he says, implicitly arguing that advocacy is actually a more ethical position."
Objectivity, I would argue, is damn near impossible. Where you point the camera, even how you frame the shot, let alone the quotes you choose or the point you make when writing, or what-not, are all choices. With a genuflection to Nanda Kumar of Baruch College (where I just guest lectured in his class) I ask: Is Google an objective search engine? No. Choices are made in how to write its algorithm.
Fairness is possible, and disclosure of ones’ biases helps achieve that aim. But objectivity? Ever seen Rashomon?
FULL DISCLOSURE:
One Of The Authors Of This Excellent Blog Is...
Vin Crosbie has been called "the Practical Futurist" by Folio, the trade journal of the American magazine industry. Editor & Publisher magazine, the trade journal of the American newspaper industry, devoted the Overview chapter of executive research report Digital Delivery of News: A How-to Guide for PublishersRepresentative American Speeches 2004-2005. He has keynoted the Seybold Publishing Strategies conference in 2000; co-chaired and co-moderated last year's annual Beyond the Printed Word the digital publishing conference in Vienna; and regularly speaks at most major online news media conferences. He is currently in residence as adjunct professor of visual and interactive communications and senior consultant on executive education in new media at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and meanwhile is managing partner of the media consulting firm of Digital Deliverance LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut. to his work. His speech to the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference was one of 24 orations selected by a team of speech professors for publication in the reference book
Posted by Vin Crosbie:
A professor today asked me:
"What will the future of the newspapers be?"
Meanwhile, someone on the Online News publishing discussion lists notes:
The question is often asked: 'What will be the future of the newspapers? But, it seems that before we ask that question, we'll have to first figure out what, if anything, constitutes the absolute core minimum of what it takes to be called a 'newspaper.'
What iss troubling about those questions is these people are still trying to define their news organizations according to products that are becoming obsolete. The true question is 'What will news organizations do in the future?'...
Dorian Benkoil last month e-mailed me asking what I thought about Business Week columnist Jon Fine's recent article, When Do You Stop The Presses?.
In the column, Fine ponders which major American newspaper will be the first to stop publishing a print edition and publish online only. He speculates that it will be the San Francisco Chronicle, which has reportedly lost $330 million this decade, approximately $1 million per week. Fine wonders if how the Chronicle should consider stopping its presses and start delivering news only online....
'Citizen Journalism' Is Only One Of Many Necessary Tools[When terminology gets stretched too far, discussion distorts and tempers snap. A friend in the Poynter Institute's Online News discussion group industry recently stretch the definition of 'citizen journalism' to include Letters-to-the-Editor. That 's when my patience snapped and I released criticisms of the 'citizen journalism' movement, which I've intentionally withheld for years.
Online News is an email-based discussion group, so some other friends have since asked me to post my criticisms here, so that they can hyperlink their own blogs or publications. Here goes:
Letter-to-the-Editor are as much journalism as a man's video of his kid's wedding is cinema. Or as much as a woman putting a Band-Aid (or 'plaster' the British would say) onto her kid's bruised knee is practicing medicine. Or as much as a guy appearing in traffic court to dispute a parking ticket is practicing law. It's too much of a rhetoric stretch.
Does its publication in a newspaper somehow make a person's opinion be journalism? If so, you might as well shutdown college schools of journalism. No need for those.
Yes, too many newsroom have become remote from, and condescending to, readers. Letting readers comment or converse in newspaper (web)pages is a much needed remedy. Yes, it's great when citizens who posses a particular expertise help report stories about that topic. Likewise, when citizens who witness a news event contribute their first-hand experiences. And, yes, it's heartening to believe that citizens themselves might be capable of reporting a significant portion of the news. Don't get me wrong: The concept behind 'citizen journalism' is noble, much like Karl Marx's vision of pure communism or Jean-Jacque Rousseau's vision of natural goodness or Ayn Rand's vision of objective individualism....
Hundreds of American Newspapers Surrender
Newspapers all across America are using newsprint to wave the white flag, surrendering to the major search engines.
Earlier this month, 50 American newspapers agreed to have Google sell some of their online advertising inventories. Those newspapers include The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune.
Today, 176 other American newspapers announced their agreement to have Yahoo! sell some of their online advertising inventories. These include newspapers owned by MediaNews Group, Hearst, Belo, E. W. Scripps, Journal Register, Lee Enterprises, and Cox Enterprises.
Welcome to the wholesale surrender of major American newspaper companies to the search engines!
The chairmen of many of these newspaper companies are claiming the deals represent victories or advantages for their newspapers, but their claims are hardly true. The deals instead represent their failures during the past ten years. You can see this when looking back on the long perspective (which is why I've pictured the white flag atop the mountain, above).
Reporting Yahoo!'s arrangements with those newspapers,
The New York Times today mentioned the effort ten years ago by the New Century Network consortium of the largest American newspaper companies -- Advance Publications, Cox Newspapers, Gannett Company, Hearst, Knight-Ridder, The New York Times Company, Times-Mirror, Tribune Company, and The Washington Post Company -- to form a common online advertising platform and also a common news search engine that included all their newspapers content and advertising space. But the executives of those companies bickered and failed to work together, and the New Century Network effort collapsed....
On this day when eMarketer estimates that Google is well on the way to capturing 25 percent of all U.S. online advertisement spending and almost twice the amount of Yahoo!'s revenues, with which Google's revenues only 18 months ago were on par, here are some other issues that my business partner and I are examining:
° What will be the future role of news agents and newsstands? Although they don't play a sizeable role in distribution of American, Canadian, German, and Japanese newspaper (only about seven percent of circulation in those countries), local newsstands and news agent play a most significant role in most other major countries' newspaper ecology. Plus they play significant roles in magazine distribution in every country.
In most of the world's countries, newspapers and their hired wholesalers distributed daily copies to the news agents and newsstands, who then distribute them to you. when you subscribe to home delivery of a daily newspaper, you make your subscription with your neighborhood newsstand or news agent (not directly with the newspaper as is the situation here in the U.S.) The news agents or newsstand has the relationships with the subscribers; the newspapers themselves don't know who subscribes, just that the wholesalers reports how many copies were sold to the retail newsstand and news agents.
Some digerati simply expect newsstands and news agents to go out of business if newspapers and magazines someday switch entirely to online publication. But that would create a major disruption in countries such as the United Kingdom, where 47 percent of the daily newspapers' gross revenues came from newsstands and news agents....
Pardon me for writing again about newspapers, but they're often the starting point in the feeding chains of broadcasters and bloggers. And this story is just in about newspapers themselves:
According to the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America Newspaper Audience Database project, more Americans visit newspaper websites than purchase printed editions. That is, more do sometime during a month. The NAA announced that more than 55.5 million Americans now visit newspaper websites at least once per month and this total grew by more than 31 percent during the past year.
When many of us started publishing news online during the late 1980s (via Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and other proprietary online services) or in the mid-1990s on the World Wide Web, the time when newspapers would have more online users than print readers seemed a distant dream.
It's a milestone, an accomplishment that deserve praise.
Yet this dream isn't a wet dream. Nor is it real. The big caveat in the NAA announcement is those numbers are monthly, not daily.
Slightly more than 54 million Americans purchase a printed edition daily while 55.5 million visited a newspaper website at least once per month. Conflating daily print and monthly online figures makes it appear that the American newspaper industry isn't so much losing daily print readers as gaining equally frequent new readers online. That's good PR for the newspaper industry, and more power to the NAA for touting it. But the claim isn't really true.
Daily reach isn't monthly reach and vice versa. There may be 55.5 million users of newspaper websites, but they use those site far less frequently and less thoroughly than daily.
Look closely at NAA's NAD data (which is downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet). How often does the average user visit a newspaper site during a month? There's are no data about that in the NAD data, but we can calculate an indication from the data. Though the NAD spreadsheet is password-protected against any changes or added calculations, you can simply add a new worksheet into it by using Excel's 'Insert > Worksheet' command and link it to the NAD data to make indicative calculations.
In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926 - 2004) postulated the now famous Five Stages of Grief that people undergo when faced with their impending death:
- Denial and isolation - The "This won't happen to me! I don't really have to worry" stage.
- Anger - The "Why me?" How dare you do this to me!" stage.
- Bargaining - The "Maybe I can evade this fate by co-opting or sidestepping it " stage.
- Depression - The "It's really happening and I can't stop it" stage.
- Acceptance - The "Let it happen; I don't want to struggle anymore" stage.
The news industry is dying. In which of Kübleresque stages is this industry. There have been some major changes this year.
But first, do I exaggerate the patient's condition? I don't think so. Nor do others. Furthermore, when I state that the news industry is dying, no, I don't want it to die. I am just stating the condition of the industry. There will always be a need for journalism, but the question is whether there will be an industry in which journalists can work.
Let's examine the patient. Its vital signs have been fading for decades. Circulations and readership of newspapers and news magazines has been evaporating. Listenership and viewership of broadcast news programs have likewise been are dissipating. These declines had been slow, about half a percent annually, but in the past few years have accelerated to a few percentages annually. The industry's heart still beats, and some industry leaders still to profess its vigor, but now even its core vital signs — its revenues (adjusted for inflation) and its profit margins — the pulse and blood pressure of the industry, have begun to wane.
Many industry executives claim that a transplant into the new-media will save the patient. However, an examination of data shows that their online editions are read by fewer people — and less often and less frequently — than the dying print or broadcast editions. Moreover, ten years into these efforts, the online editions are earning only one-twentieth to one-hundredth per user what the dying print edition earns per reader.
The news industry is in critical condition everywhere except countries that only now are forming their economic middle classes such as China and India; places only now rising to the levels North America and Western Europe reached 90 years ago (during the heyday of newspapers). The patient is dying everywhere else. The industry needs a radical course correction...
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