So several people came up to me after the post "What I Learned from being a Journalist" and asked me questions like: "Yes, but don't you think the media is hypocritical and sensationalist?" My post was more of a personal reflection on what journalism - as a profession - has taught me, but I think these broader questions about the media industry are important. There are a couple of trends in the media industry that do make me pause.
1. The headlong rush into "digital." Here is the problem with every journalist and his uncle rushing to "brand himself" on platforms like Twitter. I have nothing against Twitter and nothing against branding, but one of the cornerstones of traditional journalism was an understanding that responsible news organizations - because they served the public interest - subjected themselves to a higher standard of transparency and scrutiny than, say, your average private company. Did this always play out in practice? Of course not. But it was a lofty and necessary principle, because we accepted that news organizations controlled people's access to information.
Suddenly the world of content distributors has expanded to include, possibly, companies like Twitter and Google. I have nothing against Google calling itself a "media company" (not that they do, but that's the debate, and one could argue either side of it) but it is absolutely true that they have taken over the role of newspapers when it comes to distribution and therefore control of information. They are also a fiercely competitive, obsessively secretive, impenetrable organization whose priorities remain largely prioprietary and whose main goal seems to be to best rivals by whatever means necessary. They've been investigated by multiple countries for antitrust violations, and they've engaged in a public battle of one-ups-man-ship with the Chinese government. This is all fine, of course, and part of the Google mystique, but if they are a media company then they owe us a little more information about what the heck they really want to do with "all the world's information."
The problems are even more glaring with Twitter. An inexplicable company, Twitter's users include most of the celebrities and opinion-makers in the world, and yet the company still struggles to prove that it has a workable revenue model. There've been rumors of late that Twitter has been on an aggressive campaign to court opinion-making Tweeters and take a cut of whatever these people are paid to promote on Twitter. If this is actually happening, Twitter isn't telling. Do phrases like "the financial transparency of Twitter" even matter? If the company were a struggling tech startup, maybe not. If it is a media company, then hell yes. Who are they paying? For what? When?
The problem with the web, as many people have pointed out, is that it lends itself to "natural monopolies." The media business has always lent itself to natural monopolies because people's consumption of news has always been driven by strongly emotional and entrenched preferences. We came up with elaborate safeguards and regulations, as journalists, to try and counteract this. But just like elaborately regulated American factories can't keep a cost advantage over their unregulated Chinese counterparts, highly moral American news orgs can't continue to keep their distribution advantage over new media companies that face neither the restrictions of government nor the scrutiny of a wary public.
Or: if the New York Times called together a meeting of its top columnists and told them that from now on it would take a cut of the profits every time the columnists mentioned particular corporate sponsors in their columns, most people would call that deal unethical. And yet Twitter proposes to do the same thing and no one says a word. Now of course some organizations - including news organizations - have a strict online ethics policy regarding how their employees behave on Twitter, but frankly, these policies are usually more notable for what they leave out than for what they include.
Even if you don't care what, say, Justin Bieber Tweets about, Twitter was recently credited with inspiring massive revolt across the Arab world, largely by acting like a news organization and distributing content.* Wouldn't it be nice to know if people were being paid to Tweet the Arab Spring? (A likely possibility) Now if Twitter were a media org, it would be able to require that its users disclose their financial dealings or at least their conflicts of interest. But Twitter is not considered a media company. This is convenient for Twitter, but maybe not a net gain for the world.
As journalism moves into the online space, it adopts the free wheeling atmosphere of the web. In our rush to distance ourselves from "old school" journalism we're happy to forget that old journalism did have some pros - most importantly, a ethical commitment to "the reader." The more self-aware writers and editors out there probably do have some qualms about the way we're engaging with social media, but - unfortunately, in today's news climate - they probably feel that they simply cannot afford them. (I'm not sure that I agree with this belief, though. I think there is a happy medium - valuable, ethical content that is nonetheless democratized in its production and distribution - but people will have to sit down and think about exactly how this content will look and behave.)
..
*Interesting question: Revolutionary publications have played a major role in political movements thruoghout history, or at least since the printing press, and people have argued - believably - that without the printing press, these revolutions might never have ocurred, or at least they would have
occurred very differently. Now consider: without Twitter, the Arab Spring would never have ocurred. So is Twitter the printing press, or is it the couriers that delivered the pamphlets? To be fair: this post isn't really about what Twitter owes the public - it's about the fact that journalists are rushing to embrace media like Twitter without caring that Twitter neither knows nor cares what it owes the public.
One could argue that individual Tweeters should be responsible for their own actions, which they are, but when the aggregate result of a whole lot of Tweeting is that a government gets toppled, can we really afford to be blase about Twitter's internal workings?
....
This post was going to be a list, but it got kinda long. I'll see if I can come up with more things tomorrow.
1. The headlong rush into "digital." Here is the problem with every journalist and his uncle rushing to "brand himself" on platforms like Twitter. I have nothing against Twitter and nothing against branding, but one of the cornerstones of traditional journalism was an understanding that responsible news organizations - because they served the public interest - subjected themselves to a higher standard of transparency and scrutiny than, say, your average private company. Did this always play out in practice? Of course not. But it was a lofty and necessary principle, because we accepted that news organizations controlled people's access to information.
Suddenly the world of content distributors has expanded to include, possibly, companies like Twitter and Google. I have nothing against Google calling itself a "media company" (not that they do, but that's the debate, and one could argue either side of it) but it is absolutely true that they have taken over the role of newspapers when it comes to distribution and therefore control of information. They are also a fiercely competitive, obsessively secretive, impenetrable organization whose priorities remain largely prioprietary and whose main goal seems to be to best rivals by whatever means necessary. They've been investigated by multiple countries for antitrust violations, and they've engaged in a public battle of one-ups-man-ship with the Chinese government. This is all fine, of course, and part of the Google mystique, but if they are a media company then they owe us a little more information about what the heck they really want to do with "all the world's information."
The problems are even more glaring with Twitter. An inexplicable company, Twitter's users include most of the celebrities and opinion-makers in the world, and yet the company still struggles to prove that it has a workable revenue model. There've been rumors of late that Twitter has been on an aggressive campaign to court opinion-making Tweeters and take a cut of whatever these people are paid to promote on Twitter. If this is actually happening, Twitter isn't telling. Do phrases like "the financial transparency of Twitter" even matter? If the company were a struggling tech startup, maybe not. If it is a media company, then hell yes. Who are they paying? For what? When?
The problem with the web, as many people have pointed out, is that it lends itself to "natural monopolies." The media business has always lent itself to natural monopolies because people's consumption of news has always been driven by strongly emotional and entrenched preferences. We came up with elaborate safeguards and regulations, as journalists, to try and counteract this. But just like elaborately regulated American factories can't keep a cost advantage over their unregulated Chinese counterparts, highly moral American news orgs can't continue to keep their distribution advantage over new media companies that face neither the restrictions of government nor the scrutiny of a wary public.
Or: if the New York Times called together a meeting of its top columnists and told them that from now on it would take a cut of the profits every time the columnists mentioned particular corporate sponsors in their columns, most people would call that deal unethical. And yet Twitter proposes to do the same thing and no one says a word. Now of course some organizations - including news organizations - have a strict online ethics policy regarding how their employees behave on Twitter, but frankly, these policies are usually more notable for what they leave out than for what they include.
Even if you don't care what, say, Justin Bieber Tweets about, Twitter was recently credited with inspiring massive revolt across the Arab world, largely by acting like a news organization and distributing content.* Wouldn't it be nice to know if people were being paid to Tweet the Arab Spring? (A likely possibility) Now if Twitter were a media org, it would be able to require that its users disclose their financial dealings or at least their conflicts of interest. But Twitter is not considered a media company. This is convenient for Twitter, but maybe not a net gain for the world.
As journalism moves into the online space, it adopts the free wheeling atmosphere of the web. In our rush to distance ourselves from "old school" journalism we're happy to forget that old journalism did have some pros - most importantly, a ethical commitment to "the reader." The more self-aware writers and editors out there probably do have some qualms about the way we're engaging with social media, but - unfortunately, in today's news climate - they probably feel that they simply cannot afford them. (I'm not sure that I agree with this belief, though. I think there is a happy medium - valuable, ethical content that is nonetheless democratized in its production and distribution - but people will have to sit down and think about exactly how this content will look and behave.)
..
*Interesting question: Revolutionary publications have played a major role in political movements thruoghout history, or at least since the printing press, and people have argued - believably - that without the printing press, these revolutions might never have ocurred, or at least they would have
occurred very differently. Now consider: without Twitter, the Arab Spring would never have ocurred. So is Twitter the printing press, or is it the couriers that delivered the pamphlets? To be fair: this post isn't really about what Twitter owes the public - it's about the fact that journalists are rushing to embrace media like Twitter without caring that Twitter neither knows nor cares what it owes the public.
One could argue that individual Tweeters should be responsible for their own actions, which they are, but when the aggregate result of a whole lot of Tweeting is that a government gets toppled, can we really afford to be blase about Twitter's internal workings?
....
This post was going to be a list, but it got kinda long. I'll see if I can come up with more things tomorrow.
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