What's the news?
As the news system has become more driven by individual personalities, and replaced the apex of the profession with the blow-dried TV anchor, coverage has gotten more and more shallow, driven by the logic of the news organization itself instead of by facts and reality. In short, news is now optimized for sharing unattributed gossip about celebrities, and basically treats every story in that way.
In that sense, Twitter is great for news -- the perfect online match for the attribution- and research-free milieu of today's journalism. But that match is dancing with the devil. Any modern news system that is going to be successful is going to look very little like Twitter, and rely on such knee-jerk low-information tools in only the most rudimentary way. Recent examples as I write this: Balloon Boy and the Fort Hood shootings. In these and similar stories, the news might as well be reading twitter streams -- they put on ignorant "experts" and relay breathless and almost invariably wrong reports from on-the-scene reporters.
But what is going to be successful in a world where passing on vapid chatter is zero cost is adding the values of reputation and authority. That is only going to be earned the hard way -- by taking the time to not get it wrong. To get it right. To explain. To find the facts behind the facade. To investigate. To ask the follow-ups.
What does Twitter have to do with that? If the existing news business abdicates its role of spending the time to get the story to doing low-value "curation" (that is, largely link-blogging), then someone else (probably what we now call "bloggers") will step into the role. The real lesson of Twitter is that curation is easy, and can be done largely through algorithmic aggregation. Unless you are occupied with doing the thinking, investigating, and explaining, you're simply not doing news. That today's news infrequently thinks, rarely investigates and seldom explains, is not evidence that Twitter will save it, but that Twitter will destroy it. ¶ 11:18 PM
Friday, November 6, 2009
I'm interested in following the rapid evolution of the news business. Something that puzzles me is the conviction on the part of many people who are experts in this (i.e. Jay Rosen), that Twitter is somehow emblematic of the new news system. That's true to an extent, but only insofar as what the news system has allowed itself to become.
As the news system has become more driven by individual personalities, and replaced the apex of the profession with the blow-dried TV anchor, coverage has gotten more and more shallow, driven by the logic of the news organization itself instead of by facts and reality. In short, news is now optimized for sharing unattributed gossip about celebrities, and basically treats every story in that way.
In that sense, Twitter is great for news -- the perfect online match for the attribution- and research-free milieu of today's journalism. But that match is dancing with the devil. Any modern news system that is going to be successful is going to look very little like Twitter, and rely on such knee-jerk low-information tools in only the most rudimentary way. Recent examples as I write this: Balloon Boy and the Fort Hood shootings. In these and similar stories, the news might as well be reading twitter streams -- they put on ignorant "experts" and relay breathless and almost invariably wrong reports from on-the-scene reporters.
But what is going to be successful in a world where passing on vapid chatter is zero cost is adding the values of reputation and authority. That is only going to be earned the hard way -- by taking the time to not get it wrong. To get it right. To explain. To find the facts behind the facade. To investigate. To ask the follow-ups.
What does Twitter have to do with that? If the existing news business abdicates its role of spending the time to get the story to doing low-value "curation" (that is, largely link-blogging), then someone else (probably what we now call "bloggers") will step into the role. The real lesson of Twitter is that curation is easy, and can be done largely through algorithmic aggregation. Unless you are occupied with doing the thinking, investigating, and explaining, you're simply not doing news. That today's news infrequently thinks, rarely investigates and seldom explains, is not evidence that Twitter will save it, but that Twitter will destroy it. ¶ 11:18 PM
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I have never addressed Twitter as anything but a part of the news system-- the notification part and an extension of that system to everyone on the Net. I have never made the point you are refuting. Nor do you quote me doing so. Find someone else to be your foil, please.
Thanks for the reply, Jay. I think perhaps you understood me as attributing you the opposite position I was taking in the whole post. I can understand that, but I think a more natural way to read the post (and the way I meant it) is to attribute to you just what's in the first paragraph where you're mentioned. That is, simply the view that Twitter is emblematic of a new news system, where emblematic means "representative." I attribute this view to you because you've been spending so much of the time that I used to profit from listening to you talk about the news system to following every twist and turn in Twitter's feature set. I've lost track of your longer-form writing about the news system and now hear you largely either using Twitter or talking about it.
The point I was trying to make is not that you and others are one-dimensional, or even that you're devoting too much time and energy trying to get the news business to adopt Twitter as a tool (although I do think that), but that I think that the features of the tool play much more to the weaknesses of the news system rather than its strengths.
So: I do read you as viewing Twitter as emblematic of a new news system. I don't know whether you think Twitter is dangerous to the news system in the way I think it is, but I suspect you don't. I definitely do not think you believe that news should be vapid and knee-jerk. :-) Quite the opposite.
However, to apply the above to your case, I find personally that I really miss reading your thoughts on the news business on your blog. Instead, I have a much more telegraphic set of Twitter updates, which in my opinion are much lower value. That's the kind of danger to the news system which I believe exists in the tool that I'm not sure we agree on -- if newspeople stop writing about a story I care about, and instead start just curating, then why should I continue to pay attention to them instead of to the sources directly? You point to Twitter as a notification system, but what if the notification becomes the full content, as it increasingly does for you and the stories you are best at writing about? In my view, there's a serious gap in the conversation left behind.
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The point I was trying to make is not that you and others are one-dimensional, or even that you're devoting too much time and energy trying to get the news business to adopt Twitter as a tool (although I do think that), but that I think that the features of the tool play much more to the weaknesses of the news system rather than its strengths.
So: I do read you as viewing Twitter as emblematic of a new news system. I don't know whether you think Twitter is dangerous to the news system in the way I think it is, but I suspect you don't. I definitely do not think you believe that news should be vapid and knee-jerk. :-) Quite the opposite.
However, to apply the above to your case, I find personally that I really miss reading your thoughts on the news business on your blog. Instead, I have a much more telegraphic set of Twitter updates, which in my opinion are much lower value. That's the kind of danger to the news system which I believe exists in the tool that I'm not sure we agree on -- if newspeople stop writing about a story I care about, and instead start just curating, then why should I continue to pay attention to them instead of to the sources directly? You point to Twitter as a notification system, but what if the notification becomes the full content, as it increasingly does for you and the stories you are best at writing about? In my view, there's a serious gap in the conversation left behind.
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