Debating the New Media

The Future of Journalism

Earlier this week, Senator Kerry presided over a Congressional hearing on the state of the media. With the newspapers laying off entire swathes of reporters, shutting down bureaus, and revealing major losses in their books, blame has primarily fallen on the “new media.” This term refers to the 21st century nexus of YouTube, Twitter, the blogosphere, and news aggregators that have placed a hitherto unattainable volume of information at our disposal, displacing newspapers from their niche.

Testifying at the hearing was David Simon, a former journalist from the Baltimore Sun and creator of the all-time best television show (not hyperbole), The Wire. For five seasons, Simon’s brainchild was unprecedented in its dedication to expose an America that had been forgotten by most mainstream media outlets: the drug-infested high rises, the decrepit education systems, the corrupt political institutions, and the withered labor unions. In The Wire’s final season, Simon directed his rage at the decline of quality journalism and the fall of the American newspaper.

Here is Simon’s testimony to Congress last week:



These are some valuable excerpts:

From those speaking on behalf of new media, weblogs and that which goes “twitter,” you will be treated to assurances that American journalism has a perfectly fine future online and that a great democratization is taking place. Well, a plague on both their houses.

High-end journalism is dying in America. And unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet is a marvelous tool, and clearly it is the information delivery system of our future. But thus far, it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host…

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Simon has a good point here. Society seems to have taken journalists for granted as people who merely observe, question, and write. This suffices as a quick job description, but there is a lot of craft that goes into it. You have to really know the institutions you cover, the various interests at stake, who has an incentive to tell you the truth and who does not. You have to sniff out the whistleblowers, those bureaucratic officials who have observed wrongdoing and are willing to expose it. This requires dedication and persistence, “a daily full-time commitment” as Simon says.

But while this approach has been jettisoned by many bloggers, Simon understates the plethora of go-it-alone independent reporters who do journalism well through the medium of blogs. As a matter of fact, the finest journalist I know at the UN is a blogger who doggedly pursues every contradiction of UN policy and conduct, confronting and challenging officials to the point of annoyance. In other words, quality journalism.

Ryan Tate of Gawker takes objection to Simon’s dismissal of the ‘new media’:

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived…

Collectively, these bloggers are doing just what Simon suggests: attending meetings, developing sources and holding government accountable every day…

And the best of the crop are doing so individually, on their own and, somehow, basically for free. Simon should spend as much time as he can on A Better Oakland… a thoroughly reported blog on the nitty-gritty of Oakland politics, complete with key video moments from government meetings, illuminating crime analysis, skillful fact-checking of political puffery, transit coverage, development coverage, thorough meeting recaps, spicy guest posts, and, yes, the occasional media criticism…

This is an important debate that we need to have. While mainstream American newspapers may fall by the wayside, the need to hold our leaders accountable will not. Will bloggers be up to the challenge?

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Simon, an intriguing individual with significant insight on the problems facing urban America. Check out the videos and transcript here.

I'd kill myself if I didn't use this as an opportunity to plug my favorite show of all time. Enjoy these legendary scenes: