A Brief Thought

Bill Anderson
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

I was just reading an interesting piece about one of the recent issues Google is neck deep in. Now, I’ll be quoting a significant piece of the early part for context.

Try to imagine the Damore story happening 20 years ago. It’s nearly impossible, isn’t it? Take a company of similar scope and power to Google — Microsoft, say. Would any reporter in 1997 have cared that some Microsoft engineer she’d never heard of had written a memo his co-workers considered sexist? Probably not. It was more likely a problem for Microsoft HR, or just angry water-cooler conversations.

Even if the reporter had cared, what editor would have run the story? On an executive, absolutely — but a random engineer who had no power over corporate policy? No one would have wasted precious, expensive column inches reporting it.

But for the purposes of this article, we are not going to concern ourselves with the actions at Google. This article is not about Google, but journalism. Specifically this piece:

No one would have wasted precious, expensive column inches reporting it.

There is a wisdom there the author is probably not aware of (for no mention is really made of it beyond that). In a nutshell it is a key piece of what is wrong with journalism these days: the discipline of cost is gone.

For people who know the workings around creativity, it is well known that it doesn’t happen in a case of unlimited bounds but of constrained systems. Think of it this way. Who will be more “creative” with the food they have at home, the person with an unlimited budget or the person with a rather limited one? Yes, the limitations enhance the creativity.

Back in the day, when journalists had to print material, every inch of a column cost real money. Papers could, and did, quantify how much every inch of a column of text or a picture occupied. This carried over to radio, then on the television. Whether it be an ad, news, or opinion it cost opportunity (the ad’s money versus the content space) or outright money. The media didn’t matter, but its relative scarcity did.

Because there was limited resources what could be published had to be deemed worthy of its inclusion. But the move to bits changes that calculus. Now you can throw up anything onto the Internet for practically nothing. Of course news is still a terrible business to make money from, kinda of like auto racing, but “putting words to paper” is effectively price-free.

This eliminates an arguably crucial limitation. Now, because we can just vomit something onto the screen and not compare that to the quality of the other its of stuff allegedly competing for that “space”, we do just that. I’m not even talking about the atrocities committed against spelling, the meaning of words, and fundamental grammar. But the quality of the writing, the effort needed for the application of real thought, and of the purpose behind the writing in the first place.

We know spamming happens because of its relative cheapness. How is the relative cheapness of “publishing news” — fake or not — somehow immune to this effect? It isn’t. Many moons ago I heard a phrase that sticks with me to this day. “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” But old timers will tell of how news used to be relevant and not so vile, vituperative and vacuous. To that I bring in another veritable axiom: “The Internet doesn’t make you stupid, it merely makes your stupidity more accessible to others.”

Combining these two could, I think, explain a large part of why “the news” is in such terrible shape, along with most everything it touches. It also counters the notion that the Internet will solve so many of our problems. We humans have always been equally capable of producing crap. But in the past there was a filter on the crap. Journalism has always produced a lot of crap. Perhaps the difference now isn’t that it got worse, just that we can see it all for practically free.

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Bill Anderson

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