The news model is broken

Chapter one of Dominic Boyer’s The Life Informatic explores the hectic and exhausting work of slotting at AP-DD. Slotting, given its name from the predigital paper-in-slot story assignment, is the work of highly trained, highly functioning journalists who sift through incoming news material to decide what is actually newsworthy, while simultaneously monitoring existing stories and the feeds of other news organizations.

Slotters decide which news material constitutes a meldungen (or report) and send them out on the agency wire. As such, slotters’ authority extends far beyond their own agency as news organizations rely upon news agencies to “deliver maximally accurate, maximally fast, maximally factual information” (Boyer 17). Given the effect of the digital era, the output of news from agencies and the use of it in news organizations has only increased. News organizations look to news agencies to find themes and key stories for the day, and frequently use minimally edited agency reports in their own coverage.

Boyer argues that this sharing of news content output from the news agency has marginalized the value of original content, since original content only remains original for a few seconds, a few minutes at best. In addition, he argues that sharing news content has left news organizations looking for a different angle to present the news from in order to establish a distinct identity.

In explaining new organizations’ desire for distinctiveness he, at the same time, underscores that they remain outsourcing their news production to news agencies. In fact, Boyer states that news organizations are increasingly after “’ready-made’ content designed to be directly transferred into clients’ content management systems without the need for further editorial intervention” (Boyer 18). Beyond seeking content alone, Boyer later states that there is a rising demand for finished text and image bundles.

Although Boyer’s concerns with this news model fit into a larger web of informatics and digital liberalism, it also works to highlight the deterioration of sound journalism practices.

Outsourcing news production means trusting that the content you receive is factual and accurate. If a journalist does not double back on the information presented to them in order to ensure the accuracy, then they have no right to the title of “journalist” in the first place. Outsourcing news and taking content at face value not only disconnects one from their journalistic identity, it sets them up to fall victim to “bad news.”

John Bohannon victimized plenty in proving a similar point. In 2015, John Bohannon and a team of journalists conducted a sting operation to show how easy it is to turn bad science into big headlines. They conducted an “experiment” whose findings showed that those who consume dark chocolate everyday lose weight 10 percent faster than those who do not. The catch, however, was that the entire experiment was cooked: the sample size was far too low to be generalizeable, and the data was severely massaged to put out, what journalists call, a “statistically significant” result. This fake finding then made news in more than 20 countries. It ended up on the headline of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, in the glossy pages of Shape magazine, and was set to be published in the September issue of Men’s Health, prior to Bohannon releasing his article explaining that the experiment was a setup.

The fissures in modern-day journalism become apparent in this ultimate bamboozle. In an attempt to get the story out first or jump on the bandwagon of the “cool” new finding, all of these news outlets took the content that was fed to them without doing any real reporting, ultimately publishing false findings in their publications.

Bohannon’s sting relates back to Boyer’s core arguments in two ways. First, it highlights the risks of outsourcing news production and taking ready-made content at face value. Second, it highlights the dangers of publishing a story just because a competitor has (recall new organizations watching the tickers of other organizations to monitor their themes for the day).