Day 4: How We Do This & the News
To borrow a question: ‘But what is this getting us besides more clicks?’
NOTE: I’m posting a blog every day during the Devil’s Advocates membership drive for The Devil Strip. This is one of those.
Once upon a time, I read novels. This is how it happened. If you can, picture the 19-year-old me in a half-broken chair behind the counter at a Nashville pizza shop, sneaking in chapters from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” between deliveries in the greater Green Hills area. It was the first novel I read that hadn’t been assigned. My mind was blown.
This was 1997, so self-distraction was still an art because our phones and our Internet stayed behind when we left the house — or, to be more accurate, the cinder block closet I called a dorm room and shared with a stranger who looked like Mr. Bean and farted in his sleep.
Since I hadn’t yet met the co-worker who would show me how to smoke gas station cigars over faux-deep conversations during our breaks, I took the book to beat back boredom. It was a gift from a long-distance girlfriend — I have almost always dated above my intellectual and cultural weight class — so I figured I’d read just enough to give my report later on the phone, twirling the cord as I daydreamed about visiting her in Detroit.
I’m thinking about this because I’m thinking about slow news because I’m thinking about “Local news needs to slow down its pace,” a Medium post I read today by JulieAnn McKellogg.
McKellogg makes an excellent argument that the breakneck pace of local newsrooms is a bad thing, in part because it ignores the readers journalism is supposedly intended to help. If you haven’t worked in a newsroom, she does a good job describing it and dismantling the logic all in the same paragraph:
The industry is frantic. Frantic to be first with breaking news. Frantic to be the best in video, text, photo and graphics. Frantic to survive amidst declining ad revenues. I’m guilty. I’ve managed a video team that I’ve pushed to shoot faster, edit faster, type faster. Be the fastest. Win that top place in Google search by publishing first! But what is this getting us besides more clicks?
That last line is my favorite in the entire piece. Asked often enough by more people, that question could shape the industry all by itself. After a few times, it’s hard to ignore that “more clicks” — or higher ratings or larger circulation — is exactly why most things are done. Or why the same kinds of stories make up the bulk of local news in any city you visit.
Car crash on the Interstate!
But what is this getting us besides more clicks?
City council argues with the mayor!
But what is this getting us besides more clicks?
Fatal shooting!
But what is this getting us besides more clicks?
Two things I want to make clear: A#1) News media outlets need to make money to survive (though it’s worth thinking about what exactly survive means and why that word instead of thrive), so I’m not begrudging them a profit. B#2) I’m not suggesting the examples I gave aren’t necessarily newsworthy. However, I have problems with how they typically get covered, which is worth a rant of its own soon.
What I love most about McKellogg’s post is its emphasis on taking the time to actually think about what might be best for the reader. That’s how I take that question, as a way of asking, “When we do our jobs this way who exactly are we serving?”
By the time I finally had the nerve to leave my job in a corporate newsroom — fortunately not a Sinclair shop — I’d come to understand that most of the work I did was not really for the whole reader, just their eyeballs. That mentality dictated a pace and frequency that meant most of what I did (and work my colleagues did) would be virtually disposable within hours.
Local news shall not live by clicks alone.
If it isn’t clear, I did not read “Breakfast of Champions” because I liked reading books. That’s how it got me. Books can do this? It’s loaded with ideas and truths that are delivered plainly by a narrator who uses gallows humor and crude — in both its major senses: not-artful and also crass — cartoons to explain America to a reader he pretends has never encountered it before.
I was so surprised that I suspected the book was broken somehow. Cheating. An aberration. The only one of its kind. Because if books could be this enjoyable and filling, someone would have told me!
I read more books. More Vonnegut, saving “Slaughterhouse Five” for last to avoid spoiling everything else. Between these, I wove a path from Salinger to Zora Neale Hurston and Orwell, Maugham and Ignazio Silone to Tom Wolfe and Tom Robbins, then Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis. And so on and so forth until I came to Mark Leyner, Barbara Kingsolver, Percival Everett, Christopher Moore, George Saunders’ short fiction and Sherman Alexie before I learned better.
The point is that little book with the irreverent doodles went a long way.
Over the decade following the pizza shop, my reading would eventually slow until it shifted to utilitarian work, which I became too busy — too darn busy — to actually read, opting for audiobooks on my commute.
Likewise, the handwritten letters I’d penned almost weekly since middle school became daily emails which became blogs, tweets and Facebook posts. The notebooks I filled with the beginnings of bad novels became endless and unorganized Word docs, which became Google docs, which became something for my will-never-actually-do list. Now, I’m a father and a husband, and I’m a business owner. Time is even more precious a commodity now.
So it goes.
You may not have noticed but football has, in terms of total revenue and attention, replaced baseball as America’s pastime. There are likely myriad reasons how and why, but one explanation I heard made a lot of sense.
There are 162 games in a regular season of baseball. There are 16 games in a regular season of football. In this day and age, we don’t have time to keep up with baseball. I believe this is what’s happened with my reading habits. Novels are a 162-game season.
If this theory holds, then it’s also true for local news. Unfortunately, journalism follows baseball’s lead by speeding things up to win people back. Limit all the trips to the pitcher’s mound as you want. Start every batter with two strikes. You won’t shave enough time off the nearly three-hour average to change your fortunes. Instead you mess up your product and drive away the people who, like me when I actually watch a game, enjoy the slow pace.
Instead of recognizing what makes local news distinctive and going deep with it, outlets cling to a broadcast mindset, cramming as much content as they can into every 24-hour window and hoping the aggregate brings enough indiscriminate web traffic to offset regular ad sales.
By the way, the word content now sounds like journalism’s Soylent Green. Except, it’s not people.
Also from McKellogg’s Medium post:
A recent Knight Foundation report found that “fifty-eight percent of Americans say the increased number of news sources makes it harder to be informed.”
When we talk about journalism’s declining audiences and declining revenues, there are two culprits that tend to get overlooked:
- Most folks have too much information coming at them from too many sources to consume much, so they shut it out because the brain loves shortcuts. (I mean heuristics, not the Robert Altman film or the Raymond Carver stories on which it was based. [Full disclosure: Some brains love “Short Cuts”.])
- When folks do check out local news, the quality and depth is, in most cases, a shadow of its former self. So why would they be loyal to it?
If those were birds and we wanted to kill them, then the stone local news outlets should reach for is time-intensive quality and depth. Do the work only you can produce and do it well. Some of the most talented people I’ll ever met are buried in newsrooms where they aren’t encouraged (or sometimes allowed) to do their best work because that would take time and resources. Worse, some in management don’t believe audiences would keep up.
As a result, many gifted storytellers get stuck reliving the same newscast over and over again: someone was shot, a car flipped over, the weather is awful, a house caught on fire, officials today said something, other officials disagreed.
But what is this getting us besides more clicks?
What if local news could do more and be more? Maybe the distrust in news media, the sense of polarization between neighbors, the ascent of fake news, etc. is just the symptom of systemic and structural problems that aren’t new.
Nearly 165 years ago, in “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau wrote:
“If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”
Thoreau didn’t live in an age of clicks, likes, shares and comments — he was ranting about penny postage at post office in the passage before he lit into newspapers — but his real question transcends technology: What good does the news do anyone?
I think if we’re looking deeper than the practical applications of the craft then we’ll solve a lot of the issues that currently plague journalism.
FOOTNOTES:
- I decided it makes more sense to call this part “footnotes” instead of “housekeeping,” which I mention in case you’re looking for housekeeping.
- We have 125+ members now, mostly Rogues. Ordering member cards, buttons and stickers today.
- The store is open. We’re getting a bunch of orders. (Yay!)
- Some folks have asked if they can use PayPal to join as Misfits, but we can only use one payment system and I chose Stripe because of lower fees, which means we benefit more from your support.
- I liked “Slaughterhouse Five” as a writer —I’m fascinated by how effortless he makes the bonkers structure and storytelling appear — but it didn’t move me as a reader. I connected more with other works.
- My Top 5 Vonnegut novels: “Breakfast of Champions”, “Mother Night”, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”, “Bluebeard” and “Jailbird”.
- The only Vonnegut movie worth watching is “Mother Night”, which was directed by Keith Gordon, who was an actor you may recognize from the adaptation of Stephen King’s “Christine” or from “Back to School” which starred Rodney Dangerfield. Vonnegut makes a cameo appearance in “Back to School” which sets up a great gag later in the movie.
