Take the rise of the bloggers. This is no simple accident of technology, but the price newspapers are paying for having treated readers as passive consumers without bothering to find out more about them as news users. In the same way, artificial TV reality shows are being challenged by the mushrooming growth of permanent reality spaces like YouTube, MySpace, Etribes and others, and 3D virtual-reality sites such as Second Life.
No one knows where these trends will end. Of course, traditional media companies are pitching in to buy up anything with Web 2.0 pretensions, however remote. But as the AOL-Time Life debacle graphically showed, there is no necessary synergy between old and new media, and unless attitudes to customers change radically, they may find that the benefits of innovation are not easily bought.
Today’s NY Times gives us a j-school lesson in overcooked feature writing marked by barely hidden agendas and grating condescension (not unlike another story in the same spot in The Times that tried to make us sympathetic with a two-bit thief, which I lamented the other day). Today, Charlie LeDuff visits a Burger King in Dallas to try to urge sympathy for a woman who has a bad job but who also admits, way down in the story, that she “wishes she would have worked harder in school. Not gotten pregnant at 13. Again at 14.” Let’s dissect this one:
Off a bleak and empty interchange midway through the Dallas sprawl stands a Burger King. It’s past midnight, the rain sizzles on the parking lot blacktop like frying bacon. A young woman is working the lobster shift at the drive-through window. She is overweight and wears pink lipstick.
“Nothing special,†she says of herself. “Nothing much.â€
Gloria Castillo is 22, married, a mother of two, a Latina from the rough side of Dallas. She is on the low side of making it.
The night is busy, and a mustache of perspiration breaks across her lip. She is alone with the fry cook.
Note the heavy atmospherics: rain sizzling like bacon (really?). Note the many ways to say that the subject is overweight and sweaty. He’s sympathetic to her yet also looks down at her. We bring you the great unwashed.
The customers are rude tonight, drunk and bellicose. One guy doesn’t want to pay for his food, figuring it ought to be free. If he had wanted to rob the place, Ms. Castillo says with a tight smile, it would have been easy enough; the window doesn’t lock here like it does at the McDonald’s.
And a literate thief reading the New York Times appreciates the tip.
From the car window, the whole fast-food experience is a numbing routine. Pull up. Order from the billboard. Idle. Pay. Drive away. Fast food has become a $120 billion motorized American experience.
No news there. It’s a big industry with lots of jobs, many numbing.
But consider the life inside that window on Loop 12 in West Dallas. There is a woman with children and no health insurance, undereducated, a foot soldier in the army of the working poor.
The reporter paints her as a victim, don’t you think? And he tells us to be sympathetic to her plight. She has a crappy job. He doesn’t yet tell us that she made the choices I listed above. She’s a victim here. Of what, I’m not clear. The atmosphere continues:
The fry cook sneezes on the meat patties. Cigarettes go half smoked. Cameras spy on the employees. Customers throw their fries and soft drinks sometimes because they think it’s funny.
So far, he has told us how to rob the place and why it ought to get health-department citations. More like this to come.
“I hate this job,†Ms. Castillo says with a smile. “I hate it.†It is her third drive-through job. First it was Whataburger. Then McDonald’s. Now here. It is becoming a career.
“Burger King pays better,†she says. Even so, she has taken a second job: “It’s a bar. There’s a lot of white guys in there. I go and clean the restrooms. There’s three restrooms I clean for $150, and I do it in one hour and 30 minutes. One hour and a half.â€
Well, the job’s not pleasant, but $100 an hour beats bagging burgers.
Ms. Castillo is the daughter of an illegal immigrant who came to America from Honduras by bus 22 years ago, with Ms. Castillo gestating inside her. Her mother lives on a disability check now, and Ms. Castillo is the American who sees herself competing with illegal labor, labor that drives down her wage, she says.
“I never worked with white people,†she says while putting a cup of soda and ice together. “Everywhere I go and apply, it’s always Mexicans, black or Chinese.â€
She surmises that the entire morning staff at her Burger King is illegal. “I can tell you everyone who works here in the morning works fake papers. No English. Nobody in the morning knows English.
“Somebody takes the order and then we tell them in Spanish.â€
Ernesto Hernandez, her manager, says that he does not know if he employs people who work with false Social Security numbers and that it is not his job to know if the numbers are real. “Call corporate,†he says in a thick accent. “They have that information.â€
Corporate did not return calls.
So now add that to the favors the reporter has done for this Burger King and its employees: He practically dares the INS to come and collect the day-shift employees and he doesn’t ask them whether they are illegals.
Whatever the truth of the matter, there’s a lot of ethnic friction behind the drive-through glass, Ms. Castillo says: “There’s a lot of hate.â€
She hands the soda and a sack of 10 tacos to a guy in a Chevy who looks stoned. He doesn’t count his change. He drives away with one hand on the wheel, one in the sack of tacos.
A sign on the window says: “Burgers for breakfast beginning at 8 a.m.â€
Hate is a strong word. Then LeDuff shifts from that to the mundane and uninformative observations of the feature writer. What does it mean that the guy doesn’t count his change or that burgers are sold at 8 a.m.? It’s a classic feature-writer’s trick: Empty the notebook of such details and act as if they mean something, even if they don’t.
LeDuff next proceeds to outline the difficulties of Castillo’s day — her pay, her schedule with her kids and husband, her efforts to go to school now, her habit of buying the kids fatty McDonald’s food: life. He concludes:
Around 2 a.m. work begins to slow down. This is the unpredictable hour. It could be filled with only the fry cook’s music, or it could be the hour that gunmen rob the place and lock them in the freezer. It’s happened before, she says. It happens dozens of times a month at fast food restaurants across the country.
Tonight, it’s music. Gloria Castillo stares out the open window, allowing the wet air to blow inside. “I got dreams,†she says. “I’m a human being.â€
She looks at the crummy little house across the parking lot with peeling paint. “That would be good too, a little house. I don’t want much.â€
And just what are we supposed to take from this story? Are we supposed to feel guilty for her fate? Why? What are we supposed to do about this person with the crappy job and bad choices and hate for the immigrants who compete for those crappy jobs? Who says she doesn’t have dreams and isn’t a human being? We didn’t. But it’s practically assumed that we did. Why is this story in the national section of the national paper?
A division of ad agency WPP castigates newspaper companies for not selling online effectively:
“With some exceptions, newspaper groups don’t seem to be marketing their digital assets particularly well,” said Adam Smith, the futures director at Group M.
“Regional press groups, in particular, still seem to be overly focused on only selling in print.
“As with radio, the sales forces neglect their digital assets. The typical newspaper sales department still regards online as an exotic distraction, if they are aware of it at all.”
The report is about the UK but the same holds true here in too many newspapers and magazines. The many conferences I go to about the future of journalism and media rarely include the sales side of media companies and less rarely advertisers. We fret about where the money’s going to come from but don’t include the money people. There are exceptions; this was the reason the Online Publishers Association was founded. But it’s time to both educate and pressure the money people, for if you don’t lead the money, you’ll follow it as it goes elsewhere.
I find it amazing that the PR Newswire would be worth $1 billion. They distribute press releases and charge for the privilege. In a world of links, anyone who wants your flackerie, your company line, can come to your company site. But, of course, you’ll still want those who don’t want your stuff to see it and you’ll want writers to read it. But the days when one organization could charge for having a conduit to newsrooms is likely short-lived as is the value of getting just to newsrooms.
Chris Riley builds a neat little page that compares, side-by-side, what the BBC thinks we should care about vs. what we actually care about — that is, the BBC’s home-page placement against the most popular stories and subjects. Now I know that some will warn that we shouldn’t make news just a matter of ratings. I hear that all the time: Then the news would be overrun by tawdry celebrity gossip. Well, it is already. And note that the stop story over the last two weeks on both sides of the equation is Iraq, not Tomkat. That’s No. 2.
Back in 2003, I discovered a blog called Blue Bird Escapes, by a terribly talented young writer in Virginia who returned to her native Iran and wrote an eloquently frank and open diary sharing her views about trying to cross between the two worlds (dig in about here). I just got email from the writer, Elaheh Farmand, now a college freshman, sharing the news that she was published in the Washington Post. The challenge was to write about your life in 100 words or less. And here is what she wrote, as eloquent as ever:
I come from Tehran and no, there are no camels where I come from. There are cars and honking taxis that pass women in black veils or short, colorful scarves that barely cover their heads. In this beautiful prison of banned dreams, there certainly isn’t a statue of liberty; men and women liberate themselves with cafes, cigars, smuggled drugs and secret relationships. In America, I am a writer. I can imagine, dream, live, breathe as an Iranian, an American. I can add color to anything; if only I could paint the gray streets of Tehran with my words.
The BBC says it is putting up a show filled with content produced by the people formerly known as the audience. It’s called Your News: ” The programme where viewers provide the news through pictures, videos and stories.” Hmmm. Not so sure about that second-person plural.
So I saw that the Guardian is going tosyndicate the viral video chart (which I blogged when it launched and to which I return frequently). And so I saw that the WKRP Thanksgiving episode was No. 2 and I got to show it to my son, the Seinfeld fan. What a classic.
Two Three stories in today’s Times grated on me like fingernails on a whiteboard (updated allusion).
The first chronicles a so-what tale of a two-bit criminal who stole a mean and then whines about spending a day washing dishes. Why the hell should be care? She broke the law. She served a sentence. She barely gives a damn. Go read the story and tell me what is in the least bit newsworthy about this?
The second is Anita Gates’ review of an American Girl movie that tries to make support for World War II look like a politically incorrect subversive attempt to support the Iraq War, one that requires parental instruction:
Then there’s the war. Granted, this is World War II, the one that even protesters in the Vietnam era could see as “the good war,†totally justified and noble. But it may seem to some viewers that Molly’s lessons in the necessity of the ultimate sacrifice are meant to persuade young viewers to see the current war in Iraq as equally noble.
Parents can talk to their children about that issue and then safely allow them to enjoy “Molly†for what it mostly is, a heartwarming, dreamlike vision of American small-town life six decades ago, with universal lessons around every corner.
Well, thank you very much for the permission.
And then I just saw Clyde Haberman’s column (behind the barbed wire) trying to tie Christmas shopping, 9/11, and Iraq together in a construction even more contorted than the White House’s.
No day is better for this display of patriotism than Black Friday, so named because retailers pray for ledgers written in ink of that color. Many signs suggest that New Yorkers are ready to do their part.
Few of them may have turned out on Nov. 11 to watch the Veterans Day parade in the city. The crowds lining the parade route on Fifth Avenue were sparser than Knicks victories.
But New Yorkers more than held their own a few days later by gathering in vast herds outside stores selling the Sony PlayStation 3.
This may be one time when you should be glad you can’t get behind the TimesSelect wall.
Were the editors all off having turkey yesterday? Apparently so. And the paper got the stuffing.
Michael Hirschorn has a good column in The Atlantic on one of my favorite subjects — Whither newspapers? — singing harmony with much of what I say here.
Meanwhile, top reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists–like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts. . . .
Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. . . .
But he comes around to an optimistic ending for print.
