I realized that this slippery slope was descended upon around the birth of 24 HR new channels (ie: CNN). There is a natural and capricious appetite for real-time event reporting, it needs to be live. It seems that the implemented QA (editors) are indeed handcuffed. We need to run with this, there’s is no time to find secondary or tertiary sources. I cite the occurrence of the awful bit of journalism during the Bush/Gore elections, when something that we consider black and white as election results came with such an apparent gray area.

In any industry or trade, time is intrinsic with quality. And the lack of turn around time will degrade the product, whether you’re a stay at home blogger or you command the nation’s airwaves.

He’s yet another priviledged wanker who gets paid a million dollars a minute to intro a ludicrously short and mediocre news package that’s already been swirled all over the blogosphere, albeit a “package” (one not too far removed from fish sticks in the freezer section nowadays) with very expensive production value, with a few nicey-nice, neutered words leading in to it that any podcaster/blogger out there could trump right off the top of her snarky little head.

Talk to the hand, Charles.

by Me

Bob Dylan

“It’s not just the journalist’s job at risk here. It’s American democracy. It is freedom.”

It is the soldier, not the reporter,
Who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet,
Who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer,
Who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier,
Who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.

Admiral Jeremiah Denton

Look at the variety in Iraq war coverage we are seeing thanks to the likes of Salam Pax and The Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul Ahad. Look at this blog, inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s need to act and do something real in the aftermath of 9/11. Look at the Saddam execution video, recorded on a phone and released for the world to see. These are things that never could have happened in the old world Walter Cronkite represents. For all the access big media reporters had during the Vietnam, they covered mostly a laundry list of handouts from General William Westmoreland and his team. We romanticize those days, but news consumers today would be unimpressed by the quality of Vietnam War coverage.

Big media’s burn rate just means the market is becoming more efficient. That’s good news for everyone.

When one sees the end of life (your own or a loved one’s) then trying to make a difference can become a great motivator.

Individual journalists may be driven by a similar wish to affect change, but they are constrained by the profit motive as you stated.

Perfect!

But quibbling is what this is often all about, the exploration of the grays in the pursuit of not being snowed by people who have a story or who want to conceal one. Those who regard the two states of journalism to be cut-and-pasting press releases + repeating what is said at news conferences vs digging for the truth and cultivating sources do not have it exactly right. And neither are we at the point in this evolution to dismissively assert that journalism will survive and UGN is only and all good and by the way merely oranges to MSMs apples.

We hear a great deal about the importance of policing and vetting of UGC as if this a trouble-free detail. As a news professional I’d like some news professionals to tell me how that will be done on a massive scale when newsrooms are cutting back, if this sort of reporting is meant to supplant rather than supplement what is being described as commodity coverage.

Bangalore fact-checkers, perhaps?

Most places can now get the half-hour BBC TV news show, either on cable or a PBS station. I wonder how their ratings compare with the network and local news programs? I’m guessing the interest level is fairly low. One can attribute this to their dry style, or their non-American focus, but I think most viewers don’t really care about international news.

The American public is trained to care about buzz, celebrity and consumerism over other concerns. Look at the large degree of marketing to children (even in schools) to see how early this pattern is promoted.

So who are these people who want to see more reporting? Are you sure there are as many of them as you believe?

I touched on the future of the newspaper industry in my post yesterday on Pardon the Disruption. It goes more to the economics than the substance, but it also seeks to debunk common wisdom on the death of the sector.

We’re in an era of change in the media and those who evolve and innovate will prosper.