Newsrooms must decide: dumb down or smarten up
People in newsrooms have a simple choice to make: Will the new technologies be used to dumb down the news or to smarten it up. The choice taken will be based on the preconceived notions of the people in those newsrooms–and in part by the cost cutters.
Yesterday I got miffed at Jane Kirtley who was quoted as saying “Blogs are not intended to be objective. They are supposed to be opinionated, snarky and in your face…” With that preconceived attitude, we are taking the dumbed down road. Blogs, such as the US intelligence community’s avian flu blog, can be a way to collectively gather information that was impossible to gather in the past. Anyone in a newsroom who sees that potential in blogs is on the way to smarten up the newsroom.
Monday the Washington Post wrote a story about the the Mobile Journalists, MoJos, in Ft. Myers, Florida. The journalist Chuck Myron works out of his car. Yesterday he filed these four stories:
- Auction raises more than $6,000 to fight breast cancer
- Road work on U.S. 41 under way
- Golfers shun sunlight for chamber event
- Senior pickleball players promote game
He runs from story to story like a Domino’s Pizza delivery guy. Getting him out of the newsroom is smartening up, having him spend his time on stories that could, for the most part, be written off of press releases is dumbing down. The best of the lot is the pickleball story–and if that is the best, well hello dumbsville.
Why not send him into a Ft. Myers neighborhood for a week or a month and make him feel like a member of that neighborhood and meet the people, hear their triumphs and tragedies? I think of my own neighborhood. There is the guy who spends his days cutting other people’s lawns, but with the caveat that he will try to save your soul. The guy who painted his house pink, in a place where no one paints their house pink. And he had a reason. The gerrymandering that separates our white neighborhood from the surrounding black neighborhoods. These are real stories that would smarten up the paper and its website rather than dumb them down by asking some random driver what he thinks of the road repair work on a Ft. Myers highway. Fighting to fill web space because of some preconceived notion that people are clamoring to read about chamber events is dumbing down. Drilling down into neighborhoods to find their real essence is smartening up.
Experimenting like Gannett is doing at its papers like the News-Press in Ft. Myers is commendable and its recruiting retired community experts to help with an investigative project is smart. It paid off with results that actually helped the community. Not trying anything new would be sliding down the dumb path as the readers drift away.
Giving the reporters, as happens at the Ft. Myers paper, a tutorial in the business and advertising side of the paper is smart; asking them to go on sales calls to help sell an article package is a nice way to tarnish the reputation of the paper and is on the slippery slope from dumb to dumber. It reminds me of Dick Cheney meeting behind closed doors with the oil tycoons and then making energy policy. No matter what happened behind those closed doors I don’t trust it.
Now since we are talking about the business side I am reminded of a quote almost two years ago from copy editor Tom Mangan when he was blogging at Prints the Chaff. He said in an IM Interview with me:
…corporate execs would love to be told, “look at blogs, they’re all unedited and people love them. Think how much more money we’d make if we weren’t paying all these editors.”
If that is a notion that is creeping into journalism, then we are in trouble, and it is time to smarten up. Experiment, use all the new tools, but don’t emulate the worst possibilities, discover the best. With that I will give you the other part of Mangan’s quote that I just rediscovered in the interview:
We have to be zealous in insisting we are the guardians of the newspaper’s credibility, which is a kind of capital equipment we can’t afford to squander.
That is smart. No matter what the platform or delivery system be zealous in demanding a higher form of journalism. A form that is even better than that which exists now; don’t dumb down by settling for anything less.
December 5th, 2006 at 8:42 am
thanks for the clarification, len. i hope to respond later in my blog.