[Sound-off Sunday] The Future of Journalism

I graduated from high school around 11 years ago. If you’d asked me then what I was going to be by the time I turned 30, I would have told you, with the most certain of expressions, that I would be a journalist.

It’s funny how the events that occurred over the intervening decade radically altered my course. In some ways, it was a good thing — I never dreamed I’d get to write comic books, or manage a video game store, or work towards a master’s degree in marketing research. I avoided getting into a job market where paying gigs are getting increasingly rare. I avoided finding myself frustrated at the rise of blogging and Twitter. And, best of all, I was able to keep writing as a hobby rather than a full-time profession, which meant I was able to enjoy my time spent getting better at the craft.

But every now and then, I look over at the field of journalism and wonder what it’d be like if I’d stuck with it. And I also think about all of the things I learned about journalism that made me lose my passion for the occupation. Because, you see, even in 1999, when I took my first college-level journalism class, I could see the hand writing on the wall, and I knew things were going to change radically in my lifetime. And while I had no specific insight into how things would change, I knew that the Internet was going to be the death of the 20th century institution journalism had become.

And, quite honestly, I felt it was a good thing. But my reasoning why might surprise you.

When I was in journalism school (or “j-school”, as it’s often called), I was struck by the difference between the intellectual side of the field and the practice of journalism itself. You see, in j-school, students are admonished to dig deeper — to look for both sides of any story, to try to figure out what makes something interesting and relevant to the reader, and to write up an article that will not only help readers to understand what’s going on, but to actually care. The journalist is supposed to be a surrogate pair of eyes and ears, reporting objectively, but in a manner that’s interesting and enlightening.

And yet, when I read the newspaper and see articles written by local reporters or by wire service reporters, I’m often stunned to see how apathetic journalists really are. My local papers, the Belleville News-Democrat and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, have a great way of sucking the life out of any interesting stories that happen in the area. They also have an unfortunate tendency of focusing most of their reporting on the tragedies that occur in the area (big car accidents, homicides, shootouts, five-alarm house fires, and the like) instead of trying to find news that’s relevant to their readers’ daily lives. The only good news to be found is generally buried in the back of the front sections, or written up as a feature article in the “Lifestyles” section.

Why all this focus on bad news? The prevailing wisdom is because these are the stories people want to read. Editors will tell you that people love to rubberneck — they’re drawn to death and tragedy, and they want to be informed about it. If the newspaper doesn’t cover these things, and only focuses on good news, the readers will accuse them of being propoganda machines.

But I disagree, and my evidence is the declining number of newspaper readers out there. Editors often attribute this attrition to the Internet, bemoaning the fact that they aren’t selling as many papers because people are getting their news online, for free. They’re really worried about the bloggers and the pseudo-bloggers (who write for sites like the Huffington Post). Some papers have attempted to start news blogs of their own, but most of these are pretty lackluster. Most editors complain that bloggers are inaccurate (they are), that they don’t cite sources (they don’t) and that they often steal content from newspapers and post it as their own (they do). In fact, the Associated Press has recently been going after bloggers who have been posting AP stories because they’re annoyed that the bloggers aren’t paying a wire fee in exchange for using their content.

The problem is that newspaper people don’t stop and consider why people are reading blogs. It has very little to do with the reliability of accuracy of the blogs, and everything to do with their personality. Blogs aren’t about information; they’re about image and lifestyle. When you look at the really successful blogs out there, you discover that they’re typically run by people who have very strong viewpoints and who aren’t afraid to share them. There is no illusion about objectivity, because there doesn’t need to be; the readers tend to be like-minded, and they’d much rather be pandered to than hear both sides of the story. For example, I have several friends who read the Daily Kos not because they think it’s fair, but precisely because they know it’s unfair to Republicans and people who lean to the right. They aren’t interested in hearing the other side; they’ve already chosen theirs.

There was a time when I would have seen such an attitude as a bad thing, but now that I’ve grown a bit and started to understand how the world works, I’m actually in favor of non-objective sources. My reasoning is that these sources have something newspapers lack — passion. They believe in something, and their readers believe in it too. Therefore, they’re much more useful as sources of information because the readers are actively involved in acquiring it. It’s far more fun to hear the news from a blogger, or Jon Stewart or Rush Limbaugh than it is to read a dry, dull story in the paper and try to make sense of what’s really going on.

“But Sean,” you may be saying, “the problem is that non-objective sources aren’t reliable because they twist and distort things. Newspapers stick to the facts.”

I won’t argue that those non-objective sources are reliable, because it’s pretty clear that they’re not. But what I will argue is that newspapers are often equally as bad. Reporters have a tendency to rush breaking news to print, and to get the facts wrong because they don’t dig deep enough and ask the right questions of the right people. I know this because I’ve been a journalist, but I also know this because I’ve been a victim of bad journalism.

When I had an apartment fire a few years ago, I didn’t see a single story that accurately reported the facts of what happened. Every news source in the area was there — TV, radio, print — and yet none of the ran the same facts. What actually happened was that one of my neighbors was burning green wood nonstop in her fireplace, which had a chimney that hadn’t been cleaned in at least 7 years. She claimed she had to because the property management company did a bad job insulating her apartment and she needed the fire to keep warm. So, her chimney caught fire in the middle of the night, and all four families in the building rushed outside at around 5 in the morning because their smoke alarms were going off. I called 911, and one of my neighbors did as well. The fire department was there within a few minutes, and everyone was told to get in their cars and wait across the street while the building burned. It was a sad, sad morning.

But how was it reported? One story said that a heroic man went from door to door, waking people up and getting them out. I was the only man in the building at the time, and I can tell you — that didn’t happen, because my neighbors were already outside when I got down there. Another story said that the fire may have been caused by bad wiring. Again, not true. Many of the stories reported that multiple children were without homes due to the fire. Not true — there was one child. And so on down the line.

Following the tragedy, there was very little follow-up. And that’s sad, because there was actually a substantial story there. One angle could have been looking into apartments with chimneys and asking who’s reponsible for cleaning them — owners or tenants. That very question was at the heart of our incident. Another angle could have been about renter’s insurance. As it happened, of the four families affected by the fire, two had insurance, and two did not. One of those families had just put insurance on their unit two days before the fire occurred. This freak coincidence saved them from financial ruin, which was all the more interesting since they were newlyweds. (As it happens, it was my wife and me … and what an interesting story it is even today, almost five years after the fire took place!)

Had any of these journalists bothered to get the real story, they might have been able to write an article that would have had some real meat to it. It could have been a story that started with a tragedy, but continued on to talk about the things that affect us all — the panic of a disaster, the worry, the loss, and the blessings — and the story could have even taught readers about the risks of not having insurance, or the results of the outpouring of community support that we received. But they weren’t interested in that story, because by the time those things happened, it was all “old news” — the fire was over, and other tragedies needed to be covered.

But guess what? That sort of writing is exactly the sort of thing that newspapers need to start doing if they want to survive in the 21st century, because that’s the sort of story that people want to read. It’s time for newspapers to get away from reporting every tragedy in the area, from running stories featuring quotes from irrelevant sources and from trying to cover both sides of non-issues. It’s time for these papers to stop keeping the pretense of being objective and to, instead, serve the community by reporting on the things that really matter to people day-to-day. A whole page could be devoted to briefs about the tragedies in the area, written in police blotter style. But the rest of the pages could be devoted to stories that talked about things, both good and bad, right and wrong, uplifting and depressing.

Let me offer an example: right around the corner from me, a small restaurant went out of business. Someone bought it up, and immediately had union protestors outside because he wasn’t using union workers to remodel. After weeks and weeks, the place still isn’t open, despite the fact that he’s had his sign up for awhile now. He doesn’t seem to have done any advertising, and chances are very good he’ll go out of business due to his location. He’s also going to be competing with a lot of chains opening in the area in more visible places.

This is such a great story for a journalist to cover, because it’s got a David vs. Goliath angle, it’s got union drama, it’s got the whole dynamic of trying to start a business in a tough economy… and so much more. So much could be taught in this piece, and it could cover so many aspects of life. And yet I haven’t seen any articles run on the place, even in brief. The journalists at the paper (which has its office literally three blocks from this restaurant) aren’t interested in that sort of “soft” news because they’re too busy reporting every murder that comes out of East St. Louis.

And it’s too bad, because this is the sort of story people are hungry to hear. The days of the “just the facts” newspaper reporting are dwindling to a close, and journalists are going to have to change with the times if they want to have something to peddle at the end of the day. Sadly, the field of journalism is full of people who are rooted only in the now, and who seem to be incapble of thinking in the long term. It’s going to be the death of their industry in the short term. Tomorrow’s newspapers are going to be a completely different beast, and today’s journalists aren’t going to get to be a part of it unless they wise up and see the way the world is shifting.

As for me, I’m glad I got out of journalism and into the fields of marketing research and comic book publishing. At least in those fields, I don’t have to pretend to be objective and important for the sake of an outdated institution.

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan