Jay Rosen is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, where he has taught since 1986, and a critic and writer concentrating on democracy and the press. Dan Gillmor is a widely syndicated technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, and the author of O'Reilly's recently released We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Jay and Dan sat down recently to discuss the current state of journalism and the impact technology is having on traditional media.
Jay Rosen: I'm here in Toronto at the annual Journalism Professors Conference. Dan Gillmor and I are on the 25th floor of the Sheraton Centre looking out at the Toronto skyline. We're going to talk about some of the themes in his book, We The Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, and larger themes that surround the book. Ted Koppel, who's the best interviewer on television, only prepares one question. And then he lets all his other questions flow from the conversation. So, that's the approach I'm going to take.
A few months ago, the Baltimore Sun published an article about a young weblogger named Brian Stelter, who does Cable Newser, a very interesting weblog about the cable news industry. Since that time, Cable Newser was bought by Media Bistro, and it's now TVNewser. So this kid has himself a little business.
But in the Baltimore Sun article that profiled him — he's a student at Towson University in Maryland, so it was a local story — the article contained not a single link to his weblog when it appeared in the online edition. You couldn't get to Cable Newser from the Sun, even though the article was all about Cable Newser.
|
Related Reading 
We the Media |
And it struck me that this is a good illustration of something: There is plenty of journalism on the Web but there is very little journalism of the Web. And the Sun's article, I think, illustrates that. It's on the Web but it definitely is not of the Web. So, my first question to you is, what are the characteristics or features of journalism when it is of the Web? What are some things that would identify journalism once it becomes, let's say, organically an expression of the powers and advantages of the Web?
Dan Gillmor: Well, you hit on the first one. And the number one thing about the Web is links. That is what makes the Web the Web. And I will give one small defense to the Baltimore Sun, because I'm sure their publishing system — which was written when publishing newspapers was a manufacturing business as opposed to what's going on on the Web now — probably doesn't have a way to easily figure out what a URL is. I know the one we use at the San Jose Mercury News knows that if we put something in parentheses and it starts with WWW, it says, "Oh, that's a URL," and puts a link there. But if you don't start with WWW, it doesn't recognize it. So, this is a work in progress.
The second thing that I think the Web demands — or at least encourages — is the idea that when you publish something, it is the continuation or even the beginning of a conversation. It's not the end of the story, but part of an inquiry where we figure the truth out together. So, that would be my second element.
Other things that make the Web different are the ability to be extremely timely. Or, if it's not timely, extremely detailed, including pointers to source material. I come back to linking, to the notion that the authority increases when you link to things that support or illustrate what you're talking about with source material. There's more of it now, and we can go back to more original material.
Rosen: OK, linking is in many ways the heart of the Web. It's the thing that's really powerful about it. Linking is what Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, was really doing. That was what was new. And the current situation for the mainstream American press is that the art of linking is certainly not part of newsroom culture. Most news sites don't contain a lot of links. Most mainstream news operations have rules against it, or a policy of keeping people within the domain. The thinking is that we need to capture readers and present a full-service product, a full-service news report. Therefore, why should we link out? Because if we don't, we'll lose readers. The traditional attitudes and policies mean that a lot of mainstream news organizations are falling behind or not showing up as part of the discussion in, for example, search engines. For example, The New York Times — the newspaper of record whose whole business and franchise is built on the authority of their reporting — is not the authority on the Web, by the simple measure of Google. If you search for important topics and themes on Google, you're not going to find New York Times articles in the database. They're not going to show up on your first page, or maybe even your 30th page, because their links expire. And this is extraordinary to me, that an operation as intelligent and as important as The New York Times would, in a sense, default in the Google space. I know there are historical reasons for it. They believe they can capture revenues down the line by selling their archive.
But I wonder, first of all, how long can mainstream news organizations ignore the power of linking? What's it doing to them in the long run? How is this going to change? Or is it not going to change?
Gillmor: I don't think all mainstream organizations ignore it. If you look at the BBC and The Guardian in England, in particular, I think they are the prototypical example of how to do it right. They looked early at the nature of the Web, the nature of links, the question of permanence — or what passes for permanence, in what is by definition an impermanent medium — and they said to themselves and then to the rest of us, our links will be perma-links [a permanent link to a specific article, which will remain valid after the article has been archived]. in a way that counts. We won't muck with the link once it's there. And, as a result, a lot of their stuff gets cited.
I think that organizations like the Times are caught between two worlds. The Times' archives are behind this "pay wall." And that's a real moneymaker for them. But there are some sites that are pay-per-view from the get-go, like The Wall Street Journal, which for all practical purposes does not exist in Google. But at some point I think most news sites are going to say, "We can do better on revenue by making all of the archives available for free with perma-links, with the bargain being that we will have targeted advertising." When you do a search on keywords there will be things popping up in the story or alongside the story that are like Google's ad sense, or whatever comes along that is better than Google ad sense. And we may find out — I'm speculating, I don't have a model for this, that keywords and ads are a more profitable way for traditional organizations to monetize what is quite expensive to produce. It would have a secondary effect that, in the end, becomes a primary effect: the site becomes even more credible and even more a place to go when you need to know things.
Rosen: In your answer to my first question, you said, besides links the another thing that makes journalism "of" the Web is that publishing is a stage. Publishing the news is one stage and then many things follow from that. And that does conflict a little bit with the traditional routines in journalism. As you know, when you're a reporter you work hard on your story. You have a deadline. You send it in. It's edited. It's published. And very often, it's on to the next story. And the way the Web works kind of cuts against some of the rhythms of daily journalism. So, why should journalists care about this "after-action," this dialogue that results on the Web? And how can they incorporate that to start doing better journalism? I assume that what you're talking about is, comments come back. Reactions, elaborations. Links to an article show some of its wider significance in the Web sphere. So, how can journalists start using that second stage to do better work?
Gillmor: The first thing we'd need to do is listen, pay attention to what is being said. To really get out of the lecture mode that we've been in and to recognize that something new is going on that will benefit not just our journalism — which of course we want to do — but benefit the people who are reading or listening to or viewing our journalism. Those are the people who we say we want to serve. So, the conversation part of it — the listening part, the responding part — is not just for journalists. It's for all of us, it's for everybody. And it comes back to what I've made a kind of a cliché in my own world, which is that my readers know more than I do.
Rosen: I want to ask about that cliché, because I don't think it's a cliché. I think it's a major insight. First of all, tell me what happened to make you realize "My readers know more than I do." And why didn't it just freak you out?
Gillmor: Well, it did freak me out at first. But what happened was, I went to Silicon Valley in 1994 to write about technology. And I wrote about it in a place where most of the people I was writing about were already on email. And invariably they knew collectively much more than I did. You know, you write about tech in Silicon Valley, by definition your readers know more than you do. And I saw that happening, and I thought, "Hmm, this is really different." And then I thought about it and realized that it wasn't different at all, that it had always been true. That whatever the subject I was writing about, the people who cared enough about it to read it knew more than I did-- collectively. It was only now, however, that there was a quick-response mechanism -- this feedback loop established through email at first and then later through other tools, that made it possible for them to let me know, in a hurry. And I can assure you that people in the Valley are never shy about letting you know when they think you're wrong or when you're missing something.
Rosen: So, it's not just, "My readers know more than I do." It's, "My readers know more than I do and I can tap that because they will tell me."
Gillmor: Exactly. The ability to find out things that you don't already know and then to incorporate them into what you do in the future — it's a great advantage for any journalist. I think all journalists on any beat need to understand that this is an opportunity. It's not remotely a threat. And journalists have skills that the people writing to us may or may not have. And why don't we, in the best sense of the expression, all take mutual advantage of this situation to do a better job?
Rosen: Well, let's cut a little deeper into that. Because even though what you say is logical, and good advice, I can think of lots of reasons why "My readers know more than I do" might be resisted by journalists. For one thing, the basic transaction in mainstream journalism is understood to be -- I'm the journalist. I know things because I've done my reporting. I've inquired, I've asked questions, and I've hunted down documents. And you don't know. You weren't there. You're not a reporter. You don't have the time. You're off living your life. And so the whole idea of informing the public, informing the readers, assumes that the news organization knows and its customers — as it were — don't.
And secondly, the authority of the journalist — the way it has evolved in the United States — is very much tied up with the journalist knowing things that others don't. Having access that others don't. Witnessing things that others can't — a press conference, etc. And it's almost like in the deep grammar of American journalism, the assumption is that knowledge moves from the news organization to a public that lacks it. So, it's not surprising to me that "My readers know more than I do" is hard to grasp.
Gillmor: But nothing you just said is fundamentally less true today than it was before. For the majority of the readers, they are learning something they don't know from someone who's done some homework. From someone who is either self-trained or has picked up some skills that are not typical skills in our society. And someone who has access that many other people do not. My point on all this is that for the journalist there is a new opportunity to learn more and to do better journalism as a result. The role of journalist is evolving. The news didn't suddenly turn into a conversation, but it's becoming part of this thing that's not a lecture anymore; it's more of a seminar. And I'm very happy with the professional journalist retaining a certain amount of authority — the good ones — and I want the good journalists to keep going and doing the things they do well. I think it would be tragic if the investigative powers of the Big Media were suddenly to disappear.
Rosen: OK, so you have been a journalist for how long?
Gillmor: Coming up on 25 years.
Rosen: And you expect to do this for another 15, 20 years I hope?
Gillmor: It seems that I've found my calling, but then again, I had a different career before this one [playing music]. So, I never foreclose any change.
Rosen: OK, but nonetheless, you have a lot of pride in your profession, you have a lot of love for journalism. I know you, so I know you have close colleges and you certainly feel a loyalty to this craft, to the San Jose Mercury News. Given what you have learned in the writing of this book and what you have seen in your travels around the country, do you worry about the future of journalism as a profession?
Gillmor: Yes, absolutely. There are separate issues when we talk about the future of journalism. They're related, but they're largely separate. There is the journalism question, which you've talked about at some very eloquent length in your own writings, about whether we're on the wrong track in what we do and how we do it. And there is also a business question, the demands of Wall Street that tend to force publicly owned journalism companies to do things, such as squeeze investment to meet profit expectations, that may not be in the best interests of the journalism, over the long haul especially. That's capitalism.
I don't have a good solution to that business question, except to note perhaps that when you look at what most people would regard as the three consistently best newspapers in America — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post — each of them is under an ownership structure in which the managers are not beholden to the short-term demands of Wall Street but rather to the long-term view they hold of their businesses. And I think that's probably not a coincidence, that they are the three widely acknowledged and best, though I should caution that the LA Times — which won more Pulitzer Prizes last year than anyone else and is a hell of a good newspaper — a brilliant newspaper, in many ways — is owned by one of the more greedy companies. But, no pronouncement here is perfect across the board. You can do very good journalism at publicly owned institutions. We do it at Knight Ridder, but there is pressure.
All that said, we are part of a high-margin business. And Wall Street really loves those high margins and wants us to keep them. And we are facing new competition on the business side for the various revenue streams — apart from circulation — that are the bulk of the money that comes in. Advertising is not one monolithic block of revenue, it's a whole bunch of revenue streams that add up to a big collection. Every one of those, every one, is under attack by people who are effectively more nimble than we are, who are willing to live in most cases on lower margins, and crucially who find journalism — the notion of journalism — to be an utter distraction that they don't want to have any part of. Now, that's a potentially deadly combination. We're starting to really feel it.
It was obvious five years ago that the world's largest classified advertising site was going to be eBay, and now it is. In many major cities there are online classified advertising sites that are eating into what has been far and away the most profitable part of newspapers.
And it's not just newspapers that are facing new competition because of technology. I mean, I would not want to be in the 30-second advertising spot business right now, because I own one of those hard-disk video recorders — not TiVo, but another one — that has a button that says, "Makes 30 seconds disappear in a blink." I record everything I watch now, and when I get to the commercials, I go, "boom, boom, boom, boom," four times on the clicker, and two minutes have disappeared. And if there's still a commercial, I do it again until it's back to the program.
|
Rosen: Poof, there goes that business.
Gillmor: Well, you know, I don't feel virtuous about that on some level because I know the implicit bargain that had been established at one point was that you'd put up with a certain amount of commercials in order to watch the program. But I'm willing to pay a la carte for the things I actually want to watch. And I should recognize that so-called "free" television has had some benefits for our society as well as the rank commercialism that I don't think so highly of.
Rosen: Let me summarize your answer so far. You are concerned about the future of your profession, A) because of Wall Street pressures and B) because advertising revenue — the bedrock of the journalism business — is under assault from all directions. Are there any other reasons why you're concerned about the future of the profession?
Gillmor: Yes, it was the one we started with, the nature of journalism that's getting done by the big media. There is a problem here. We have to recognize it. I don't like journalism as stenography. I don't think it serves much purpose except to fill space. I don't like the journalism of spin, of the clustering around the spin doctors at the debates to get that quote. I've done it myself. Of course, once in a while you get a quote that's so perfect, that sums up what happened, that you feel good about the spin doctor being there. But these are very serious times we live in, and we need more serious journalism than we're getting. What serious work we are getting is drowned out by the less serious stuff.
Rosen: Well, this is even a bigger challenge that you suggest, in my experience, Dan. If journalists have to recognize that there is something wrong with their work, you're stuck right off the bat. Because from what I've seen, there is great resistance in mainstream journalism to anyone — colleague or outsider — who comes in and says, "You're not doing a very good job. Or, there's something wrong with the way you're doing journalism. Or, you have to go back and relearn this or that." In fact, I'd go further and say that the way that mainstream journalism has developed, it incorporates now certain learning deficiencies as well as a professional culture closed to ideas and insights from the outside. And this itself is part of the problem along with the changing circumstances in the world and in technology and the marketplace that you've described.
So, that's my perception. I think more than many other professions that have to deal with change and new markets, or new competitors more directly, there is something about mainstream American journalism that is uniquely closed. And this worries me as a journalism professor and critic of the press. I'd love to hear whether it concerns you.
Gillmor: It concerns me, but I don't feel as strongly that the conditions are the way you put them there.
Rosen: OK, so argue with me. Go ahead.
Gillmor: All right. I know from my daily contacts with people inside newsrooms that there is a very wide recognition of the problems, but also there is an awful lot of good journalism going on.
Rosen: That's definitely true.
Gillmor: And I am proud of the good journalism that goes on. I think that at some levels it's never been better. And certainly the level of training, of education, of talent in a raw sense probably has never been higher.
Rosen: I would agree with that. Today's journalists are more educated. More ethical. More serious people who are more dedicated to public service than ever before, as a percentage of the profession.
Gillmor: And I really don't want to lose the good part as we try to change the not-so-good part. In a general sense I have enormous respect for the people I work with, and I know how hard they work. I know that this is not a business people go into if making a big financial score is part of the game. I admire that.
And I don't have magic answers to the problems, but I'm fairly sure that one of the ways we improve is to spend more time listening to people outside, especially our readers and viewers and listeners. And if they tell us things in a kinder way than beating us over the head, we tend to listen better. I mean, none of us likes being told, "You're an idiot." That's not generally a good way to begin a conversation. But when people beat me up and say, "You've got to do better than this, and here's why," after I recover my balance from feeling hurt — which is typical and human — if I listen to what they've said and I find myself agreeing with it well, nothing is lost and much is gained. And in fact, I had that experience with the book, where the publisher of a small newspaper in upstate New York …
Rosen: Stephen Waters …
Gillmor: Yes, Stephen Waters. After we posted HTML drafts of some early chapters, he poured one of them into a Word file and proceeded to line-edit the thing and sent it to me. He said, "This is the right time for this book, but it needs to be a better book." And as I related in the epilogue of the book, I had to retrieve my ego off the floor and say to myself, "Well, gosh, he has a point." And my editor said, "He has a point." So, this is part of why I get so interested in the future here, because I think journalists are starting to listen. I think there is now a widespread understanding in the business that something is broken. The solution may not be the ones you've proposed or that I've proposed, but no one who is in a profession for reasons that are not entirely financial will live long with the situation in which they know it's broken. Otherwise they'll go into some field that's more lucrative.
Rosen: OK, let's follow-up a little bit on that. When you say that most of the thoughtful people in the profession realize that something is broken, what is it that they think is broken? Where does this perception come from? How did it accumulate? What's the evidence of it? Where do you see it showing up? If journalists think something is broken, what is it they find in disrepair?
Gillmor: Well, our image is one place to start. We have a dreadful public image. And whenever someone has a dreadful public image it's usually advisable to ask why. Journalism is a business — a trade — that relies in the end on being credible.
Rosen: OK. What else?
Gillmor: I think people are well aware now that as media fragments, and as people have more choices, they're going elsewhere. It is a terrifying thing to me that people under the age of 30 by and large don't read newspapers.
Rosen: OK, so people are going elsewhere, especially the young. That contributes to the sense of something off. What else?
Gillmor: I'll give an example of something that clearly went wrong, with some honorable exceptions. The run-up to the war in Iraq. The United States population was roughly divided on this. There were very passionate people for it and people very passionate against it. But there was some serious division. That was not reflected in the mainstream media to the extent that it needed to be.
Moreover, it wasn't just the division that needed to be reflected, it was the reasons for the division. It was the hunger among the public for answers. People wanted to know things before they were going to rush into support of this war. And there was precious little — some, but precious little — journalism being done by U.S. journalists asking the really hard questions. I want to tip my hat in a big way to the Knight Ridder Washington bureau, which almost alone was asking the hard questions before and after the war. The bureau was getting not nearly the recognition it deserved then, but is only starting to get now. They did our company proud.
But during that time — actually, right after the initial hostilities were over — I was in London at The Guardian, and visited with their online people. And they showed me their traffic numbers, which had had this enormous surge in the run-up to the war. And it was easily attributable — because a lot of it was coming from the U.S. — to people looking for English-language information that they weren't getting from the American press. I had my issues with some of what The Guardian wrote. I don't think they were dead-on with their coverage. Then again, nobody is. But we need diversity, and we didn't get enough of it.
Rosen: So, we have the extraordinary spectacle of the American public looking to British journalists for some of the basic questions and information that they wanted at the time when it could have made a difference.
Gillmor: Exactly. And if that's not a wake-up call, I don't know what is. You can actually extrapolate that to all kinds of areas of journalism. One reason weblogs are so popular is that people are going to them for some diversity of perspective. At least if they're smart they're going for diversity instead of echo chamber. And the niche weblogs are utterly destroying the potential for new print publications to start. They're just preempting some print that might have otherwise occurred. That's an interesting phenomenon.
Rosen: Very interesting indeed.
Gillmor: And I'm all for it.
Rosen: This will be my last question. But it requires a bit of a preamble, and it arises out of what you said about reporting and the run-up to the war. I think if you go back further, there's a kind of slow, deeply set problem& mdash; maybe even a crisis — that arose out of September 11th. The immediate reporting around September 11th was actually a case of American journalism's strengths. The performance of the press in the hours and the days after the event was really extraordinary, and I think a lot of people in the profession realize that this was their moment that they had been preparing their entire lives for. Which is what [Howell Raines] actually said on the Lehrer News Hour after the event. And I think it's true.
But after that, another kind of problem set in. And in my mind it has to do with the question of, are American journalists American, and what is their connection to the political community? What makes them citizens of the United States as well as journalists in the United States? And particularly in an age when we're in a permanent war against terror. Terrorism is not only a big issue to cover for the mass media, terrorism incorporates the news media. The bomb doesn't terrorize until news of it is reported. And the fear and panic and reactions spread in the United States after September 11th were a reaction to the news, to what we saw on the news.
My own sense is that deep within their professional conscience and personal awareness, journalists understand that they are actually part of the regime of terror — just by doing their jobs. And perhaps have to be part of the fight against it as well. But this doesn't conform to existing wisdom in the press about detachment, and being the watchdog, separate from the society we report on. I don't think the American press has really worked out or worked through its relationship to the country and how that might be different after 9/11. And that seems to me to be a critical question for journalists to examine. But I don't know if they have necessarily the resources to do that. That's my observation. How would yours compare?
Gillmor: I don't know what to add, because I have not put my mind hard to that grindstone yet. Because it may be one of the most central questions that we have to ask ourselves going forward. I'm an American. I am proud of being an American. This is my country, and I don't know who said it first, but I picked it up. "It's my country, right and wrong."
The journalist's role is evolving in ways that I think we're going to have to confront sooner than later. We have a role that goes beyond just telling the world what's going on. To the extent that we are part of what the bad guys want to have happen, the best thing we can do about that fact is to confront it and talk about it. Report about it. Do more journalism about that subject. If we can't unravel ourselves, the next best thing is to say, "We recognize this. Let's put it on the table as one of the big things we talk about, even to the point where it may annoy some of our readers. But we have to do this." And journalists need to cover journalists better than they do. This has always been true.
I would expand your observation to take in the larger subject of risk. We live in a risky world. We always have, though we've just never had quite such concentrated risk, such disproportionate, asymmetrical risk as exists today. And that's going to get more so, not less. But we've lived through our lifetimes with the daily risk of dying in our automobiles, which we seem to be perfectly able to handle as a society even though the carnage is terrible. When crime grew at a fairly enormous rate, we adjusted, and journalists reported on it. What we didn't do when crime shrank at an enormous rate was to adjust our coverage. In fact, I think the press is grossly negligent to the point of malfeasance in the coverage of crime in the 1990s, which left people with the impression that it had never been worse when in fact it had almost never been better. And it is this climate of fear that leads to curbs on civil liberties that were absolutely not necessary. We don't really judge risk properly in our society. And journalists need to actually confront that in a big way. Terrorism is the most visible risk, and it's certainly the most awful one in many respects. You're right, we're part of the process of it being visible. But I wish we'd actually talk in-depth about the question of risk in an open society. You cannot have one without the other.
Jay Rosen is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, where he has taught since 1986, and also a critic and writer concentrating on democracy and the press.
Return to the O'Reilly Network.
Copyright © 2009 O'Reilly Media, Inc.