Vin Crosbie delivers a punchy challenge to members of the Online News Association gathering in New York next week.
“Unfortunately, the major obstacle for online journalism is the people who practice it — the best of whom will be attending the conference. Most are transplanting into the new medium the failings of the old, mass medium: the failings of traditional journalism and the failings of traditional journalism’s packaging.
[...]
Simply reporting who, what, when, why, and how; quoting both sides’ statements; and expecting the public to decide the issues from such factoids is no longer effectively satisfying the unambiguous needs of viewers, readers, and listeners. Neither does traditional journalism’s story selection and packaging. The numbers were in decades ago.Delivering that traditional journalism via HTML, CSS, Flash, PDF, streaming media, RSS, or podcasting solves nothing. If anything, it only makes the problem worse.”
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
THM thought this on Oct 21 05 at 2:35 pmIs he advocating making up the reader’s mind for them then? I thought reporting was all about presenting the facts and allowing a person to make up their own mind.
Andy Losowsky thought this on Oct 21 05 at 5:42 pmIt’s a bit of a sawn-off shotgun attack there, misrepresenting the decline of news, and failing to explain properly what indeed he’s advocating, apart from ’something the people want’. Perhaps what he means to say, or rather perhaps what he should be saying, is that we should be wary of the same huge media groups dominating the net as they do television and newspapers, for that way may lead to the same disillusionment felt at least over American TV news. Has traditional journalism failed? It all depends on how you define journalism - and I’ve yet to find two journalists, or bloggers, who agree on that one.
Vin Crosbie thought this on Oct 23 05 at 2:34 amTHM: I’m not advocating journalists make up the readers’ minds. Readers can quite well make up their own minds, thank you. But I do think that journalist should report not only what happened and what was said by sides of an issue, but what that journalists concludes from it. For a fuller discussion, see http://www.tamark.ca/students/?p=1723#comment-7605, where earlier this month I commented more about what I mean.
Journos (and I’m former UPI and Reuter) have an unwavering belief that they can inform the public, yet also believe that they shouldn’t inform the public about what their own delving into the issues has let themselves to think. Odd contradiction there.
Do bear in mind that I am writing about American media, which is far more colorless and less probative or conclusive than UK media. Except on the editorial page, you’ll never see an American journal report its own conclusions about the story. You’ll merely read the ping-pong match of ‘this spokesman said this and that spokesman said the opposite.’ A form of descriptive stenography.
Likewise, most periodicals are still practicing the journalism of the 1950s, yet their readers are more concerned with other things and huge numbers have stopped reading those periodicals. It’s OK to continue reporting about the local council, but equal weight should be given to a lot of other things [too numerous to list here].
Andy: Thanks for the sawn-off shotgun metaphor; I’m tired of being accused of just throwing grenades. I don’t think I’ve misrepresented the decline of news. For a fuller explanation, see my Online Journalism Review essay http://www.ojr.org/ojr/business/1078349998.php about that issue. I’m not warry of huge media groups dominating the net. And I think the definition of journalism is pretty simple: the search for the truth about what happened and why.
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