New Media and the Muckraker's Lament

The Cincinnati Enquirer, my local paper, is pursuing various methods of adding user-submitted content. Average people have been given interfaces with the news pipeline - and everything from sports articles to church festivals may be published, on the web or in print, after some editorial review.

It's an understandable move. Most newspapers are in survival mode these days. The Internet does wholesale national and global news much more efficiently, and opinion-oriented, editorial discussions are increasingly taking place in the blogosphere. Media companies recognize that local content - weather, neighborhood news, sports - these are the only niches in which they can compete with original, relevant information for their readers. Prodigious amounts of ink have been spilled on this topic, but take The Economist, from last week. After obligatory statistics on the decline of old media, this:

“Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers,” says Sammy Paper, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specializes in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.

Few newspaper companies like to hear this and they tend to ignore the research they have paid for. Most journalists, after all, would rather cover Afghanistan than personal finance. But some are starting to listen. Gannett, the world's biggest newspaper group, is trying to make its journalism more local. It has invested in “mojos”—mobile journalists with wireless laptops who permanently work out of the office encamped in community hubs.

Sounds mildly innovative, right? At least they're trying to change with the times (and Gannett owns the Enquirer, so that makes sense). After itemizing other various other ways newspapers need to commercialize in response to a more competitive market, the article finishes with this conclusion, about old media:

Over the next few years it must decide whether to compromise on its notion of “fine journalism” and take a more innovative, more businesslike approach—or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.

Foul ball, cry the activist journalists! The role of the newspaper, puffs the Dean at the Cincinnati Beacon, is to pursue investigative journalism and maintain the "intellectual climate". Readers - who are compared to children and idiots by the Dean - are just too simple to understand what's good for them. The suggestion here is consumers might only want box scores, weather, and local concert listings, but these are only "feel-good puff pieces". Left to choose for themselves, sheep-like citizenry will be mesmerized and confused by greedy corporations, and lured away from any potential sense of outrage that they might otherwise feel about our corrupt public officials and capitalist masters.

All of this is core, foundational progressive dogma. Independent media types are not famous for their intuitive grasp of a marketplace economy. Of course the changing business tactics of old-guard media companies will seem opaque.

But if they believed their own hype, and if they had a better handle on the dynamics of business, they would celebrate, enthusiastically, any perceived mis-step by the corporate media that is their natural rival. Isn't there some old adage along the lines of - when your enemy is busy doing damage to himself, sit back and watch? If they really, truly think that these are wrongheaded efforts, and if market for investigatory journalism will be grossly underserved in the new environment, shouldn't agitators and activists be rubbing their hands gleefully at all of the readers who will be seeking a new home in alternative publications?

Tags: New Media, Cincinnati, User Created Content, Gannett, Economist