The Modern Journalist

5 Reasons the Story is Dead

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The past few days have transformed my thinking about the future of journalism. For the first time since I started this project, I had time to sit, contemplate and read what other people far smarter than me had to say — not about journalism, but about the way we work in the modern world.

The more I read, the more I have become convinced that my initial thesis for the book — that technology is radically shifting the journalism landscape quicker than the industry is set to deal with — is correct.

If Thomas Friedman is correct that The World is Flat — and I think he is, the way we both interact with and consumer data (er, news) will never be the same.

But journalists don’t believe that yet. And it might be too late.

Whenever civilization has gone through a major technological revolution, the world has changed in profound and unsettling ways. But there is something about the flattening of the world that is going to be qualitatively different from the great changes of previous eras: the speed and breadth with which it is taking hold. (p49, The World is Flat)

I’ve been reading The World is Flat, a tome about the radical shift in how all types of information is constructed. While Friedman is an award-winning journalist, the story is not about journalism. It’s about how fiber optic and wireless networks, along with powerful PCs, allow us to gather and construct and analyze information outside of geographic limitations.

He does touch on journalism, though. He mentions that Reuters in 2004 decided to outsource its press release rewrites — that rote task process where a financial release comes in and a reporter churns out the data in a very short story — to India.

I remember the news breaking on this — and I remember the talk that companies were looking to outsource their copy editing as well — and thinking to myself, “What a horrible idea.”

Yesterday, though, something curious happened. As I read the passages in Friedman’s book, I had different thoughts: “What else could be taken off the plate of the reporters to allow them to do their jobs?”

The idea of a cross-continent collaboration on constructing the news seems like a perfectly logical way to go about business.

Since the late 1980s, people had been putting up databases with Internet access. (p 65, The World is Flat)

I tell you this because that thought — along with the quote above — echoed through my head today as I met with a former Cincinnati Post reporter, who is now working at Northern Kentucky University. He is a well-respected journalist in this town who found himself out of a job after the Post, Cincinnati’s afternoon newspaper, shuttered earlier this year.

We were discussing databases and modern journalism. But he kept referring to using the database for him to write stories — and I kept referring to them as ways for people to interact with the data on a website (any website).

Me: The guiding force behind the Web is — and always will be — data. So newspapers should have the best databases available.

Him: Brad, that’s great if they are publicly available. But they are really had to put together particularly if you’re working on stories.

Me: People are already putting these together. Without newspapers.

Him: But they can’t bring that cynical (in this case, the best kind of cynical — prove it — not the bad kind) knowledge to the story.

Me: But people are doing this anyway. Without newspapers.

In fact, much of the history of the Web and the Internet is database driven. Actually, it all is. The whole Web is run with databases. The cleaner the data, better the information. We have become a society that expects and demands access to raw data — with really good software tools that let us manipulate that data — to give us the answers that we need.

Don’t believe me? Don’t use Google for a week. No Google Maps. No Fandango or MovieFone. No Travelocity. No online banking. No Excel or financial spreadsheets.

Now try not reading a newspaper.

Which do you think is easier to give up?

Totalitarian systems depend on a monopoly of information and force, and too much information started to slip through the Iron Curtain, thanks to the spread of fax machines, telephones, and eventually, the personal computer. (p55, The World is Flat)

Friedman’s passage is about technology’s role in the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it just as easily could be about metaphorical role newspapers have had with information.

Until the 1980s, media outlets were the sole provider of information. If you wanted to find out what was happening, you turned on the TV, listened to the radio or read the newspaper.

Last night, I found out George Carlin had passed away through a Twitter post, logged on to MySpace to see what my friends had said and then watched his old routines on YouTube while I was reading Wikipedia about his life.

I still haven’t visited a newspaper site because I have no desire to read some reported story.

I don’t need to.

Any activity where we can digitize and decompose the value chain, and move the work around, will get moved around. Some people will say, ‘Yes, but you can’t serve me the steak.’ True, but I can take the reservation for your table sitting anywhere in the world, if the restaurant does not have an operator. (p15, The World is Flat)

All of which brings me back to my original thought: that journalism is in a more precarious state that I thought because most companies are  not able to fully grasp how their operation would look in a flat world.

Repeatedly, I’ve been told by working reporters why you can’t build a business model around news as I’ve watched places like Pegasus News and The Examiner begin to pull those models together.

Heck, I helped build a model that is moving towards profitability in large part by trimming the extra costs associated with our processes. We even hired some programmers from around the world to build components for our Content Management System.

That does mean some journalists will lose their job; however, if — as has been suggested by numerous reporters — there is too much work and not enough time to do it, then it seems a solution is parsing out the rote tasks, outsourcing them, laying off U.S. staff and building a robust team of programmers, designers and reporters who can create a viable, modern newspaper.

As I told my colleague today: I don’t care one iota about the paper part of news, but I care a great deal about the news.

In a modern world, though, that doesn’t mean stories. It means something entirely different. I am not arguing that reporters shouldn’t be writing stories and adding some depth to the data. They should and they must.

But they must do more — and that means the entire system needs to be thrown out and overhauled.

The more we cling to that antiquated, traditional notion, the deeper into the morass we fall.

Reuters also recently opened a software development center in Bangkok because it turned out to be a good place to recruit developers who had been overlooked by all the Western companies vying for talent in Bangalore. (p19, The World is Flat)