Journalism Ground Rules

In keeping with Jay Rosen's suggestion that TV shows fact check Sunday morning talk-show guests  (and why should this be a novel idea? And yet it is.),  I'd like to see TV news programs return to journalism by:

a. Acknowledge people's financial/lobbyist connections when they're on TV talking in their "expert" capacity (ex-military officers, Michael Chertoff, et al.)


and
 
b. State the ground rules of the interview. If someone comes onto a show with a promise that certain topics are off limits, then the show should say so ahead of time. And if they refuse to answer, DON'T BRING THEM BACK ON.
 
 

Past as Prologue

The question is whether we are going to continue to mourn the decline of newspapers on the grounds of nostaglia, quality, etc., or move our skills over to a new medium. I'm for the latter.

Copy editors as a group have never been shy about using new technology. What some of us are unhappy about is the replacement of traditional skills by technology itself, an emphasis on tech skills over everything else and a non-news mindset that has taken over, in some cases, at what were formerly news sites.

This article suggests we need to think in a new way, by looking at what has happened in the past. And it's time to fight for what we know is right instead of relinquishing the battle. It's simple, really: How do we preserve and practice good journalism with new tools? If we try to make it any more complicated than that, we lose.

WSJ Sightings: Terry Teachout on the New-Media Crisis of 1949 - WSJ.com

Public Reunions and Taste

I happened to see a video today of another one of those stories where the soldier-father comes home and surprises his child at school. Most of them are very charming, moving, the kids alternately crying and laughing but ultimately, everyone is happy.

This one was different. I won't link to it because I found it so painful and intrusive. The shot opens with the soldier walking through the classroom door and a number of adults gathered to watch this scene laughing with the joy they think the daughter will experience. But that, to my eye, isn't what happens. The shot quickly moves to the fourth-grader looking at who is walking through the door. To my eye, she looks horrified for a moment--maybe she doesn't recognize him, I'm not sure. Then she rises up, in tears, her body curled forward as she goes to him. He's not smiling, either, when he picks her up as she cries.

A TV talking head warns at the beginning that it will move viewers to tears. It did me. But I'm finding these kinds of scenes really intrusive. There's no pleasure or news value in seeing this reunion, at all, that I can see, and I question the point of showing them. The people--family, educators-- who arranged it no doubt meant well. But that kid appears to be in agony and I don't think we all need to see that. It may make good TV; it doesn't say much about our humanity.

Making the Leap, Part I

I've been chatting with several people who have left newspapers for other kinds of media work and offer their observations to those who, voluntarily or not, are departing newspapers for something else. For most newspaper editors and reporters, switching to an online news operation is a relatively easy step but it's not seamless.

Rather than interpret their words, I'm going to let the interviewees speak for themselves, with occasional explanations or notes.

First up: Mark Mooney, former national editor of the New York Daily News, currently working for a broadcast TV dot-com operation.

I found that traditional skills are at a premium--(dot-coms) are populated by young people and TV people: they need an adult, they need rewrite skills--it's a new concept of taking four or five blogs where a reader has to assemble a story, to have one person put together a cohesive story. They also need people who can do breaking news.

A dot-com is more immediate--your readership peaks at lunchtime. you have to get it done and up quickly. It's a wire service skill, and then you keep growing the story.

It works as a wire service because the readership peaks over lunch time and (you) have to work quickly. There s the speed of it--quicker than newspapers but those skills become valuable here.

Things you have to adjust to--photos are less important; video is what you always have to think about because that's what's more important here.

(There's a certain) chagrin about what is read--it's a lesson to newspapers, too.

The amount of production is probably the biggest adjustment you have to make. You have to refine things.

You have to learn all the tactics for your stories to get wide distribution. To SEO (search engine optimization) your story probably is 20 to 30 minutes more work so that the aggregators will bite. If you don't do it, your story doesn't get out there.

It's harder for a dot-com to have a comprehensive news report. They don't try to be a comprehensive report but papers aren't being comprehensive, either.

Dot-coms do the major stories of the day and then the other interesting stories.