Amid 2008 Campaign Cacophony on the Web, Print Reverts to Hobbesian State
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Off the Record
Does print journalism matter in this election?
“It’s obvious, and no crime against humanity, that the world has many, many places to turn for information, misinformation, analysis, rants, etc,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, in an e-mail. “We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled.
“But we do want our work to be noticed,” he wrote, “and I’ve been repeatedly surprised at the rich, important stories that fail to resonate the way they deserve.”
On one level, more people read The Times, albeit in digital form, than ever. The pipeline piece did a brisk business as an e-mail forward. But so did everything else anyone had to say that day about the campaign—whether it was true or false, reported or simply asserted, fact or opinion. In-boxes crammed with New York Times articles and Huffington Post hyperlinks do not advertise their relative value or importance. Everything is equal, everything is a tie and nothing, it seems, is important anymore.
Nobody has felt this more acutely than the Newspapers and Magazines of Record in the United States. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time: all over the world of “quality” journalism, there is a feeling of decline.
“There can no longer be a Johnny Apple—a single political reporter who can set the agenda as he did when he discovered Jimmy Carter,” said Frank Rich, columnist for The New York Times. “Whether in print or on the Internet or on television.”
“At Politico we often talk about winning the morning, not just winning the day,” said Jim VandeHei, the editor of Politico. “Because the news cycle is no longer 24 hours—it might be 16 hours or even shorter.”
It works well for Politico, but if everyone is readjusting to that breakneck pace, how much real news is left? And who’s there to suss out the real from the junk?
“The story burns more intensely and then it burns out more quickly,” said Jonathan Alter, the Newsweek writer, musing about the life cycle of pieces. “And there’s so much information and so much political coverage that it’s easy for good stories to be lost entirely in that register.”
“Very few of these stories have a long finish,” said Michael Duffy, the nation editor for Time. “The gong dissipates quickly.”
“My instinct is that there is such cacophony of commentary that it does sometimes drown out ideas from good and deeply reported journalism,” said Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post.
“In the Internet age, the cycle is constant and people don’t really have time to reflect all day on a single story in the newspaper,” he added. “And it’s more difficult to set the agenda for very long.”
Mr. VandeHei agrees.
“One of the casualties, I think, is that powerfully reported and written stories, especially investigative and accountability ones, do not land with the impact they once did,” he said. “They might still turns heads—and thankfully at times change things—but usually they get pushed aside as the new-media machine moves to the next ‘thing.’”
But such are the pressures of trying to produce material all day—even if it’s unclear what’s actually being absorbed from the information that’s being produced.
Mr. Keller, for one, wonders what happened to the big stories The Times reported during the election cycle.
There was a Jo Becker and Don Van Natta investigative piece of Bill Clinton’s relationship with Kazakhstan—barely noticed. There was a piece in the spring by David Kirkpatrick and Jim Rutenberg about John McCain’s relationship with Donald Trump in Arizona—hardly a word.
Even a meaty, damning, 3,100-word, three-bylined front-page Sept. 14 Times piece on Sarah Palin’s management style doesn’t appear to have the same sort of impact on the campaign trail that it might once have, Mr. Keller said. Next Page >
Keller is just another self-absorbed suck-up to Sulzberger, Jr. as is most all of the reporters for the Times. Their nuanced liberal bias shows through virtually every article published.
People realize that and seek other outlets for their news...and thankfully, there are plenty.
As a business entity, they reek havoc with the environment and the amount of trees cut to produce the paper every day is just a shame.
The sooner it folds, the better for all.
are y'all nuts?! if newspapers do not matter in this election year, then why do so many tv-cable-news programs QUOTE newspapers -- actually hold them up and show their front pages -- as part of their coverage? why do bloggers use print information to form their opinions? explain THAT one to me!
If you spent more time actually reading the NY Times, you might learn not only what "nuance" means (hint: it's a good thing) but also how to spell "wreak," and how to associate a plural verb with a plural noun such as "reporters."
The comment above illustrates the dilemma of the printed press. I just bought the paper and was about to e-mail the link to the story to friends abroad. That is a good resource brought on by the Internet edition. But when they read your well written and timely story they will also be treated to a grammatically challenged superficial rant.
It's this kind of corporate populism that, I fear, allows excellent reporting to go unnoticed. How can younger people, brought up online, focus on a long in-depth investigation about Palin's past competing visually with "the most e-mailed" list and flashing ads and this constant pandering to the reader? The newspapers subverted their own editorial priorities. I sympathize with their plight but I long for a business model that protects the news.
It his is elitism, so be it. I can sing an aria off tune and fortunately will never inflict my voice on a Met audience. Why do we have to navigate among so much drivel, in the name of interaction? And, yes, I will avoid logging on to this page again because I have no interest in what your wrongly empowered audience thinks. I buy the paper for the writing of the good professionals it employs.
One suggestion for Keller: If he wants readers to believe his newspaper is impartial, he's going to have to assign a story on the Chicago machine to balance Sunday's piece about Sarah Palin's hiring habits. It will take many such assignments, though.
To M. Erwin: I am sorry for the grammatical errors in my post. English is not my natural language. It is one of four languages I converse in. But I will try harder next time to get it right.
By the way, I have been a subscriber of the New York Times since attending college here in the '60's.
Finally, nuance can be good or bad depending on its use. If hard news stories are shaded such that opinions leave as much of an impression as the facts, then it is not a good use 'nuance'.
Vous trop protester et montrer votre élitisme.
'nuf said.
the NYTimes is still a great paper, and anyone who wants to keep up with what's happening has to read it.
however, it clearly DOES have a problem with unnamed sources and facts that amount to unsubstantiated opinion, and THAT'S why it is so easily attacked by critics. every day it shoots itself in the foot.
alot of times "news" stories read like opinion columns. stories often are not REPORTED very well, or at least you can't tell it from the stories themselves. hell, even johnny apple's pieces were often flawed in that respect. sure, apple's pieces read great, but often i wondered: "exactly WHO is his source for THIS statement?" indeed, the NYTimes is probably the loosest edited paper in the country when it comes to using named sources (with the possible exception of the washington post).
i used to report for medium and small papers. very few (if any) of my editors would let me get away with the kinds of sweeping, unsubstantiated statements that one frequently finds in news stories in the times. my editors would insist: "get somebody to SAY this on the record."
the times obviously thinks it doesn't need to include such trivia in many of its stories. but it is WRONG, and it is sacrificing its credibility for its arrogance.
This is sad. Everyone quoted here needs to spend less of their time feeding the Gang of 500 echo chamber.
Blogs alone don't explain why the media enjoys a lower approval rating than Bush. Nor do partisan politics.
Try an experiment, guys. Turn off Twitter for 20 minutes, and CNN for 30. Ask yourselves who, exactly, you really want to notice your work. Who counts more: 1,050 readers who take the time to comment? Or Anderson Cooper?
How did it happen that one became 'elite' simply by exempting oneself from the category of "the American public" -- and defining that public as "people I've never met whose tastes I nonetheless know to be vacuous and lowbrow"?
If you can't turn down a few talk show invitations and take as much time as you need for serious, considered journalism, no one's gonna do it for you.
I earned my degree in journalism, & love newspapers, but, seriously, when you know the conclusion of an article (Sarah Palin's management style will be found inadequate), why bother reading it?
This is a paper that couldn't find the resources to dig into the John Edwards affair/siphoning campaign $" story, (a presidential candidate!) but ran 5 stories on Palin's daughter in 1 day. Where are the cries for information on Obama's community organizing and what it says about him? Strangely silent it seems.
They make themselves irrelevant with the intellectual dishonesty.
NYO does a good job of revealing the media fishbowl.
a number of people have called down the mainstream media for not pursuing the john edwards affair story, and it is done again here.
it seems to me the lack of attention was fully justified. first, by the time the story was gaining some credibility and legs, edwards was no longer a candidate. second, when the national enquirer first published the story, there was little reason to believe it was anything more than another sensational yarn that was unproven and thinly, anonymously sourced.
would the critics have the mainstream media chase every tabloid tale? what about the ones about president bush drinking heavily? or of mrs. bush fleeing the white house and the allegedly inibriated president to spend a night or two in a washington hotel? those are two headline blaring tabloid stories that have been published this year, by the globe, i believe it was. (i see these things at the grocery store.)
no, just because the national enquirer got the edwards story correct as it periodically does with others does not mean it should stand out as a bellweather example of credible journalism.
JTFLoore,
I agree with the tabloid journalism point.
What you're missing is that the Edwards story was floating around last October into 2008, when he was running for President. The MSM/ NYT didn't bother to investigate. The only reason the Enquirer got the story is because no one else was trying.
Somehow, for the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, they're really trying and have the resources to investigate.
Somehow, for the Democratic Presidential candidate, they don't have the resources to investigate his community organizing efforts.
The NYT needs to quit making excuses, stop whining and get with the program. The article on Palin on Sunday was informative, but offered no substantial conclusions like many articles produced by the NYT for the past 10-15 years or so. The political landscape has changed dramatically since 1980 when the GOP explicitly targeted alienated "Dixiecrats" beginning with Reagan's speech in Mississippi. Ever since that point the GOP has made an appeal to the lowest common denominator. The GOP no longer creates political platforms with any other goals than simply winning elections like they are football games and the GOP has been unbelievably successful. "Objective" newspapers like the Times still treat the GOP like it is a party with a vested interest in the future of this country...it isn't. The party subscribes to racism and crony style pseudo free market capitalism that actually functions more like a white collar organized crime syndicate as shown by the latest debacle on Wall Street. If the Times wants to get publicity for well researched articles like the Palin piece, the authors need to draw explicit conclusions and state real opinions which while controversial, are backed up with solid research. The art of real journalism has been lost in the attempt to maintain the illusion of objectivity which only serves to prop up the self defeating cronyism of the GOP politics. When the Times takes a truly objective stand, people will read and talk about the articles for days on end. If the Times using the evidence it had accumulated and presented for the article had just come out and called Palin a self serving cut throat politician whose self serving goals feed only her ambition and show no desire on her part to actually serve her constituents, people would have discussed the article all week long and the Times would have made a fortune in advertising for the Times website as people flocked there to read the "controversial" article.
Bill Keller's laments fall on deaf ears. The New York Times have made themselves irrelevant.
Their utter lack of credibility concerning such stories as the buildup to the Iraq war, vis-a-vis Judith Miller and her infamously nonexistent WMD, and their shielding of the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping until after the 2004 election are only the most glaring examples of a systemic violation of the public trust that has eroded readers' confidence and ultimately ruined the newspaper's reputation.
I don't feel sorry for them. They are dinosaurs that have outlived their usefulness. The time has come for them to leave the stage and exit the theater.
Important stories are getting lost in the constant news cycle. No doubt about it. It is not that people don't care and don't want good information. Far from it. As someone pointed out, if you count website traffic, more people are reading the news every day than ever before, on many sites, including the Times, the Post, Politico, etc.
We all have busy lives and we're getting used to be able to grab information at a moment's notice. We desperately need context and understanding and a way to sift the unimportant from the essential. One key item which is missing (and I can't believe people haven't realized this) is a curatorial site to house the most important stories of the day/week/month. Every story is NOT equal. People know this.
Yet, somehow, it is has been left to me to figure out what is consequential and what is not. Perhaps because of competition with one another, perhaps because organizations like the Times or the Post don't want their legitimacy to rub off on a lesser organization with a hot story, no "long finish" news curatorial site has sprung up.
The new needs an impartial, curated site where stories of significance can be sorted and stored. Where historians and educators and experts can add to the discussion and help put things in context.
I get daily news from the Times, Googlenews, Kottke, Romenesko, Digg, the Post, Arts and Letters Daily, NPR, MorningNews headlines, Politico, Memeorandum.
Figure out what news story is important to the nation isn't necessarily everyone's strong suit. And even if it is someone's strong suit, stories gets lost in the mix because the average person does not have the time to survey every important site on the net every single day.
So why isn't there a central site like Kottke for important stories of real consequence where people who have time can go to get material worth thinking about for more than 30 seconds?
Too funny... Keller thinks the reason his business is broken is because of the business model of printed press. Nope.
His business is self-flushing because the product has become quite poor. Along with most of the traditional press, Newsweek, Time, etc... not much audience on either side wants to read one-way biased opinion (albeit presented as news) when they buy the NYT... but that's 90% of what the NYT puts in ink every day.
We don't read the position taking pubs of our political persuasion, nor do we want to PAY for and read the ruminations of the other side of the coin. We would pay for insightful study into both sides of an issue, but you won't see such objective treatment from the NYT et al.
The truth is nominally that there is value and danger on both sides of ballot box. Everyone knows this to be true, down deep. Hence we just won't accept being lied to by the NYT. If they came out and said, look, we admit it, we're a printed form of the Daily Kos, then that's different... they might not sell more, but at least they would be more sincere.
This notion that the media is liberally biased is hogwash. And it is hogwash because the biggest complainers are the so-called conservatives who completely ignore the fact that it is the GOP apologist Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Reillys, etc., of the world who dominate the airwaves. No bias there, huh?
A problem with journalism right now is talent and dedication. Too many reporters - print and TV - are lazy. They don't know the issues, they don't know the facts, they don't have the context. They don't ask the right questions. They don't know when they're being played. They're scribes who repeat what they're told. (TV is the worst, by the way.)
Used to be that some of the best and brightest became reporters. Not any more. The young Halberstams of the world aren't looking at journalism as a calling anymore. And they probably won't until the industry finds its new voice and place. And it won't happen until corporate journalism goes away and publishers stop responding first to the stockholders and to the P&Ls.
Until then, the readers need to re-establish and make clear their standards and expectations. News outlets are going toward the commentary because that's what readers seem to want. They want the facts interpreted for them so they don't have to think and form their own opinions.
It is a mess right now, but journalism will survive. Eventually.