My weekly rant against newspapers, as prompted by Jeff Jarvis
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Splitting newsrooms and hairs
History time. In 1998, I was 18 years old in the Orange County Register in a budget meeting. Everyone was talking about this concept of “listening posts,” basically community newsrooms where reporters could interact with the public while still maintaining their hegemony. It would be a storefront, or something like it where a reporter could dial back into the paper, file a story, interview someone, etc.
I spoke up at that point.
“Why don’t we put up a discussion board?”
Dumb looks all around. “What is that?” So I explain, I showed them things, I brought up Howard Rheingold. It was decided that we would indeed do a discussion board.
We called it Dialog.
It lasted not even a month.
To tell a reporter that the former safety net of media differentiation no longer applies scares them. A newspaper is a fundementally different media than a letter to the editor. A webpage is not different than a blog, only be perceived authority, and that authority has been subjected to so many fissures and breaks that its almost pedantic to count.
Now, provide the public with immediate access into a forum that the newspaper maintains, but give the public the impetus to make it successful and what will a reporter do? They complain, they whine and they don’t participate.
Dialog died not because the public didn’t want it. It died because they wanted it too much, and even in 1998 the nascent online audience wanted a say in what was thought (by the paper) as being news for them. What we found out is that in most cases we were wrong. In most cases we misjudged, misrepresented or otherwise assumed too much about our audience. When the audience spoke up, they ran and hid.
Here’s a challenge: go to the Orange County Register’s discussion board. I challenge you to find discourse that tangibly effected the newspaper. In 2001, I went around to all the papers and preached about online communoities, about giving up control, about customer driven web presences. I was laid off because I spent too much time “siding with customer demand rather than market demand” (as one reason).
Newspapers are founded on the notion that they are the tree and we are begging for the fruit. Attempt to get the fruit off the tree and its rotten. Blogs, alternative press, decentralized news or whatever you call it is rhizomic. It shoots its roots out, making new plants at will, spreading in a non-linear fashion to the point where amputation serves no other purpose than a temporary barrier to eventual spread.
OK, I’ve had my weekly rant against newspapers. Yes, I am still bitter. I have my whole business plan for the Online Community product for Freedom Communications still on my hard-drive.
Yes, it’s all part fo the tension/dichotomy that exists in the news business thanks to interactivity/two-way/participatory/many-to-/many media. News, by default, is founded on telling people what they *don’t* know (else, why buy news, other than for shared-consumption kinship?)
The arrival of interactive media presents the audience with the capacity to speak to the producers, but then you sometimes have to stop and ask “why”? Why? What is to be gained by having the _audience_ tell the _producers_ something _they_ didn’t know? Well, the benefit is the feedback loop that sends better content back the way of the audience at the end of the day. There’s no point informing a producer just for the hell of it; there has to be a tangible benefit for the consumers. What many media producers are only now catching on to is that, by letting the consumers speak, the power of the more-knowledgeable audience is input to the production process and back out to the audience at the consumption end. ie. _better content_.
If there’s a blockage point here it’s where some arrogant media producers are affronted by what they see as a challenge to their traditional role as sole arbiter of current knowledgem, that they don’t grasp the opportunity to _enrich_ their product. But even the Gray Lady has made moves toward more reader input. And The Guardian is already there.
We all knew the potential in ‘98; sometimes it just takes seven years to turn around an industry?