Media in the New Millennium

posted by Doyle

Clay Evans, a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera, hit the nail on the head today with this column. 

He showed me exactly why newspapers are dying.

To be clear, I disagree with the overall message of Evans’ column, but I’m not one of these cheering the end of the mainstream media. In fact, I’m mourning this demise. I believe in the Fourth Estate and am of the opinion the press plays a vital role. As Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to George Washington in 1792, “No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”

What Evans doesn’t get is that “the press” is not the giant thing that the Daily Camera just outsourced to the Denver Newspaper Agency — the thing that puts ink on paper. The press watches and reports, and the end product can be on paper, on a computer screen or on a cell phone. Clear thoughts can be expressed in 140 characters or 2,000 words — and as Evans should know, shorter is often far more difficult.

The sad arrogance of Evans’ piece is that he infers that writing by anyone that doesn’t receive a paycheck for writing isn’t worth reading. Clearly, only those anointed with official positions can be considered trustworthy. Even worse, from the tone of his piece, I think Evans is inferring the rest of us just aren’t bright enough to be expressing thoughts outside of carefully reviewed letters to the editor. To read his piece, you’d think anyone with a blog has Paris Hilton’s vocabulary and Britney Spears’ spelling skills.

What should be happening is that reporting should be moving to a different medium while the tenants and professionalism remain. The New York Times has more readers now than at any time in their history, thanks to the Internet. Does the business model need to change? Of course. But the answer is not to discount the online world. That’s like saying those new-fangled auto-mo-beels will never catch on — just give me my horse.

Like anything, social media has both good and bad. Let’s look at newspapers through the same lens. For every New York Times, there’s at least one National Enquirer (sorry, no link to those guys even if they have one!). For every radio program like This American Life there’s a handful of juvenile morning shows offering concert tickets to anyone who will come to the studio and test adult diapers on the air. And for every thoughtful blog that is either expressing well-reasoned opinions or doing solid reporting, there are a bunch that are simply drivel. And, I’ve said many times, there are millions of blogs out there with one entry: “Hi, welcome to my blog. Check back here for frequent updates.” Then silence. 

From this column, it sure seems Evans has never taken any time to discover the myriad of voices — good and not so good — online. Perhaps he missed that little story about how bloggers accused Dan Rather using potentially false documents when covering Bush’s National Guard service, an issue that ended up costing him (right or wrong) his long-time position as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. Maybe he’s not familiar with some of the excellent technology reporting being done on blogs by journalists like Om Malik or Dan Gillmore. Clearly, since they’re not working for a daily paper in Boulder, Colorado, they must not be relevant. (And, for the record, Clay, Malik has raised millions to expand his online publications. Last time I checked, the Daily Camera building was on the block, as was the entire Rocky Mountain News.)

I usually find Evans thoughtful, even when I disagree with him. This piece sounded more like it was written by someone on a manual typewriter declaring “that Internet thing” to be just a fad. But if this is how newspaper reporters are thinking about social media and the inevitable move to online information distribution, perhaps the fall of the newspaper is coming sooner than any of expected.

C’mon, Clay. You can do better than that.