To find answers to the questions we asked last week, we interviewed three experts, all of them successfully making the transition from traditional journalism to the reinvention of media, in other words, The Fresh, Ferocious Wave.
What are the limits and uses of the first person?
Rosenberg: The first person has a couple of very powerful uses. One is as a device to tell a story that is not about yourself. You use yourself as a surrogate for the audience. You see it much more commonly in magazine journalism, less in newspapers.
The other use is to tell a story that is about you. That can be extremely powerful. Someone steps out from behind the third person and says, “This is what I experienced. Let me tell you about it.” Recently journalists were writing about being foreclosed on or declaring bankruptcy. These were very emotional stories with a visceral appeal.
The potential downside is when we jump to the conclusion that this story is representative in some way. You have to return to the bigger picture. You have to do the homework to put it in perspective in order to present a full and accurate picture.
Weldon: First person narrative can be intrusive when telling a story. In media, you can have the complete immersion in self on one end—the first person reaction to the news told completely through the reaction of the writer—all the way to just a regurgitation of the facts and events at the other end. Either end is extreme and either has an audience who wants a more personalized, opinionated look at the news. Somewhere in the middle, moderation, is really good journalism.
We can’t ever achieve complete objectivity because journalists come with their own opinions, biases and viewpoints but we can certainly, as journalists, make an attempt to include as many sources as possible so that we have a more fully dimensional account of what happened.
The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year in 2005, was truthiness, “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” These days, is “truthiness” good enough?
Weldon: No, I don’t think truthiness is okay. Ethics is the cornerstone of solid journalism. Just because there’s more junk doesn’t mean that good journalism has gone away.
Rosenberg: A colleague of mine, Farhad Majoo, wrote a book called True Enough. all about this question: What constitutes the truth.
We are in a time when large numbers of people have begun to turn away from fact and are content with a picture of reality that is consistent with their existing beliefs.
Campbell: There’s a lot to this question. The first thing is an economic issue. Opinion is cheap and reporting is expensive. There’s more opinion because you don’t have to pay for it. It’s a lot easier to get someone to give their opinion for free than it is to open a bureau in Beirut and fund it and staff it. We’re never going back to the traditional model, it’s just too expensive.
Does democratization equal dumbing down? Now that anyone can be a journalist, are journalistic standards slipping?
Rosenberg: We overlook how valuable blogs actually are for real experts to share their knowledge in depth at a level they formerly couldn’t pursue. If you’re an expert in some specialized complex subject, the only outlet for getting your thoughts out there was through a reporter who would interview you for maybe an hour, pull a quote and probably over-simplify it in the presentation. Now you have the opportunity to share what you know publicly on the Web for anyone who’s interested to come and learn.
Look at the recent economic meltdown. If you wanted to know what was going on, you could turn to your newspaper and get a decent picture but it was a day late and in summary form. If you wanted more, you could turn to a handful of economic bloggers. That’s a blessing. The fact that these people are able to do it in their own voices is a better guarantee of accuracy and reliability.
Sadly most journalists are not experts. They’re generalists; that’s the nature of the field. You do the best you can, but if you’re writing about something really complex, chances are the person you’re interviewing will express it more succinctly and more knowledgeably than you will. So why not go to those people directly?
What we need to teach is discernment, how to discern what is real and what is opinion and what is dumbed down.
In my classes at Northwestern, I require my students to have Twitter accounts that they are to use strictly for journalism. They retweet, they follow journalists and columnists, they can look for sources. They begin to understand how to use that tool for journalism. You can use any of these new tools to be ridiculous and inane or you can use them as another tool for information gathering.
Campbell: What you have with the comments and blogs is an incredible amount of information and things that would not have been published or broadcast now are. But there’s also an absolute ton of junk out there.
It’s a strange situation because you don’t have backroom fact checking. Ideally, in the discussion, the truth emerges but that may or may not happen. With blogs, you get a lot more information than is in the news.
Are we becoming a nation of narcissists more interested in our own tiny purview and willingly ignorant of the larger world?
Campbell: The rate of narcissism has increased quite a bit and we have a narcissistic culture. One of the things you see in the media that’s consistent with that is the channelization of media.
People search for media that is consistent with their own beliefs, that makes them feel like they’re right, they’re on the right side. There’s really been an atomization of media experience and it’s had consequences in terms of having a more unified cultural dialogue.
A lot of people who write blogs are talking because they like to hear themselves think or they think they’re important. There are so-called trolls. There’s anti-social discourse. It’s not a pretty place. There’s a lot of information but the specificity is lost.
Rosenberg: Does the facility that new media gives us mean that we’re becoming more narcissistic? The answer is no.
To say that by being subjective and so becoming more narcissistic is an easy way to dismiss something that is far more profound.
People who aren’t in the blogging universe either as writers or readers don’t realize that it is an intensely social environment. You have to focus on what other people are saying. The whole thing operates as a conversation and not as a monologue. A lot of people think of blogs as a soliloquy that happens on a web page.
Weldon: There will always be people who want to navel gaze. But there is a value to thoughtful, contemplative first person narrative. It isn’t just about “I saw Justin Beiber today.” There has always been a need for a thoughtful, trained observer to cast their own eye on events, but now there are so many people who are pretenders. Some people don’t really get all sides of the story or make an attempt to be balanced so it’s confusing.
There is an audience that wants really solid, no-excuses journalism. They haven’t gone away but there are a lot more options for silliness. That gets more attention. It’s more fun, more hip.