I give NewAssignment.Net, Jay Rosen’s plan to start a citizen-funded citizen journalism, a standing O for its audacity and for Jay’s courage in imagining and putting the idea out there. Props to Craig Newmark, too, for giving the new venture $10,000. I see NewAssignment.Net as standing in distinction to many instances where bloggers-who-call themselves-journalists are now beginning to solve the ”who will pay?” question. Most of these are merging indistinguishably into a form of media that is technologically different, while in content and ethics virtually identical, to the mainstream media they once crowed they would soon conquer. This afternoon for instance I watched a 20-year-old named Brian Stelter interviewed on C-SPAN about his TVNewser.com blog, now a must-read in the television news industry. When the C-SPAN guy asked Stelter where he thought blogging was headed, he answered ”It’s going to become more and more like the mainstream.” I think he’s right. What’s different about NewAssignment.Net, to me, is that it is public-spirited from the start. It’s an obvious point, I suppose, but worth highlighting if only to once again remind ourselves that the very idea of journalism as a public service is what’s most in danger today. That’s what we could lose completely, and NewAssignnment.Net is a project designed to ensure that this idea flourishes in the new forms of cyber-journalism that are being created –- and just as quickly being eyed for lunch by commercial forces — as we speak. NewAssignment.Net reminds us that journalism needs to stay connected to good ideas that serve society; that those ideas are obviously most likely to bubble up from society; and it is bold in proposing that we should test to see whether society will pay for journalism that it declares it wants. Some precedents suggest that funding streams could develop. Here in Minnesota, where I live, the listener-funded Minnesota Public Radio has built the second-highest radio audience in the country after NPR. Though they struggle, outfits like the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting raise funds from private entities, sometimes to pay for specific stories, which entities offer their funds for no other reason than they believe such stories must be told. The MPR example suggests, perhaps, that despite NewAssignment.Net’s potentially global reach, it may actually find funding on a regional basis, i.e. in parts of the country where audiences have been developed over many years to value and understand public service news, appreciate the low-key and serious tone of such news, and are accustomed to paying for it. Three other first thoughts about NewAssignment.Net: 1. Can a mob be smart? Possibly this is not just a semantic quibble. History is rife with brilliant people who turned horribly, dangerously stupid when they gathered in groups of three or more. From time to time, entire countries filled with good people go insane, as per, say, in China during the Cultural Revolution, or in Japan during World War II. Some part of me fears such a mob on the Internet. Naturally I want large networks of smart people to gather for good in cyberspace. But part of me expects and fears the rise of cyber-mobs, too. 2. The plan as presently outlined looks possibly vulnerable to commercial co-optation, to me. What is to prevent a drug company, such as the one that makes the hypothetical Zorflexe, from organizing paid user groups of the drug to approach NewAssignment.Net incognito, as citizens, who would shape their story suggestions in such a way that Zorflexe would come out smelling like a rose – or Zorflexe competitors to look like rats? I know good editors make a good firewall, but cash makes a good battering ram. Of course, it’s rarely as obvious as that. Most consumer products are mild poisons (not strong ones like tobacco or heroin or meth), and therefore are open to ”on the one hand, on the other hand” newsroom discussions about story assignments. These types of discussions make it easy for assignments to be made based on ”lesser evil” decisions, especially when serious cash beckons, which in turns puts the whole enterprise back on the slippery moral slope. Again, good editors are a solid individual moral check. Where’s the institutional check? 3. An allied concern is whether NewAssignment.Net will have the institutional heft to back up investigative reporters when the shit hits the fan. Having the law on your side is never good enough when that happens –- only expensive lawyers will do. Besides defense lawyers, where will the money come from to pay lawyers to vet stories ahead of publication? This is one area where I genuinely fear the weakening of institutional journalism. Courageous reporters will always exist, but society owes them, and itself, more protection than today’s weakening newspapers, and already spineless and vacuous television, can provide. Can NewAssignment.Net, even when it becomes successful, develop not only that kind of heft, but influence society in such a way that public consciousness finally recognizes that journalists too rush into burning superstructures and need protection? Just some ideas, if not for the boardroom, then for the coffeeshops where NewAssignment.Net will take further substance and shape.
Archive for July, 2006
This Just In: Citizen-Funded Citizen Journalism
Saturday, July 29th, 2006The Moral Poverty of Journalism Today
Sunday, July 9th, 2006In recent weeks I’ve talked to a couple of writers who left daily journalism because of disheartening experiences.
One is from a woman in her mid 30’s who worked as a reporter for a major daily newspaper in the northeast United States. She was doing a story on homelessness in her city, and went out to do some interviews with a fellow reporter. After interviewing one homeless man, she gave the man some money before saying good-bye.
Back in the newsroom, her fellow reporter went directly to the paper’s editor, telling the editor that my friend had breached journalistic ethics by giving a homeless person, a source for a story they were preparing, some money. My friend was called into the editor’s office and read the riot act.
Another friend, who now lives and works for non-profit in Minneapolis, told me two stories from her days as a senior editor at a major daily in the Midwest. The first story was about a going-way party for three colleagues who were joining the U.S. Army as "embeds" during the invasion of Iraq. Everybody in the newsroom gathered for cake and speeches. The merriment of the occasion was the first thing that struck my friend as odd. Then, the paper’s editor-in-chief told the assembled editors and reporters in her speech that "War is good for newspapers."
On another occasion, the wealthy owner of the newspapers parent company (okay, it was Tony Ridder) came to the newsroom to allay fears among the paper’s senior editors about cost-cutting and layoffs that Knight-Ridder had recently announced. The layoffs and cutbacks, Ridder assured the assembled editors, were planned for other papers and not the one he was visiting. And then, referring to the stock options that the paper’s senior editors received as a part of their compensation, he flatly told them "We’ll make you rich."
I won’t offer commentary on these stories except to say they speak eloquently to the deep corruption of the profession today.
Hundreds of other reporters and editors, most of them probably still working in newsrooms, could tell similar tales. As members of a profession they presumably joined in hopes of doing noble, socially important work, why on earth aren’t they finding ways to tell these damning stories from the mountaintops?