Blast from the past: “Neo in the Newsroom”
With the news of the New York Times integrating its Web and print operations, and with similar integrations happening everywhere I look these days, newsrooms have been on my mind a lot recently. Coverage of the NYT move has been cautiously positive. Finally, people seem to be saying, the Web operation gets to wield proper influence on the print product. No more separate-but-equal.
But it all leaves me wondering – should unifying our newsrooms be the goal? Or should we be breaking them up?
Newsrooms are horribly, horribly seductive places.
My first stint in a newsroom came while I was a sophomore in college, at a local TV station. I was completely taken in. Visuals blaring out from TV screens and editing bays, computer terminals spitting off wire feeds, scripts and budgets and newspapers and magazines strewn everywhere, all against the crackle of the police scanner and the constant ringing of the news desk phone. I’d been jacked into the Matrix, standing right in the midst of this never-ending cascade of information. I felt more connected to the flow of news than I ever had before.
And I felt more disappointed with the final product.
In the newsroom, stories come alive, or so I thought. But as I rolled the TelePrompTer each evening and listened to the anchors’ scripted patter, I watched these stories devolve into abstract pastiches of disconnected fluff – flesh-and-blood people and their narratives turned into five-second sound bites, locator maps, random shots of houses, police tape in front of an overturned car, a reporter trying to look concerned, tag back to the anchors. I found the same thing happening in newspapers – a cutesy lead, restated with a quote, nut graf, strained moment of prose, awkward snap back to the institutional voice, here’s what fill-in-expert has to say, so-and-so refused to comment, here’s a good quote for a kicker.
Somewhere underneath it all, there was conflict and tension and catharsis and humor and life. But with only 35 seconds or 12 inches to fill, I figured, that usually had to be cut.
Over time, I realized that the newsroom really was the Matrix. The perfect facsimile of utter connectivity. All that information spitting, crackling and ringing around me? More often than not, that was just journalists keeping tabs on each other, trying to hear what everyone else was covering, looking for topics to localize. Where else in town could I have been less connected to the flow of news than in that imposing monolith with security guards at all the entrances? News, after all, rarely happens in a newsroom.
The Red Pill
Outside the newsroom, I began to indulge my inner info junkie with a new discovery: blogs. I found these unassuming little outposts weaving lifeless pieces of news into tapestries lush with characters and context. On the Web, people were forming connections and communities, with ethical codes subject to more passionate and thoughtful scrutiny and discussion than I’ve seen in many a newsroom.
If the chief virtue of the newsroom was connection, it was being beaten, hands-down.
Since my initiation into newsrooms, I worry less and less about connections between journalists at news organizations. The Washington Post maintains separate print and Web newsrooms and remains adept at coverage in both arenas. (And of course, the New York Times isn’t so shabby itself, integrated or not.)
Much more important but much less celebrated in my observation is the matter of our connections with our audiences. As journalists converge and consolidate with each other, who’s paying attention to our convergence with communities we cover? While I’d love more of our print and broadcast journalists to be infused with a hyperlinked mindset, I think our resistance to the Web in many cases is a symptom of our resistance to our audiences.
In the wake of coverage chasing “Rathergate,” I heard a lot about “attack blogs,” an idea lampooned most notoriously by the Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert:
Jon, the vast majority of bloggers out there are responsible correspondents doing fine work in niche reporting fields like Gilmore Girl fan fiction, or cute things their cats do or photoshopped images of the Gilmore Girls as cats. That’s great. Where I draw the line is with these “attack bloggers,” just someone with a computer who gathers, collates and publishes accurate information that is then read by the general public. They have no credibility. All they have is facts. Spare me…
Blogs are vicious, I heard journalists say. They swarm and destroy at will, with no sense of balance.
And what I kept thinking was, Folks, these aren’t “blogs.” They’re people. These harsh criticisms aren’t new, they’re just spilling into sight after years of being cooped up in living rooms, around dinner tables. We’ve drifted away from these people for decades as our newsrooms have swelled and overlapped, and now, thanks in part to blogs, we finally get to hear just what they’ve been saying. It isn’t pretty, and we shouldn’t be surprised.
If I could bend the world to my whims, I’d see our newsrooms exploded into a hundred little bits, as tiny, friendly and ubiquitous as coffee shops. People would flow in throughout the day and night to share news, comment on it, hear it. A hundred bureaus would strive to draw connections between their communities and the world around them. Letters to the editor would become conversations with editors and with fellow citizens.
For a hundred boringly practical reasons, of course, this is impossible. Where would we put the presses?! But even if our giant newsrooms stay intact, I want to start hearing more about the most important convergence – community convergence.
— Originally published on August 4, 2005 at morph.
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