I have other things I should be working on but it’s impossible to resist getting into this discussion.
The catalyst of the conversation is CTVglobemedia’s decision to cancel the A Morning show from the lineups of A Channels nationwide. In London that decision carried with it 48 jobs from the station (and this comes hot on the heels of the outright elimination of stations in Windsor and Wingham).
There was a lot of buzz about this on Twitter yesterday. People’s concerns about local media seem to be building momentum. Today Dan Brown asks readers how we feel.
My own feelings are sympathetic to the actual people losing their jobs (as well as others worried about losing their jobs) but I have only a negligible attachment to any of the mainstream outlets. I’m about as non-local-oriented as a person can be. I’ve had to make a deliberate effort to read the London Free Press more and blog about local issues — it was like my pre-New Year’s resolution in the fall — to keep my blue sky, global thinking from floating out of the atmosphere completely.
While I don’t consume a lot of local news, I certainly appreciate its value. Newspapers’ role in foiling corruption was thoroughly argued by Paul Starr in his recent New Republic essay, and Wire creator David Simon made an excellent case this week in the Washington Post [via The Plank]:
Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.
While this certainly isn’t the most desireable state of affairs, I’m still very hopeful that on the other side of this transition we’ll get new conventions that are far more effective than the ones from the recent past.
The biggest mistake is to make the assumption that reporters working for news organizations are simply going to be swamped by a bunch of blogging-for-free amateurs who more or less cover the same area, albeit focused more on opinion and attention-mongering rather than real reporting, and lacking the institutional gravity and resources of traditional journalists.
That’s a mistake for two big reasons. The first is that great reporters can and will continue to do great reporting outside of traditional news organizations… it just might take a little while to learn. In fact, I suspect a few real journalists (in the same sense Simon’s characters talk about “real police”) will go on to raise the bar for excellence, as they’re more free (from under the crushing weight of bureaucry) to thrive by cultivating special knowledge and leads best suited to their talents and circumstances.
Again I should point out: first people have to learn how to be effective with more independence; everyone isn’t going to thrive as soon as things open up — in fact, maybe only a few people will.
The principles I’m going by here aren’t limited to journalism. Every field struggles with the challenges of bureaucracy and the stifling atmosphere of mediocrity they enable. This is precisely what Barry Schwartz addressed in his recent TED talk on practical wisdom. It’s also the main underlying them of The Wire — which addresses institutional dysfunction not just in media but in the police department, government, education, labour, and even within criminal organizations.
The second reason it’s a mistake to assume new journalism is simply shittier version of old journalism is that individuals and organizations are increasingly responsible for “getting their own word out.” We no longer need reporters and PR professionals to intermediate our public relations. If you have something you want to say there are virtually unlimited venues to do so; no need to go through an agency or wait around for a reporter to call you.
The importance of this fact occurred to me when I was reflecting on the post I wrote about the Ontario in the Creative Age report. I genuinely take to heart the common criticism that bloggers are merely parasites who re-post the work someone else already did. I looked at the Free Press story and noted that Randy Richmond got a statement from the mayor, as well as the president of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. That’s reporting: making the phone calls and visits (and even prior to that, knowing who to call and building relationships).
But then I thought, “If the mayor and the trade association really want the public to know what they have to say — which I’m quite sure they do — why aren’t they publicizing their reactions through their own website where they have more freedom and control?”
Then I thought about the way LFPress is using Twitter to cover London Knights games. I like that but shouldn’t (or at least couldn’t) the Knights do that themselves with a co-op student and virtually zero cost? And then there’s the Chamber of Commerce and London Transit and Orchestra London and all the other arts groups and business associations — and all the businesses themselves.
Which brings us to advertising. Advertisers don’t need media organizations as much as they used to. If they’ve got a genuinely great product or service and a bit of savvy they can market virally without paying for any traditional media presence. For now this has only been proven true in a few exceptional cases (Google itself is the most obvious) but I think there are far deeper changes about to occur in the near-to-mid term.
The closer I look, the more it’s apparent that traditional media companies are the real parasites (I wouldn’t be so comfortable saying this if I didn’t feel like many of the traditional folk see me as a parasite): it’s like they somehow set themselves up as a barrier to communication and then charged a toll to people who want to get through the barrier. But in this case, if the service provider simply left the scene they’d take the barrier with them and we could conduct our business more effectively than ever.
The big shift will be in the public appreciation that everyone has an interest in how they are represented publicly, and in just the past few years technology has made it possible to actually take direct responsibility for this… It’s just going to take a few years to learn.
Meanwhile, as things open up in this way and more people become used to publicizing things directly, my hope is that it becomes more difficult for organizations (like the Baltimore Police that David Simon had so much trouble with) find it increasingly difficult to keep dirty secrets from getting out. Of course there are privacy and security concerns, but it only takes a couple of conscientious insiders to make institutional barriers a little more porous.
And as more people in the general public get used to having direct access to all of this information through the web, the more sensitive we will become to possible cover-ups and the more accountability and openness we will demand from the organizations that affect our lives.
Again, I can’t stress this enough: this is the beginning of a transition and it will take time for people to learn and for the new habits and assumptions to become more firm. Making these changes will be risky but it seems to me that it’s even riskier to try holding onto the old habits and assumptions.
The television industry increasingly looks poised for the kind of crisis that the auto industry and newspaper industry are going through — in which suddenly everybody realizes the old business models are outdated and the legacy organizations are widely ridiculed by a public mob.
This occurred to me when I read (and commented on) Jesse Hirsh’s post, “When TV Meets the Internet.” I haven’t been a big television viewer but it isn’t because of any bias against it that its conventions look more and more absurd.
What exactly is a “channel” in an online world? And what can we even say about “networks”? The Wire couldn’t have been made without HBO’s help, but I didn’t watch it on HBO, I watched it on DVD. The only other shows I care to watch are The Agenda and Charlie Rose — both on public broadcasters, and the latter I usually watch online. Apart from that I watch sports and movies — and the fact that I have to flip between three or four different channels to find the Leafs or Raptors game on any given night demonstrates how out of whack the current system is.
And then on top of the inherited absurdities of network business models we have CRTC to make sure we’ll never run out of bureaucratic dysfunction and perpetual mediocrity…
Personally I won’t miss the A Channel if they shut the whole thing down tomorrow. The people who work there are something else entirely: them I would miss. But then again what’s stopping the best and most locally-committed of them from continuing to do good work with or without a traditional organization.
I actually find it offensive that we tend to rely so much on these organizations. Hypothetically, a board of directors in Montreal might decide they need to assure shareholders through rough times with large-scale restructuring (whether or not it is actually effective: the important thing is to be able to say you did something), and a junior vice president in Toronto assigned with the project looks at the numbers and decides the most expedient (i.e. career-positive) decision is to cut one of the shows that requires the most revenue and personel, regardless of popularity or even profitability.
As far as I’m concerned, the A Channel was as good as finished the moment the network was foisted by the CRTC, because of some byzantine ownership regulation, onto a conglomerate that didn’t actually want it. The downsizing we’re seeing now is just a formality.
We’re stupid to have much faith in office-holders working out of Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg — or wherever — to do what’s best for London. It’s going to be hard enough for us to decide what’s best for ourselves. But we need to get better at it. We need to learn as we go.
The responsibility has always been ours, it’s simply more evident now. Let’s use this lesson as a turning point. The resources we need are all available to us, just waiting to be used to turn London into an exemplar of locally grown media.
