Journalism Musings

I used to teach journalism and run a school newspaper. I was trained in order to get a certificate to do this, and I was trained "old-school" by a Chicago Tribune reporter. We spent the first class doing nothing but crafting leads. We later talked about ethics, and the fourth estate, and gate-keeping, and political influences too. It was great, and one time my 18-year-old editors actually scooped all the local papers on a big story. Our school was huge; I used to remind school board members that our school paper had a larger circulation than half of all Illinois towns...and that was true!

Right now, lots of hand-wringing continues among journalism folks. They say print media is dying, they moan about the Medill school at Northwestern changing their program to require "marketing" of all J-school grads, and when each old school guy who cut his teeth at the City News Bureau dies, they bemoan the fact that there aren't any journalists like that anymore. Should we worry?

Yes and no. No because finding out the truth in the world is a built-in habit of humans, who are competitive and hate to see people lied to and taken advantage of. No dictatorship, no politicians, no religious crazies, no school authority has ever stopped investigative reporting or whistle-blowing. Of course, fascists round up the journalists and teachers first, and a lot of them may then disappear or die for the truth. Still, journalists will always exist and always find avenues to report the truth.

Yes, journalism is changing. This piece is appearing on a blog. I could start a NING that reported and shared data on any one local or even national story of interest. I can read the Sun Times online (now that newspapers have figured out that profit online is about advertising, not exclusivity/subscriptions). Print media have had to remake themselves to appear more "bite" friendly, more like TV news and WIRED magazine. Hard news coverage has shrunk in number of words per story, and non-investigative stories are collected in new ways, and often in partnerships with electronic media. The days of the paid ambulance chasers and precinct reporters have passed.

I was reminded of the thing I worry most about regarding journalism today by, no surprise, a radio talk show host. He was complaining about how we get new slogans and labels pushed on us, so that they appear everywhere. His complaint was about the phrases "Black Friday" and "Black Wednesday".
Black Friday was a phrase only known to retail management and no one else fifteen years ago. It referred to the day when any retail company shows what kind of profit they are going to take in on the busiest shopping day...the day after Thanksgiving. Black Wednesday may be, although no one is sure, a phrase coined by bar tenders for the day before Thanksgiving, which is currently reported to be the biggest drinking day of the year...outdoing even St Patty's and New Years! The radio host said that he had bartended for years (having quit only recently), and he never ONCE heard any one in the bar business use that phrase. So, how do these phrases get splashed in headlines, and reported on TV news in Chicago this week?

My answer: the media invented them.

They have to. Why? Because in the digital/internet age, news media cannot nap. News media face the constant challenge, with even fewer staff and reporters, to fill up 24 HOURS, 7 DAYS A WEEK of non-stop "news." In order to do that across hundreds of newspapers and hundreds of cable channels and thousands of e-zines and print mags, they have to keep finding something -- anything -- to grab our attention. So, the day after Thanksgiving can't simply be the busiest shopping day of the year. It has to be a story, with some 'sex' and some 'legs'. It has to have a 'hook' and the coverage has to be pushed back to the week before and forward to the week after. Last week: "How are nervous retailers preparing for the dreaded black Friday?" Next week "Black Friday is all red for terrified retailers!" There will be side stories with a local spin: "Ma and Pa grocery weathers Black Friday" and "Black Friday may toll death knell for Quackenmeyer Discount!" News media have learned from Hallmark cards. Got a slow cycle for sales? Invent a new holiday that needs cards...like "Sweetest Day." And the news media themselves will jump on it because the internet is on the phone and the crawl is crawling on the bottom of the screen. The week before: "Are you ready for your sweetest?" and the week after "Sweetest Day not so sweet for Tinkleberry's Chocolates!"

Make something where there was nothing, slogan-ize it, sell it, report on it over a cycle, keep it alive, make people believe they should care, even if they can't quite recall if the thing ever even existed before. Market it, then spin it into niche markets (is grandma sweetest on sweetest day in area nursing homes???) It can fill, fill, fill up all the time we have to fill.

And, once we have filled, filled, filled it up, we can put the the news foxes in front of the cameras and keep track of our share. Don't worry if we can't cover the wars because the military won't let us (the one and ONLY thing the American military apparently learned from Viet Nam!). We've got Black Fridays and Sweetest Day. 'Now,... is 'reporter' Susie Q. doing the background interviews for our annual two week coverage of post-holiday stress syndrome? I think she's got a doctor who claims she was the first to recognize this awful 'syndrome.' We have former guests from Springer's show who claim that the syndrome made them have affairs at work, gain 33 pounds, and run away to a motel in Duluth. Of course some geeks in the Afghan hills died today, but nobody wants to hear about that....we've got 'em conditioned to hear about THIS.'

Barnum said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the [American] people. However, I see some hopeful signs of a more critical public. One is the recent election. Voters have been spun to death, and they are sick of it. Palin's handlers made a huge mistake believing they could 'market' associations with "known terrorists" to a nation who now knows more than ever what a terrorist is (it ain't Mr. Ayers, despite his count-cultural ear rings!) The young generations of bloggers and facebookers know what's bullshit online. They occasionally laugh at, but then always expose urban myths and made-up stories. To them Paris Hilton isn't news but a geek to be joked about. The older generation shows signs it has gotten over being niche-marketed-to; witness the responses to American auto makers whose businesses really died twenty years ago telling how they are competitive in the world market! I wonder if there's anybody left, except in a few church basements, who believe Fox News is really news.

My hope is that people in America have become much more critical of media ploys to snag their attention and invent news where there is no news. When the film "Wag the Dog" appeared, it frightened me; now, I am not so frightened.

Americans may actually be getting smarter; but wait, ...no they can't be because the media keeps reporting how awful ALL American schools are, right?

Wrong.