From 50,000 Feet

I disagree with the premise behind this recent post on Pajamas Media — that America will soon have a glorious future of news without reporters. I hope the writer, news futurist Steve Boriss, is wrong, and if he’s right, I’m not so sure it’s a gain.

However, there is no doubt that the web has multiplied the sources of news, and, as Boriss implies, many of those sources have very different interests than your traditional five-Ws newshound:

Now, the Internet is eliminating the reporter as middleman by connecting audiences directly with the real sources of news — politicians’ offices, PR firms, whistleblowers, think tanks, courts, police departments, and everyone else with a news ax to grind. These entities have always been capable of writing their own stories in a usable form, but have previously needed reporters to get their stories distributed.

This is absolutely true. Years ago, I only knew what think-tank studies said when a reporter published a story about them. I wrote and edited press releases for a living, but I seldom saw anyone else’s. I saw the stories that resulted from them, and of course, didn’t see the stories that the press releases failed to inspire. Now it is utterly commonplace for paid spokesperson and executives to share their thoughts on the Internet, for politicians to send out e-mail blasts, for police and fire departments to post what happened overnight on a government-sponsored blog and, of course, for experts, fans and crackpots to fill the cyberspace void with posts, comments, twitters, snapshots and video.

Borris, optimistically, envisions the future this way:

We are…relearning what Thomas Jefferson intuitively understood — the truth is more likely to emerge from a multitude of voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas than from elites offering their views of the truth drawn from their own limited knowledge and perspectives.

But what I observe, so far, is an array of cocoons, in which specialists increasingly talk to each other while political partisans dismiss as “trolls” the comments left by anyone who disagrees with the host’s take on the latest news.  Oh, and they all still rely on the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, ABC, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, USA Today, NPR, the BBC, and their local papers for feedstock.  Most news-oriented bloggers aren’t combing press releases, police files or uploaded speeches to fashion completely fresh content.  They drink the filtered stuff just like almost everyone else.

There are, of course, lots of exceptions — law blogs, academic and research institutes — where you can find predigested information.   A lot of the best stuff you have to pay for, as one might expect despite the “news is free” culture that supposedly dominates the internet.

But it’s all too much for that Jeffersonian citizen to absorb.  Maybe today’s mainstream editors can be faulted for laziness and bias.  But what occurs to me now is that if you think they can and should be replaced by you, you’re going to have to work really hard.

I’m going to do my part.  I’m going to start looking up press releases.  I’ve done it a few times already — it’s fun to poke underneath them to see what might really be going on.  So keep watching this space, and I’ll try to do my patriotic duty.

Tags: blogging, journalism