Blogversation Part II
Yesterday, I posted a response to a question from Channel 13’s Evan Dawson about whether or not bloggers are journalists. This is part of a continuing discussion that I, Rottenchester, and Ontario Republican are having with Evan about the roles of blogs in the media.
Here’s Evan’s next question:
Where do you guys see the traditional media (and more specifically, the traditional local media) evolving? And perhaps more importantly, where is the traditional media currently failing in its coverage, style, or presentation?
My answer:
First of all, I like Rotten’s response with regard to other local blogs that don’t focus on politics.  I know very little about nonpolitical local blogs but would like to learn more. Rotten’s post seems a good place to start.
I don’t have a very specific vision of how I’d like to see local media evolve. And while I don’t want to turn this into D&C bash-a-thon, most of my specific complaints about local media are about the D&C. I’m not saying this to butter Evan up, but I’ve been happy with most of the news coverage I’ve seen on Channel 13 and I like the Channel 13 blog.
I find the D&C’s efforts to enter the internet age pretty laughable. Their website is a mess, their community blogs are awful, and most of their reporters and editors who use the blogs have yet to master the basic syntax of html. Given that they’ve been at this for over a year, I find this last point particularly ridiculous.  (I would like to stress here that there are a lot of terrific reporters at the D&C and that they probably are the best source for local news overall. I’m commenting here about their internet efforts.)
Another thing I find frustrating about local media, especially the D&C, is how little effort is made to tell readers what is actually going on. Everyone in Monroe County who follows politics knows that Steve Minarik runs everything at the county level, but to read the D&C you’d hardly know he exists. Similarly, coverage of Renaissance Square has generally been pretty shoddy (with some of WHAM’s interviews with planners being notable exceptions).
In the era of blogs, I don’t think the same old gentleman’s club media ethos really flies anymore.  Given the choice between toothless but high-minded traditional media meanderings and tough, direct (and, yes, maybe rude) blog banter, serious readers will choose the latter.  Some Republicans have told me they prefer reading RochesterTurning to the D&C for political coverage, since RT at least makes an honest effort to describe what is actually going on (even if we see it through a different lens than they do).
Obviously, blogs have advantages over traditional media when it comes to getting to the bottom of things. We can blur the line between editorial and news in a way that combines facts with a blunt, opinionated take on things. In many cases, sources will tell us things that they won’t tell the newspapers. And we can write concise two and three paragraphs where the newspapers are forced to write longer articles (at least in the case of news that appears on the front page).
But I think that, more than anything, that’s the challenge traditional media faces: how do they achieve the clarity and directness of blogs within the confines (and I don’t mean confines in an entirely bad way here) of traditional journalism?
I think a lot of it is that blogs are like real life, real conversations. I was just watching MSNBC and they had an unscripted moment with Tim Russert leaving his desk to allow their chief political analyst sit down. Russert quipped “He’s my stunt double” and everything unraveled from there. It was wonderful! You got to see the camera pan behind the desk, anchors let down their polished veneer and it was so real. That is what people want. That is what blogs offer.
in terms of the local media, i think they need to do investigative work and more in depth local coverage. not bake sales and that junk, but stuff like ren square like you mention. the reporters need to do more digging, maybe find more/better sources. maybe they could look at blogs and see, wow, these people are all on this one topic/rumor, maybe it is worth looking into.
I would like to see more investigative work from the local media (and not “How to avoid getting ripped off by car repairmen”) but on political issues.
I would like to see less “He said, she said” reporting, and more digging to undercover the real facts of the matter, so if one side is not telling the truth, that gets reported. In the same vein, I would like to see more editorials that call out one side or the other when one side deserves to be criticized, and fewer editorials where both sides are blamed equally although only one side has taken action.
I would like to see more analysis from the local and national media. I feel that the stories never connect the dots to other related stories, as if the first story exists in a vacuum, independent from other stories. A good example is the I35W bridge collapse, where I learned from blogs that years of conservative budget cutting (often due to huge tax cuts for the rich) have led to an infrastructure maintenance crisis here in this country. While I don’t claim to read every newspaper, I certainly would have liked to see this background provided to the readers in the newspaper stories I did read. That’s just one example, I’m sure there are many local examples (I believe STLO7 has done some great work here on RT connecting the dots between stories)
I work in the media, and last summer/fall I was working at WXXI in TV News. Yes, there needs to be more investigative work done in the mainstream media, but there are many many issues that are involved with doing that kind of work. Most of the time scandals or lies get uncovered when someone says something that they shouldn’t or when a rumor breaks through a medium like a blog.
All a reporter can do is ask people questions and dig through publicly available data. As a reporter, you can’t report on a rumor until someone goes on record about it or until there is something to back it up from a data stand point. If people don’t want to answer your questions then you end up with no story. It’s happened to me before.
I agree with everyone that the D&C should do more from an internet standpoint and from an opinion standpoint. This is where the connecting the dots needs to happen to comment on trends in news and in coverage. But as far as straight reporting goes, they probably do what they can without permanently alienating sources (which is the worst thing they can do from a professional standpoint). The Monroe county government was about the most difficult to get in touch with that I’ve ever experienced, more so in fact than federal officials I work with now for RenewableEnergyWorld.com. This blog helped us out at WXXI because we were able to follow up on rumors that were heard by you guys that we as reporters would not have had access to.
Thanks for checking in with your comments, which are very illuminating.
I have a ton of respect for reporters and was certainly not trying to criticize the D&C’s reporters. I do think, though, that the way Gannett shuffles reporters in and out from one paper to the next means that the political reporters at the D&C don’t have time to grow into their roles. F29th touched on this a little while ago.
You’re absolutely right and a lot of the problem there is that Gannet hasn’t figured out a good way to make money online and since subscriptions for print are way down, they don’t have the money to pay veteran reporters who might be capable of doing more investigative work. Once traditional publishers figure out a good online business model, and web savvy reporters grow in the field, I think that the trend of reporter shuffling will change.
G says:
It is not the asking questions and looking through publicly available data that is the problem. I realize reporters do that. But there is a lot more that a reporter can do. Reporters can stop the “He said, she said” type of reporting, without providing background facts. This is a type of reporting seen all too much lately. Reporters can write: “Candidate A claims the sky is green, but in fact this is not true.†Rarely do we see this. Furthermore, we have seen examples in the press where the “facts†written by a reporter are refuted within five minutes using Google. We have also seen hundreds (thousands?) of examples where a politician needs to get a message out, and the reporter writes it down, almost verbatim (Judy Miller, anyone?) without resorting to fact checking or providing context and without corroborating the story independently.
As a citizen of this country, I would rather that you alienate a source than tell us things whose truth is in question. The media, in large part, has been rendered useless by Rethuglicans who want only their side of the story told. You have been spun by devious politicians, who use you for their own ends. I want to be well informed, and I want to understand the big picture, and I’m not getting that (except in small doses) from the mainstream media.
If I wrote in a feature that I am currently working on, “John Smith says that his agency is doing all it can fund renewable energy, but that is not the case.” I damn sure better have some kind of facts to back that up. If I don’t, my reputation goes down and so does my publication’s.
Reporters should fact check more often than they do, that is true, and some papers also have a department that does that, people who read stories and check the facts day in and day out. Sometimes though the facts aren’t there and all you have to rely on is the word of your sources (this is where balanced reporting and looking for all sides of an issues comes in).
The media is at the mercy of it’s sources. The better the sources the better the reporting. The more open the government, the better the sources. This whole conversation started as a debate about bloggers role in the media and in my opinion, their role to get the rumors and the gossip and put them out there so they can be followed up on and questioned.
G sez:
I agree. I don’t want you to state something without the facts to back it up, and I also don’t want to read the opposite: “John Smith says that his agency is doing all it can to fund renewable energy” if the reporter makes no effort to fact-check this statement. I’d rather read nothing until you have put in the time to find out what is truth. I want facts, I do not want “Politician A says…”. And that is the value of a lot of blogs, they do the fact-checking that I think should be done by the media.
In the same breath, part of the problem with technology is that people are prone to sitting behind a computer, googling for information, and failing to actually get out into the situations that they read and comment about online.
From a community perspective - the media and citizens no longer attend board meetings or step out to stand up against issues in their community they are unhappy with.
And when media shows both online and on television that standing up for your rights (like the case of Gantt, Scott and Florence) you go to jail.
Have you heard anything further? Nope. Somewhere, someone thinks they are still in jail. And that mindset keeps them from coming out.
Solution? Well Evan Dawson could have stood up for his rights and could have gone to jail with the camera crew. Perhaps that’s what its going to take to stop the nonsense.
<blockquote cite=I make my living off the Evening News
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry
Kick ‘em when they’re up
Kick ‘em when they’re down
Kick ‘em when they’re up
Kick ‘em when they’re down
We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
comes on at five
She can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam
in her eye
It’s interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry
Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a
running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry
You don’t really need to find out what’s going on
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough love
Eat your dirty laundry
Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody’s pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
We can do “The Innuendo”
We can dance and sing
When it’s said and done we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that Crap is King
Give us dirty laundry!
People don’t care - reporters don’t care - society only gets angry when it hits their backyard.
That’s why RT is different. You go to the meetings. You take the pictures. You talk to the victims and the victors. You do your research. You report the facts.
Yeah, crap has changed, but the difference about quality blog sites is simple:
I have another point that I would like to add.
I see blogs doing more follow-up than the traditional media. The traditional media gets soooo wrapped up in the story of the day, that follow-up from last month’s big story almost never happens. Atrios is constantly following up on politicians who said the Iraq War would show great improvement and we’d turn the corner in 6 months. Stlo7 follows up on COMIDA grants. Where is something similar in the mainstream media? I’m sure there are examples, but there are not a lot of examples.
I tend to see this as laziness on the part of opinion columnists and national reporters and overworkedness of local beat reporters.
I blame Lawrence and Tobin, and to a much greater extent, I blame the Villagers, but I don’t blame regular reporters so much.
Editorial direction flows down from the top, what the executive editor/producer and the editorial board say goes, that’s the way it is everywhere I’ve worked whether it be print, online or TV. If there is no clear direction then stories/projects tend to wander in their focus and followups get lost in the shuffle. The flow of new news outweighs the ability to follow up often times as well.
Last I knew, the D&C had one, maybe two full time reporters per section (except sports which is the best staff/section I’ve ever seen). That’s a lot of inches to fill every day for so few people. I know they were in the process of gutting the business section in November.
While I agree that editorial direction is one component, the funding for reporters is another. If you only have 2 reporters per section, there is a natural limit as to how much they can report and cover. If there were twice (or thrice) as many reporters, the time to do followup stories might exist, and the time to do more research and connect the dots might also exist. So I think the owners, who set the funding levels, also deserve some of the blame. (and should it come to pass that much of the readership of traditional media disappears in favor of blogs, I won’t feel sorry for traditional media)
What comes after “thrice�
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