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June 16, 2005
The A-word and the L-word...
You should read Bruce Murphy's feature about his three years as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I like this article because it portrays the complicated experience that is daily newspaper journalism. A newspaper is an industrial product. The articles, headlines, graphics, and photos that you see in any newspaper arrive in printed form through a process involving many individuals applying many skills to the production of the product. While a newspaper is an industrial product, a newspaper is not a widget that can be assembled the same way each time so that it works the same way each time for the consumer. Journalism is an industrial product produced in a very noisy system.
I am fascinated by some of Murphey's observations. But I'm even more fascinated by some of the things he accepts without criticism--what Jay Rosen calls "press think." Here's one good example touching on something I wrote recently:
The yes-no, push-pull environment of the newsroom confused and embittered some reporters and took its toll on morale. It was often easier to produce less, to simply do the stories editors suggested. Yet if your stories got too safe, you could get marginalized and stuck with a low-priority beat like suburban government.
This paragraph is about so much that is wrong with American newspapers and journalism. And I can simplify it with one word: arrogance.
I accept Kovach and Rosenstiel's articulation of journalism's (civic) purpose: Journalism provides the information citizens need to make civic life work and to be self governing. Those people living in those suburbs probably think the running of their civic lives is pretty darned important. And it is. The journalists who can't understand that covering it is equally important suffer from professional arrogance.
The institution of journalism--from the schools of journalism to the news organizations--is set up to teach and perpetuate this arrogance.
Remember this word: LOCAL
I wonder how much of the shrinking circulation of newspapers is the result of a form of professional arrogance that promotes the silly idea that local suburban politics is unimportant (the clear implication of "low-priority beat").
There's a lot more going on in that paragraph. What do you see?
Posted by acline at June 16, 2005 1:29 PM | | Spotlight