Planting Liberally

Jay Rosen posted a thought-provoking piece at Press Think this week, National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News. The post takes the case of an excellent piece of explanatory journalism - Ira Glass's The Giant Pool of Money, which is a one-hour tutorial on the mortgage crisis - and bemoans the shortage of good explanatory journalism, especially given the possibility that if more people understood a story, they would be prone to seek out more news about that story. Rosen even suggests that the primary audience for this kind of explanatory journalism would be other journalists, whose coverage would improve from better background understanding of a complex story.

Rosen has an excellent point, and he voices a frustration I've often felt with news stories, especially complex ones like subprime mortgages: there's often very few places to turn for good background information. Rosen goes into good detail on why traditional media frequently fail to explain a complex story properly. Wikipedia and the web in general can be helpful, but they can also be very hit-or-miss. Wikipedia, in particular, is just not well-geared to explanatory journalism; the best articles in Wikipedia are usually the ones which have had a lot of time to stew, or have been edited and revised again and again by a lot of eyeballs. Complex news stories, especially relatively recent ones like the war in Georgia, are unlikely to meet either criteria.

I'd love to see explanatory journalism take hold and become a more prominent feature of the news landscape; I think it would help turn the tide in journalism toward improved coverage of important stories. Fortunately, as Rosen points out, (perhaps unintentionally) explanatory journalism also has a built-in business model, both because it has several potential audiences and because it tends to boost news consumption. A high-quality, up-to-date, reliable repository of pieces dedicated to explaining the major stories of the day could be a very valuable asset, if properly organized and monetized.

In other words, I think there is an opportunity for the creation of a center of explanatory journalism, whose job is to regularly churn out explanatory pieces about stories of the day. Such a center could sustain itself by repurposing content for different audiences (people who want to listen to a piece on their iPods; local journalists who want to understand how their region is affected, or who might even want a "cheat sheet" of acronyms and important players in a story); selling reprinting rights to newspapers and magazines; and earning money by directing traffic to news organizations with more day-to-day coverage, whether through ads or otherwise.

Incidentally, if an explanatory journalism center was wise about crowdsourcing and sharing its profits with contributors, the center could even help bloggers sustain their own blogs. After all, bloggers are extremely well-suited to explanatory journalism - they are voracious news consumers, they tend to pick a very targeted "beat" and pursue it doggedly, they don't have the same kind of deadline and word limit restrictions that traditional journalists face, and they must, to some degree or another, explain the background of a story to their audience in order to provide a reasonably coherent opinion.

Given the neverending financial difficulties at most news organizations, I think that relying on traditional journalists to produce explanatory journalism on a regular basis is a nearly lost cause. Unfortunately, "The Giant Pool of Money" is almost certainly a special case, not the beginning of a revolution in the way news is done. If explanatory journalism is to take hold, I think it will need a new business model, located outside the world of traditional journalism, but hopefully interacting with that world and helping to improve it.

PS - I know that I haven't been the best about blogging regularly. In fact, I think it's been almost a full Friedman Unit since my last post! I do apologize that, but I'm glad to announce that we're finally turning that corner. More seriously, I'll try and get back into the game and not disappear entirely.

Whenever I write about progressive TV, I inevitably get a healthy dose of criticism in the comments from folks who think that progressive TV should be dispassionate, non-partisan, objective, and truth-focused - essentially, a recreation of PBS. (In fact, the last post featured a commenter who asked why more progressives don't just support PBS.) I also get a reasonable amount of pushback every time I suggest some variant on the notion that progressives should develop a mirror image of Fox News - a hyper-partisan, foaming-at-the-mouth progressive channel.

For the record, I don't think that creating a mirror image of Fox News is a good idea, for several reasons. One, I don't think progressives react well to that style of news, and a progressive channel that can't do well within the progressive base is a non-starter. Two, I think Fox News isn't so much a conservative channel as a Republican Party establishment channel. As Eric Boehlert pointed out earlier this week, Fox's cozy relationship with the Republican Party is now putting its audience share at risk, and I'm not sure I want that kind of future for a progressive TV channel. Finally, I think the core tenet of progressivism - "we're all in this together" - simply doesn't have room for Fox's aggressive, divisive, insipid style.

On the other hand, I firmly disagree with the notion that progressives need to build their own PBS. Many progressives seem to think that it's possible to build a TV channel which trades in fully objective journalism, and that doing so would benefit the progressive movement as much as Fox has benefited the conservative movement. I think that it's both impossible and non-beneficial for the progressive movement besides. Follow me across the flip for details.

 

I think objective journalism is simply impossible, at every level of the journalistic enterprise. At the highest level, which stories does a journalistic enterprise pursue? On a given day, do we track the latest news about Britney Spears, or about the future of the wind power industry? For a more substantive question, do we follow the debate on Iraq among Democratic presidential hopefuls, or the debate on taxes among Republican presidential candidates? It's possible to build a truthful channel which focuses on any of those story lines, but the choice of story lines is certainly not objective, and does tend to promote certain value systems over others.

At a more granular level, there are questions regarding how a story is put together and packaged which make objectivity impossible. What headline should we use to describe the Democratic presidential debate, or the State of the Union address? Who should we call for comments on the bids in the FCC's 700 block auction? With limited resources and space, it's impossible to answer any of these questions in a trully objective way. Every choice along these lines introduces some bias into a story.

There is, I think, some nostalgia in progressive circles for the "golden age" of journalism, covering approximately the New Deal through the beginning of the Reagan years. The story line goes that journalism during that time was honest, unbiased, and objective, and that government during that time was regularly hounded by the press and forced to do the right thing. The pinnacle of this story line includes the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the unveiling of the Watergate conspiracy. Believers of this narrative argue that we need to somehow return to that golden age, and all will be right with our media.

I think this narrative is deeply flawed. This reading of history ignores the overwhelmingly white, male, and upper-middle-class nature of the power structure of those years, and the ways in which the news media often enforced that power structure. While it's true that journalistic enterprises may have lavished more money on reporters and supported more in-depth coverage of important stories, the impartiality which news media rigorously claimed was actually deeply deceptive, and may have served to undermine emerging progressive movements of those times. This is not unlike Pastor Dan's point on civil religion, namely, that it's really the establishment of the values of a certain segment of society (mainline Protestant denominations) as normative. (Full disclosure: my wife is a once-a-week front pager at Street Prophets.)

Moreover, I think that even if it were possibe to develop a modern objective news channel, it wouldn't be much help to progressives. Sure, such a channel could investigate the reality behind the talking points of each party, and could help viewers judge which politicians are lying and which aren't. Sure, such a channel could put today's arguments in proper context, reminding viewers that we've heard the "six more months" argument countless times. But what then?

This sort of journalism is obsessed with hunting down facts and reporting them, but not with examining social narratives and questioning or event overturning them. Journalism of this sort is more-or-less incapable of questioning the political environment. Instead, it accepts that environment, asks questions about the policy details, perhaps examines proposals for reform along the way, and doesn't do much more. The result of this model of journalism is is technocratic liberalism, the governing regime of the late 20th century. Technocratic liberalism is a regime primarily concerned with finding the best technical solutions to a variety of social problems, and tends to be remarkably wonky. It's a a fine way to go, I suppose, in that it produces a government which does a reasonably good job at solving problems. It's certainly a lot better than our current Shock Doctrine regime. The trouble with technocratic liberalism is that it's technocratic - it tends to elevate bureaucrats and technical experts while disempowering ordinary folks, and doesn't address problems underlying the political environment as a whole.

If our only choices in political and journalistic models were, on the one hand, fear-and-gossip journalism coupled with Shock Doctrine politics, and objective journalism coupled with technocratic liberalism on the other hand, then I'd choose the second, in a heartbeat. But it's not clear to me that, the second option is even possible. That's not just a philosophical point about the nature of journalism, but an economic point about the business of journalism. Now that Fox has unleashed dishonest, partisan, sensationalist journalism on our media landscape, it's not clear that the news media can return to the purported golden age of journalism without losing significant audience share to Fox.

Instead, I think that the solution is to take the model that we've developed and nurtured in the progressive blogosphere, and make it available in a more accessible format on TV. Whereas the conservative model of journalism is "fair and balance (and dishonest)", the progressive model of journalism should be "biased, active, and proud of it." Progressive TV should have a progressive bias, and should be proud of that bias. Our journalistic enterprises should make their viewpoint obvious, and, from time to time, should remind viewers why it's a valid and worthwhile point of view to hold. More than that, our journalistic enterprises should be action- and engagement-oriented, as the blogosphere is. There may be good reasons for progressive TV to avoid explicitly endorsing candidates, as bloggers do, but there is no reason that progressive TV can't explicitly encourage viewers to vote, contact their elected officials, start their own blogs, and run for office. Indeed, progressive TV makes a whole new kind of engagement possible, thanks to interactive TV formats like Current.

If "objective" journalism creates technocratic liberalism, and fear-and-gossip journalism creates Shock Doctrine politics, then biased-and-active journalism will create, I hope, a highly engaged, populist, and tolerant politics. After all, such a journalism is emphatic in its embrace of engagement, and encourages people to create and explore a diverse, Long Tail media landscape. It tends to disempower powerful media enterprises; it tends to make debate on a very wide range of subjects possible, via the massively parallel architecture of the web; and it can support discussions which fundamentally alter the terms of debate. This kind of journalism doesn't guarantee progressive victories in elections and policy per se, but it heavily rigs the rules of the game in our favor.

Naturally, such journalism still requires fact-finding, and all the resources necessary to do good investigation. I am not suggesting that we abandon our zeal for rigorously collecting and analyzing hard data. Instead, I'm suggesting that we do so with an explicit and transparent point of view, and that we attempt to reorient the structure of journalism and politics along those lines.

My schedule is tight this morning so I'll make this quick. In looking at Chris Bowers's SC results thread on Open Left, I noticed the following tidbit:

 

Update 12: I'm looking at Google News headlines on the primary to try and see what sort of narrative comes out of South Carolina. There appear to be three types of headlines right now. First, the most common is the bland, "Obama wins South Carolina," that won't help him much. Second, there is the "Obama wins racially charged primary," that probably won't help him at all (and may hurt him). Third, there is the "Obama wins huge" headline, which he really needs and will help him. Since he needs a bounce, he also needs a lot of "Obama wins big" type headlines.

 

Now, here's the question: is there anyway to automate this type of analysis? It seems to me that most major events will follow a similar path - headlines for the relevant story will follow one of a small number of basic paths. Is it possible to write a program which will automaticlly track those headlines and reveal how the newspapers "voted" on the story, based on the headlines? That would be one sweet media analysis tool.

I haven't done theoretical CS in a long time, but it seems to me the answer would probably have half a foot in clustering (assuming you could isolate all the stories about a single event, you could use some kind of thesaurus metric combined with clustering to identify the major headline groups, as Chris did manually); and half a foot in crowdsourcing (you'd probably need humans to help you decide which headline groups are most advantageous for the candidate). You could overlay all that on a database of newspaper circulation and a neat little automated graphing program to get some really great charts.

Full disclosure: My company did a small technical/design project for Chris and OpenLeft last year.

Yesterday, Jeff Jarvis announced that he's been awarded a two-year, $100,000 grant to fund entrepreneurial journalism. Jarvis is a journalism professor at CUNY, and has many years of experience in media and media criticism, having worked at Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, the Chicago Tribune, and a whole host of other venues. This semester, Jarvis is teaching a course on entrepreneurial journalism; his students design entrepreneurial projects meant to shake up the world of journalism. The $100,000 grant will go to seed some of the top ideas from the class. Jarvis should be commended for his project on entrepreneurial journalism, and I think this grant soundly affirms the importance of the project. Entrepreneurial journalism attempts to find new ways to make journalism sustainable and relevant in our cultural and economic climate. This idea is incredibly important to the progressive movement. After all, the present crisis in media is really the combination of two troubling trends: one, the increasing militancy of conservatives in bullying and taking over purportedly objective media; and two, the decreasing number of resources devoted to high-quality journalism, partially the result of the media conglommeration of the 1990's. These are monumental problems for progressives, as they immeasurably contribute to the strength of the conservative movement. Indeed, journalistic entrepreneurialism has a very comfortable home in the progressive movement. Every progressive blog, to some degree or another, is an exercise in journalistic entrepreneurship. Innovative projects like ePluribus Media, Assignment Zero, and Real TV were started by progressives or have goals explicitly focused on spreading progressive ideas through journalism. As interesting as some of these projects are, I suspect that Jarvis's students will come up with still more ground-breaking sustainability mechanisms for full-time journalism, and I'll be very interested to see the results. For tonight, I'd love to hear about other projects I haven't listed here. What have progressives been doing to create new, sustainable, entrepreneurial ways of doing journalism? Some of the most obvious sustainability mechanisms - advertising (blogs, mostly), volunteer power and donations (ePluribus), crowdsourcing (Assignment Zero) and subscription-based journalism (Real TV) - have already been tried, with varying degrees of success. What other ideas can we drum up?