The End of the World as We Know It

It is a truism now that news media are in a time of transition. The internet has changed how people get news. Cable TV has created a 24-hour news cycle, which the internet has only accelerated. Access to blogs and podcasts has "democratized" the process. Print -- physical newsprint -- is generally assumed to be dying as a medium, replaced by electronic access to the same content, which would be unrecognizable to the reader of even 50 years ago, with the addition of video, audio, interactive charts, and so on.

But in our focus on the form, the technology of it all, I'm wondering if we haven't missed a bigger, more "meta" aspect of the change, and it's Donald Trump who makes me wonder about it.

We in the journalism business were taught and continue to believe a certain function for our profession. It's something that you've heard a lot about in pushback to the "fake news" accusations of late, but it also has more to it than that ... at least for us.

Right now, you hear a lot about afflicting the comfortable and speaking the truth, but that's not always our function. Actually, if one is honest, it's not our function very often. Most journalistic time is spent on fires and car wrecks, or on heartwarming feature stories about cute kids and adorable pets. And there's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't take much effort to see that those stories bring readers and viewers, and I frankly believe that most people go into public service with the intent to do good.

So what, you're asking, am I suggesting? That journalism is a glorified version of ambulance chasing and cat videos? No, and here's my point: In a broader sense, we have journalists to go places and see things so you won't have to. As humans, we all want to know. We want to know why there's a massive backup on the highway, and whether anyone was hurt in that wreck. We want to know what happened at that fire, or why police were all over at that store up the street. These things may not really affect us in any direct way, but we still want to know.

And that is the social function of journalism. We are delegated to be nosy and curious, to be pushy and ask impolite questions, to stand around and watch, so that crowds gather less and false rumors don't run amok. Is this important? Look at countries with dysfunctional journalism, like the old Soviet Union or Middle Eastern autocracies: the most insane rumors spread, wild conspiracy theories live vibrantly, nothing is trusted, no matter how supported, because no "fact" is considered factual.

But now, we are told, everyone can be a journalist. The internet has eliminated the huge overhead required to reach out to more than a few friends and acquaintances. Anyone in the world, if they so chose, could read these very words if they found the website. I have the reach or any giant media corporation, if not the readership.

There is an essential error, however, to that phrase: "Everyone can be a journalist." And it's an error that cuts both ways in that, now that anyone can act like a journalist, many have begun to believe that they are just as good at this as a traditional journalist, and there we have our problem.

That overhead expense traditional media used to face meant that, before they handed the keys over to somebody, management wanted to make sure they could drive. Putting out fake news, not properly checking the facts, even sloppy writing or inadequate work meant you were forcibly stopped from being a journalist. Without that testing and seasoning, without management that can feel the pain of losing money (or worse yet, with management that can make money with clicks to fake news), there's no control, no authority. When everybody's a journalist, eventually no one is.

While we in the news industry have been focused on technology and ratings (or circulation), the continents beneath us have been shifting. The public no longer see us as their proxies because they don't think they need proxies anymore. We were worrying about where to find our audience and how the public was reading and watching us. Buzzwords like "three screen viewing" and "hyper local" were presented by consultants as the way to stop the hemorrhage of eyeballs. But we were missing the point. It wasn't their eyeballs we were losing, but their belief in us.

Now journalism is in search of itself, literally. Where people go for the news, and even what they consider the news, has left the place where we always found it and taken on a new identity. It is a period of far more profound transformation than whether the New York Times will stop its print edition or TV will become only on-demand streaming. It is a question of the very meaning of the term "Journalism."

Sooner or Later, You'll Need A Source

So there's been a bit of a micro-sensation as Apple first announced a music streaming service and then, more to the point here, started putting together a news service, called "News." CNN Money worries - or rather, passes on the worries of others, because as a "legit" news operation, it can't have opinions of its own - that Apple "job listings provoked some of the anxiety that is palpable in the news industry at a moment of intense tech-fueled disruption. Journalists on Twitter cracked dark jokes about being put out of work by Apple when the job listings circulated widely on Monday."

But here's the thing about all of this - and a thing that has frustrated me as technology has disrupted journalism - sooner or later, the stories have to come from somewhere. In other words: Apple's News, and Yahoo, and even the now ancient Drudge Report, though they do some original reporting, all still are pretty much news aggregators. This is a cheap way to move information around without having to pay for the content creation; you just take other people's work and point at it.

And that's where I get frustrated: the internet isn't the only technology that's revolutionized how we get news. Cameras are cheaper, smaller and more efficient, video editing is a totally different, easier, and cheaper process than when I started some 30 years ago, still photographs are virtually cost free thanks to digital (which eliminated the costs of film and processing), sending stories is now a breeze via worldwide internet connections accessed by commonly available, free wifi connections. So now, rather than having to build an expensive bureau somewhere, staffed by a number of workers in specialized fields using expensive equipment to create content that then has to be sent to a central distribution point via expensive, unique transmission lines, a news organization can send out a kid with a camera and a laptop ... virtually anywhere.

But news organizations are cutting down on bureaus, counting on free consumer-provided content (don't get me started again on the "everyone's a photographer with the iPhone" thing) or locally produced (usually by state-owned and -run operations) material revoiced by some network reporter at a hub half a continent away (or not changed at all, when linked via an aggregator). In my earlier blog on iPhones, etc., I quoted Boston photographer John Tlumacki: "I’m so sick of citizen journalism, which kind of dilutes the real professionals’ work. I am promoting real journalism, because I think that what we do is kind of unappreciated and slips into the background."

So what happens when every outlet becomes an aggregator? It's much, much cheaper - you need only employ a limited number of "editors" to move material around, and they don't really need to be journalists, just web mavens. Maybe you collate a few pictures or factoids and put them under a clickbait headline ("7 Ways You May Be Killed By Your Puppy!"), but nor real reporting or news gathering.

But then, where do the stories come from? Sooner or later, you have to have a source.

Meanwhile, On the Internet ...

"While I’m all in favor of this new world of media startups, where truly well-intentioned people are trying to figure out how the heck to make money from journalism on the Internet, I just need to step up right now and call bullshit on pretty much all the algorithms. Cause you guys just aren’t understanding the importance of a good writer."

So says Erin Biba, "a talented, experienced, smart  science writer."  As she explains, in her short, easy to read, and worthwhile post, "I love the idea of a new world of media that exists solely on the Internet. And I really, really want to be part of it. But I also want to pay my rent and feed my cat. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask. In fact, I’m gonna go ahead and say I’m pretty irritated that I have to ask at all. Actually, screw that, I’m INSULTED by how much you’re trying to pay me. Or not pay me."

Of course, I'm doing this for free, so ...

Speaking of free, Maria Tornberg did a blog post a while back on that very subject.  "In the last week I have found myself in several very uncomfortable situations where I was asked to work for free. First by a person I know, the second time by someone I know a little less and the third time by a stranger," She starts.  "Yes, you heard right. I was approached by people who asked me to do a job, at a day and time suitable to them, without getting paid."

Her point is that we are undermining our own value.  "If you hire me, pay me, with money ... I have bills to pay. I have a company. I‘m an entrepreneur who happens to be an artist."

Finally, Mathew Ingram, referring to another piece, explained a while back that Journalism isn't evolving.  It's being totally replaced by things we don't think of as "journalism."

"On a local level," he says, by way of example, "a whole series of websites and services from LocalWiki or Everyblock to Pinwheel are providing people with information about their neighborhoods ... And many people are duplicating what they used to get from their newspaper by using Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other platforms."

So I'm not sure where that money Tornberg hopes we'll get is coming from, at least in my case.

There Are Not Ten Million Photojournalists with iPhones

Contrary to the recent smartphone ad, anyone with a camera of some sort is not a "photojournalist," for the same reason that someone with a stethoscope is not a doctor.  They are people with cameras who might make an image of something happening, and like fish roe, one in ten-thousand may survive to become a decent picture.

With the recent events around the Boston Marathon bombing, there has been a useful illustration and, secondarily, reaction to emphasize this point.  Kenneth Jarecke made the point extremely well in his blog, and even one of the photographers there, the man who made what may become the iconographic images of the initial event, said it very clearly and well in an interview with Poynter.

"What newspapers and professional journalists need to realize, and the world has to realize," John Tlumacki said at the very end of the piece, "is that we are news photographers, not somebody out there with an iPhone and a camera, jumping over people to put images on YouTube. Our job is act as professionals and to show the world images that they can’t see because they aren’t there.

"I’m so sick of citizen journalism, which kind of dilutes the real professionals’ work. I am promoting real journalism, because I think that what we do is kind of unappreciated and slips into the background."

I recently did a book review for NPPA's News Photographer magazine that, I fear, morphed into a rant about one-man-bands in television news and all the other ills (many corporate driven in a blind, uneducated effort to save a few pennies) that have begun to grind my gears recently.  In it, I cited an event I experienced, where a TV station executive blithely announced to his news staff, including a number of photographers, that "all the best news pictures through history were shot by amateurs." He smiled, as if to soften the blow, and began to run on for a while about the Zapruder Film.

We can laugh about it, we can hope it goes away when the truth becomes obvious, we can scream and weep about it, but I can't help but sense that this is all just a part of the coarsening and decay of the quality of journalism and news.

What's Wrong with This Image: Addendum

While he's making a separate political point, Daily Beast writer Michael Moynihan finds another fine example of what I was talking about in my last post.  Would any aspiring writer, or even political essayist, have gotten a millimeter of space in The Nation if he submitted this "stew of words" without the name Sean Penn attached:

“Ostreicher, whose innocence was maligned by an arrest where only vague illusions to money laundering have been shown to be fabricated by corrupt officials within the Bolivian judiciary, whose motivation has proven to be extortion.”

Seriously.  He uses the wrong word (illusions instead of allusions), but that's the least of its incoherence.  The whole sentence has a subject, but no verb or object.  The name, Ostereicher, just hangs out there, isolated and abandoned, waiting to make a point of some sort ... I think.

Moynihan finds another writer who makes my point, however:

"It’s difficult to improve upon the brutal verdict of New Yorker writer George Packer, who wondered why 'someone like Penn think[s] he can do this job [journalism], which isn’t his job?'"

What's Wrong with This Image?

So I get a Twitter recommendation, "Suggestions similar to Black Star," and one of the is the Wall Street Journal photo Twitter feed.  Are you old enough to get the problem there?  Traditionally, the Wall Street Journal didn't have photos.  At all.  Zero.  Even to the point that I used to joke that I wanted to have business cards printed advertising myself as a staff photographer for them, and then see how long it took me to get busted.

But of course it's all just part of the changing media world.  For a long time, for example, I've carried around a note to myself to blog about Chelsea Clinton and Ashton Kutcher.  Not that they're an item or anything (now there's an image, isn't it?)  No, it's because they symbolize a lot of what I think is going wrong in the media world.

Chelsea (who I refer to by first name -- if I must refer to her at all -- to distinguish her from her distinguished parents) was recently looking for, I guess, a purpose in life.  Simply getting a job was insufficient.  So she had a meeting with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News.  According to The New York Times, "Mr. Capus said he had met with Ms. Clinton and had a long conversation that began with a simple question. 'I asked her: "What are you interested in doing?"'

How many things are wrong with those two sentences?  Why is the president of a network news division meeting with her?  Why isn't she meeting with, at best, the executive producer of a show, someone who might actually be expected to be doing hiring?  And I guess the question of qualifications or some sort of vetting is unnecessary.  Just look at how the meeting began.  Reading that quote over again always makes me quiver with fury.

And now Ashton Kutcher thinks, or at least acts like he thinks he's a photographer.  Perhaps he's a better actor than I give him credit for (though still waiting for evidence of that from his work).  No, he's on my naughty list for doing Nikon ads.  Now perhaps I should blame the nabobs of Nikon for this concept, but many of the ads are based on how he, with his smug good looks, is just as good as the pros because he uses fancy Nikon cameras.

In one ad,  he saunters into a fashion show, where he gets marvelous pictures of the runway models while amusingly blocking the pros.  In another, he visits a wedding, where he makes dozens of charming photos while the actual wedding photographer is nowhere to be seen.  In all, of course, he smirks and sashays about with that coolest frat boy overconfidence.

In the end, this is my point: there are professionals who do this stuff, people who have worked a long time to become journalists and photographers.  I fail to see how being Chelsea Clinton (even conceding that she may be very smart) gives her any ability to do anything in any form of media.  And it should be no surprise that she quickly foundered in the dummied up job Capus found for her.
 
And while I can see the concept behind the Nikon campaign (Buy our cameras and make better pictures, duh), the whole scene creates a coarsening of life.  Go ahead, block a real fashion photographer at a Paris show and see what happens to you.  I'm betting the next day's headlines would describe how American actor was found beaten in alleyway.

We work hard at what we do, perhaps harder than many other professions.  In news and news photography, the rule is: What have you done for me lately?  Either keep producing top notch work, or you'll slowly drift into second-rate jobs.  And if you want that first-rate job, well you have to show you can produce at that level ... before you get to that level.

So who's job did Chelsea Clinton take?  What hard working young reporter spent years aiming at the network, only to be told: "Sorry, the president of the news division called."

And if Ashton Kutcher thinks he's going to step in front of me and block my picture, then make it all okay with a winsome smile, he better protect his knees ...

Layers Upon Layers ...

I sometimes bore my friends (and generally bore my children) by seemingly being unable to answer a simple question with a simple answer. "Well, that depends ...," is as likely to be the way I start as any. Today, there was an article in The New York Times that makes me think of that.

Headlined "Scenes Cut From Film Find New Role In Court," it seems rather straightforward at first. Lawyers for Chevron, suing over a documentary about the company's actions in Ecuador, demanded outtakes from the film. Naturally, the filmmakers said no. And frankly I think they're right.

A documentary is -- or at least should be, in my opinion -- an act of journalism. It is reporting on something factually, telling the viewer information that is truthful and accurate. That information may be 100 years old, or about some ongoing issue, but an effort should be made to tell some fact-based truth.

However, to be clearer, I'm not so sure a documentary has an obligation to be objective. A filmmaker does not, I think, have to ensure he gets every side or tell every part of a story. It's still a documentary to, for example, tell the story of an activist for or against something and be sympathetic to his point of view, and not feel any need to include the opinions of the people he's an activist against.

It's fair, I think, to have an openly declared point of view -- to say, for example, that I set out to make this film because this issue bothered me. Ideally, say with this past year's Oscar winner, "The Cove," if you have a point of view, you also have an array of facts on your side.

On the other hand, I'm reluctant to call Michael Moore (despite his Oscar in the category) a documentary filmmaker. He does make films on issues of import, and he is very clever, but he is also fast and loose with the facts. He is not, I think, engaging in journalism, or even activist or "concerned" journalism. His is a work of propaganda. Fair enough -- especially if you agree with him -- but not documentary filmmaking.

So, having dispensed with that aside (see what I mean about boring the kids?), a true documentary should be treated in most ways like reporting. That means sourcing and sources are a critical -- and often closely held -- part of the process, especially in any sort of investigative work ... like, say, exposing what the filmmakers believed was wrongdoing by Chevron in Ecuador.

But here the question gets murkier. The Times reports that the judge let Chevron have the outtakes. (Again, a mistake in my opinion, undermining the capability of future filmmakers to do long-form exposés and get access; who's going to let you to unguarded moments on a "trust me" basis when that trust can be overruled by a court?) And in the outtakes we find ... the lawyers fighting against Chevron in Ecuador engaging in all sorts of questionable practices themselves.

So how did Chevron know to ask? Apparently, they saw a version of the film shown at Sundance that included a scene revealing a technically nonpartisan expert attending a planning meeting with the anti-Chevron lawyers. In the final release of the film, that shot was gone. So what does this tell us? Well, that the lawyers were skewing the "neutral" testimony to their side, and that (most importantly) the filmmakers knew this was a bad thing.

So now the Chevron guys get to work their way through the outtakes -- 500 hours of footage -- and they're finding all sorts of questionable stuff. Says The New York Times: "The clips ... 'have sent shock waves through the nation’s legal communities,' one federal judge said in an opinion. Another court last month called them 'extraordinary evidence' that suggests that lawyers 'presented false evidence and engaged in other misconduct.'" The filmmakers' lawyers say this is all a smokescreen, and we should get back to the point of all the nasty stuff Chevron did.

And now I'm wondering:

1. Why did these guys film all this in the first place? I know it's great to have access, and planning meetings with lawyers are just the sorts of things a documentary wants -- showing something important but otherwise hidden from view. But just who's malfeasance were they trying to document? And if you're on the side of the people you're filming, is it a good idea to actively film them engaging in questionable practices?

And 2. If they did it in all innocence (not realizing until the edit, say, that having the expert in the meeting would look bad), why didn't this become part of the film?

And hence, we return to Point One: Documentary filmmaking (especially about contemporary issues) is an act of journalism. These guys ceased to be any sort of journalist when they consciously concealed these significant facts. (Not being a lawyer, I won't go into the question of what kind of lawyers are involved here.) Truth and reporting are about going where the facts take you, and the facts here took them to a someplace else -- a place they weren't planning to go, but one they found themselves in.

One might argue that the film was about what Chevron did, not the legal case and its conduct, and that's a fair point, except they were busy filming the legal case, weren't they? If they were simply going into the jungle and out to sea, showing what Chevron was doing, well that would be a safe point. But now the film is also about the legal process, isn't it?

To take it somewhere I've worked, let's say I'm doing a film on Robert E. Lee, and let's say I am working on it from the point of view that he was a tragic figure, a fine fellow dragged reluctantly into defending slavery, an institution he abhorred. And finally, let's say I get exclusive access to never-seen-before, very private letters from Lee to his wife, Mary. (All of this is plausible enough -- I had been working on a Lee film, and there are recently released Lee letters, with more to come.)

But now let's say I come across one letter in which he says he finds the services of his slaves delightful, and he wouldn't eliminate such a grand institution for all the lives in either the Federal or Confederate armies. (NOTE: This is not true; it is an example for debate purposes only.) Now, I can tell myself that this is just one letter out of hundreds, and many of those other letters speak to feelings exactly the opposite. Maybe he was just in an odd mood, or I didn't understand the context -- perhaps Mary had sent him a letter lost to the collection, in which she asked what he thought other Southerners believed. Maybe he was drunk (though a noted teetotaler). But, you see, that is all rampant speculation and wishful thinking, elaborate logical constructs to allow me to cling to my initial premise and ignore an inconvenient and uncomfortable fact. I cannot deny that the (fictional, for the sake of debate) letter exists.

So I think there are a couple of ways to go. My first inclination is to simply shift the focus of the story and make the film about making the film. We set out to do Robert E. Lee the gentleman, but found this letter -- what does it mean? My second thought is to make the film planned, but integrate the new information. At no time do I seriously think: Let's just ignore this thing and do what we'd always planned because that theme is a Greater Truth that overwhelms this difficult, little detail.

So what's my point? Well, I guess I have two. One is that a documentary's outtakes are sacrosanct, part of the process, as much as a reporter's notes and a lawyers memos, and should be so protected. And the second is that, whatever "Crude" is, it has wandered into a gray morass in which telling the whole truth seems less important than making its point ... a very dangerous place.

Haven't I seen you before?

Around the station, it's called "Fat Running Cop." What they are talking about is a piece of footage from the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, made by Lynn Eller, a photographer at WDBJ. The station is the nearest CBS affiliate, and we regularly cover Tech and the town of Blacksburg, so when the newsroom heard of problems there, they sent Lynn to get some footage and see what was going on.

As he approached, Lynn remembered later when telling me about his experience, he was passed by State troopers driving at that high speed that only cops headed to an emergency can do. He called the station immediately, recommending they send everyone they had as well as the satellite truck.

On arrival, Lynn found a community in chaos. Cops were everywhere, and as one approached, Lynn thought, "This is it. He's throwing me out." Instead, the cop warned him to be careful. "We don't know where he is yet." Lynn spent the entire day taping the events around the shooting, much of it being the police reacting to the massacre. One of those police was an overweight cop, weapon in hand, rushing down the sidewalk. The "Fat Running Cop."

Poor guy. Lynn says now he almost regrets even shooting the footage. You see, you saw the Fat Running Cop everywhere that day, and in the weeks after. Frankly, I'm surprised that, when the anniversary passed last month, we didn't see him again.

I thought of the Fat Running Cop (geez, I'm sorry for calling you that over and over, but I don't know who you are) recently because of the United-Continental airlines merger. There's a leap, you might think, and you'd be right without seeing it from my perspective.

I edit the B-Roll -- that's the footage that they show while the anchor reads the story -- for the morning news show on Mondays. This past Monday, United and Continental announced they were going to merge. That, like most economics stories, doesn't really lend itself to visuals, so what I edited was pictures of planes and terminals. United-marked jets took off and Continental-marked jets landed, passengers waited at a United counter and luggage handlers sent bags up into a Continental airplane, and the anchor explained that it was a billion-dollar deal while we watched that. The one only marginally has anything to do with the other, but you use what you can get. This ain't radio.

Here's the sad part: That evening, after eight hours of continuously editing news footage, I watch the evening news. I am that much of a news junkie. And what appears on Fox (unrelated to WDBJ, as far as I know, in any way)? The exact same footage of United jets taking off and Continental jets landing and passenger sullenly moving through terminals.

Now this is understandable. The footage was probably some stock that had been given out by the airlines in good times, and laid around in various archives for just such an eventuality. But it was not just some part of a larger collection, it was precisely the same stuff.

And this brings me to my point: A CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Virginia, and an international cable news network are using, of all the thousands -- millions! -- of hours of footage of stuff related to United and Continental and airports, the same few seconds, probably because some guy at a network once said, "This'll probably come up; I'll save about a minute of it."

And then I thought of the hyper twenty-something that had been interviewed earlier about the attempted Times Square bombing, telling in breathless tones how everyone had rushed from the area. He was on all the networks too, probably because he was the effusive and cooperative one still on the scene when the cameras arrived. And this is a problem.

We spend a lot of time talking about journalism in crisis: Newspapers closing, one-man-band coverage (instead of a cameraman-reporter team), bureaus closing ... Bureaus closing. That's what this is a symptom of. Fewer and fewer journalists (and I'm enough of an elitist to differentiate -- there is such a thing as a real, professional journalist) covering more and more, often by not bothering to go to the place and ask real questions. Rather, too many stories are covered by getting footage or information sent in to some roughly nearby bureau (like London is nearby Afghanistan) and adding a voice track to the TV story, or just passing on whatever has been said, like a giant game of Telegraph with all the accompanying miscommunications.

One of the few times this didn't happen was after the Haiti earthquake, which was a story big enough to focus everyone's attention yet close enough to make covering it directly affordable. And yet, complaints were common that there were too many journalists (and especially photographers) there. Too Many? You'd rather get the whole tale of that monumental catastrophe from the Haitian version of the panicky twenty-something in Times Square? What's the Kreyol for: "And then we all ran, 'cause we didn't know what was going on?"

Noooo. This is a bad thing. It's something we need to think about. Because I'd like to be able to edit new and interesting pictures on Monday morning, or better yet, get sent to make those pictures.

Welcome to my world of concerns...