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."

Time

What is it about time? Or rather, I guess, what is it about my time? As in: I don't have any.

That's why this blog has laid (lied? lain?) fallow for so long. It's not like I don't want to do it. Far from it; I really want to exercise my independent writing skills in a way controlled by me, expressing the thoughts and concepts that friends and family have now tired of hearing. (Imagine living with that guy who suddenly comes up, without preface, to talk about how the White House staff should be restructured, or what the future of journalism might be, or how we could get to Mars without being killed by cosmic rays in the process. I realize it's a bit bizarre, and do try to spare them.)

But I digress. I'm trying, but I just never seem to have the time. There are a handful of potential entries in the bin here, helpfully labeled with a little red "Draft." My favorite, the one I really wish I had some real time to craft, consists only of a half-dozen internet links to various long think pieces, all of which I want to string together to express a concept of my own on where journalism and society and, specifically, photojournalism have gone. I call it "I Blame You." Intrigued?  Me too.

But maybe that title is also part of a solution. I need to carve out time for things. However, despite what physics (which says all of time already exists) or philosophy might say, my pie seems of a finite size, and by the time I do work (incredibly time consuming), the stuff in support of work (also time consuming), family and home demands, other various responsibilities ... well, about the only thing I manage to force is about a cumulative hour of sitting still in an effort to not do anything, because that's necessary too.

So: writing. Where do I find, where do I force, where do I carve out the time for writing? And art? And personal projects?

Afterword

Shortly after posting this, I realized I had left one massive question unanswered: So how did I get the time to write this entry?

Put simply: I worked an hour of overtime yesterday, which corporate hates, so the bosses asked me to start my day late today. Unfortunately, I found out about this only after getting up at my usual 5:30 am, which I probably would have had to do anyhow in order to take care of the many tasks required to get my girl off to school, but now there's an extra hour in the interim. Hence: the time to write.

Mary Tyler Moore

Every generation has its markers. One of the markers in mine was Mary Tyler Moore.

In the early 1960s, she was Laura Petrie. In the old Dick Van Dyke Show, she was the clever, pretty, stay-at-home wife and (later) mother. Then she was Mary Richards, journalist, TV producer, working in a newsroom full of clever people doing fun things.

She was my Mom, and I was little Richie. She was my coworker and friend. It's like she was always at the center of my life.

The Gospel of Andy Griffith

The story -- which I have heard often enough from reputable enough people to believe -- is that "The Andy Griffith Show" dominates the ratings at 5:30 on weekday afternoons where I live. As a matter of fact, again as the story goes, a competing station once paid a vast sum to get rights to the Oprah Winfrey show when she was at her nation-dominating height to run against Andy ... and lost. To this day, at 5:30 pm in the Roanoke-Lynchburg television market, you will hear with the certainty of the sun rising and the tide shifting the whistling theme of "The Andy Griffith Show."

It's one of a handful of anecdotes I always tell newly arrived people moving to the area. (Another is that Roanoke once had a Hooters restaurant ... which went out of business. It wasn't put out of business, it just didn't get enough customers.*) I tell these in order to help people understand in a more visceral (and hopefully sympathetic) way the culture of the area. Call it my gentler version of The Hillbilly Elegy.

But what is it about Andy that holds such rock hard appeal? You would think that the viewership would age out. (The station only airs the early black-and-white episodes, with Goober and Gomer Pyle appearing fairly late. I was once told there are only 107** of them, which run in sequence, and then the line up begins again.) How could anyone born in the 1990s or even 1980s find anything in the small town of Mayberry circa 1961: before the Kennedy assassination and the upheaval of the 60s, before rap and the internet. How dull and figuratively as well as literally colorless it must seem to them, wouldn't you think?

The Word of the Lord

In the Catholic Mass (as in most Christian services), there are rituals of gathering and prayers, and then readings from the Bible: the old Testament, some from the later books (eg: letters from Paul), and finally the Gospel.

The priest takes up the usually ornate copy of the New Testament, which has been on display on the altar, and shows it to the congregation, first to one side, then the other, before walking to the ambo and setting it down to read.

I enjoy that, which to me is a very tangible connection to the 2,000-year history of the Church and its rituals, a remnant of the time when most of the congregation couldn't read and that New Testament was probably one of only a handful of actual books in the community. "This," the priest seems to say with his gesture, "is the real deal. See, right here, I have the book with the writings we have all gathered to hear."

The readings are on a regular cycle (three-year for Sundays and two-year for weekday Mass), so if you're a frequent churchgoer, they're aren't going to be a lot of surprises. Then why bother with all the hocus-pocus and recitation? Simple: to re-enforce the common beliefs and values that bring that community together.

As you've probably already realized, I think The Andy Griffith Show serves a similar function here in Southwest Virginia. It's a vision of an idealized middle south (fictional Mayberry is in the mountains just over the NC border; nearby Mount Airy claims to be the town it's based on), a place where an amiable sheriff rarely feels the need to carry his gun, community members settle differences eventually, and even violent crime is more acting out than a real danger. It's a place where everyone has a role which he or she seems to understand and have somehow organically settled into, where assisting one's neighbor is assumed, and even when someone is insufferable (usually Barney Fife), he is politely tolerated and handled in a way to not hurt his feelings.

While Big City types occasionally pass through (sometimes as criminals, sometimes as government officials or state police), the are briefly dealt with and sent on their way or embraced until their more obnoxious characteristics are smothered and they come to appreciate the True Way of Mayberry.

I can, at this moment, imagine a Marxist academic recoiling in his dashiki-covered desk chair as he does a spit take with the organic, free market chai he (although he prefers some other pronoun, no doubt) just put to his lips. What I have described to this person is the very vision of entrapping horror, a gray flannel world dominated by the white patriocracy, an intellectual and in some cases literal prison without bars, more reminiscent of a dystopian nightmare than an ideal town.

"Be seeing you, Andy."

But that is both to see my point and miss it. Unlike you, professor, these people live by the calming rules that smoothed out the rough edges of life. There was crime and dissension and conflict, but it was the crisis of a family, not the signs of a sick society. You knew where the problem was because you all knew the rules of interaction and behavior, and those rules outlined a path to resolution.

In today's world, the world where our professor would enrage himself over the bigoted, misogynistic, stultifying white male privilege of Mayberry, those foundations shift and sink. It's okay, the Andy viewers ask, to dismiss the faith of evangelicals, but not Muslims? The Other must be welcomed, but members of the tribe shunned? And I have to be careful which pronoun I use?!

Better to flee, even if only for thirty minutes, back to a world where stability was sure and seemed infinite and the rules were the ones I was taught by my grandma.

...

* However, a new consortium is working on bringing several new Hooters to the area. Perhaps they need to spend some time, while they're up to that, watching Andy.

** Wikipedia says there are 159 black and white episodes (Seasons 1 through 5)

A Moment of Clarity: Two Thougths on the Media World

While watching TV today, I grew impatient with an extended ad break. With some 250 satellite channels to choose from, I had already mapped out a couple of alternative shows to view, and switched to the next ... also in an ad break. But I stayed there. Why?

One might argue it's a constant search for novelty (the old show was okay, but now I wanted something different), but I also think it was actually the quality of the ad. The old show had a classic, cable-TV, 1-800-number product pitch on it, while the new show had a creative, artful, high-end candy commercial. Simply put: I found the new ad more entertaining.

Is this a trend? Is this something of importance? As technology allows us to time-shift and skip commercials, is the answer to make more commercials more like actual entertainment? We seem to have discovered this with Super Bowl ads, which now are featured in shows of their own as part of the game run up. Is the old truism that an annoying ad which caused you to still remember the product was an effective ad now obsolete?

Frankly, I can find this only a move to the good. It reduces the amount of garbage in the world, and the increase in the amount of "art" of a form, even harnessed in the cause of sales, can only make the world a better place.

And maybe it will provide work for the truly talented, hardworking professionals who make film and television ... which leads to my second thought.

As news media cut back, trying to do more with less, one of the areas frequently cut is in photography. Much of this is due to a misunderstanding of the skill and professionalism good photography and photojournalism require, as well as a failure to appreciate the necessity for good (if not great) photography rather than just adequate pictures.

Now, I continue to search for a clear, relatively simple of explanation of where the money has gone (old media companies were able to make tons of money producing newspapers and television broadcasts using more people and much more expensive equipment; what's the difference now?), but in the meantime it strikes me that we could be on the cusp of an interesting professional moment.

To back up a bit, corporate media thinks they have found a solution by reallocating news collection resources. They assign several tasks to a single journalist (classically, the Multi-Media Journalist -- MMJ -- or one-man-band of local TV, where the reporter also shoots and edits the story), they accept more handouts both from organizations and from non-profit and other non-traditional journalism organizations, they encourage "citizen journalists" to send in pictures and information, and so on. All of it is driven by the fact that these things cost less than paying professionals to collect news.

What to do, if you -- like me -- treasure the image of a journalist (that being a person who is curious and interested in learning an accurate account of what we call news, who then can take that an present it to the rest of us as an enlightening, understandable and maybe even entertaining piece, no matter what the media ... to be over simplistic)? How do we save the profession of people dedicated to its idea and ideals?

Well, this is not really a new question, though it might be a newish variant. And I think an answer might be found in the past.

The legendary photo agency Magnum was founded in 1947 by some of the great photojournalists of the day, men who had tired of a media environment they saw as tyrannical as we might see today's: a place where corporate management calls the tune by way of available jobs and money, and no room for creativity or deeper coverage was allowed. They decided to fund assignments themselves, then have agents sell the stories for the best possible price. Magnum continues today as a key player in the photography world.

So, if the new media corporate world wants to eliminate staff and the expense of continuous coverage, go ahead. Let's answer them by forming our own world of little Magnums: co-ops of photographers and writers with similar visions and interests, covering stories and making them available to the highest bidder. This will mean some business and bargaining acumen on our part, though we wouldn't be the first. Besides the older example of Magnum and other photo agencies, one can find any number of photographers (like John Harrington) and writers who are also clever businessmen as examples. (Sadly, I am not one of them.) We just can't accept their scraps with gratitude as we have in the past, but insist the work has value.

Now this in turn requires the consumer to discriminate between quality work and crap, but if we go to my first thought, where I reflexively turned away from the bad ad to the good, it should shake out. The question is whether management will see that at the start and avoid the difficult culling period ...

Time and Tide

My Mother-in-law is fascinated on occasion by a book, The Rivers Ran East. It's a story about an explorer's adventures searching for a legendary city of gold, and when she gets onto the subject, one is as likely to be entertained by the lengthy and complicated story of how she first encountered the book as a summary of what it is about.

Lately, she rediscovered the book and has been rereading it, stopping daily to urge me to read it and attempting to press her copy on me with the enthusiasm of an evangelist with a brand new edition of the New Testament and a tribe of undiscovered natives to convert. I unfortunately am in the process of trying to finish my own reading project, an old paperback of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo.* It seems the curse of my work and life that I either have a great deal of time to intensely read, and plow through multiple books in short order, or no time at all, meaning I might get through a single page before unintentionally falling asleep, the book slipping from numb fingers as reading glasses droop on the bridge of my nose.

Which gets me, after this overlong prelude, to the point of all this: time.

Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe than time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important how we lived. After all, Number One, we're only mortal.

-Jean Luc Picard

Star Trek: Generations

That's very nice, but I tend to agree with -- or at least feel the same as -- the "someone," actually the movie's villain. He was willing to sacrifice an entire planet and those aboard the USS Enterprise to step into a timeless rift in the universe, freezing himself in any time he chose so as to not be stalked by the predator he feared. Not sure I go that far, but I do have some trouble seeing the grinding passage of time as some sort of amiable companion.

The other day, I heard a book discussion on the BBC with Judith Kerr, the author of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. It is a novelized version of her own life as a young Jewish girl in Germany during the rise of Hitler. In it, she admitted that the book's title was not where she started, nor even her idea, but it was what struck me very strongly, especially as it was all I knew of her or the book before hearing the rest of the broadcast. It refers to how, in their escape from Germany to Britain by way of Switzerland, the young Judith lost her treasured pink, plush rabbit, left behind in their home. She writes how, as a child, she imagined Hitler keeping the toy himself, as some treasure of his own. But as a parent (and an unreconstructed child) I am tragically struck by the sad loss of a beloved toy.

What Are You Afraid Of?

When I was a child -- or rather a young teen -- the concept of mortality struck me very strongly. It became finally, inevitably clear that there was no escaping death, and there is no clear answer to what exactly death brings. One can choose faith, or perhaps some vague concept of the supernatural, or one can resign oneself to ceasing to exist -- Pop! -- in a terrifying obliteration of self. It frightened me, and there were long periods where, poignantly self-aware, I saw the approaching darkness with dread.

Now older -- more than four times my age then -- the fear has faded, to be replaced by regret and a deep sense of loss. Time, rather being a fearful treadmill driving me to uncertain obliteration, is now a thief, stealing away friends and family, treasured moments and possessions.

I guess this too is a factor of aging. I no longer fear the future (that inevitable knock to come from the Reaper), but a loss of the past. As a teen, there was more future, and I looked forward. But now there's more past, and I guess I cling to the things that give me comfort.


*About the books: This was started ages ago, and I have finally finished Nostromo. I have not finished The Rivers Ran East, a dreary accounting of discomfort, danger, flesh-burrowing bugs, and cannibalistic natives written by a man who intentionally set out with inadequate support, supplies, or money. I have since moved on and read two other books. My mother-in-law has happily also moved on to other books ... though I'm sure my day of reckoning shall came.

The Secret Code of Cartoons

My mother-in-law lives with us. At 90, she is slightly (she would say) hard of hearing, and so generally one can hear what she has on the television. Today, it was "Stagecoach," the classic John Ford Western. And while I of course recognized the music (a compilation of Western melodies and generic period orchestral accompaniment) , it was suddenly the orchestration itself that struck me. I realized it sounded just like the music in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Carl Stalling, the man behind the music in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons, was a true genius recently appreciated with a collection of his work. As the booklet in the disc set explains, "Stalling's propensity for flat-out quotations of Warners-owned pop songs and public domain folk tunes is evident from the very first." Indeed, as the publication explains, a key part of Stalling's work was his encyclopedic memory of songs available in the Warner's catalog -- music the studio already owned the rights to and could use without cost or limit.

Now, this meant a lot more when the cartoons were made in the 40s, because these songs were not only owned by the studio, they were well known tunes from feature films, and also pop hits. So when Stalling chose "We're in the Money" for Daffy's celebration of greed in "Ali Baba Bunny," it wasn't just a pleasant piece of music to fill out the audio track.

But what struck me today was the realization that there was a secondary undercurrent in that backmessage. The orchestration itself -- perhaps accidentally, because that's how movie music was done then, perhaps with intent -- also sends its own message. The music coming out of my mother-in-law's room, without the visuals allowing me to pigeonhole it as feature or cartoon, sounded just like the cartoon music.

So the cartoon, given a fraction of the time a feature gets, was able to concentrate its message with a range of cultural references, tune choices ... and they way those tunes were played.