This is one of what may become an occasional series of articles to be categorised either as “what hacks off the hack?” or “what knackered the hack?”. In this rare instance the story covers both.
As part of our ongoing study of broken things, it should be no surprise that this hack considers journalism itself to be a little bit broken.
On Monday, the Financial Times economics behemoth, Martin Wolf, said that it would be a bad thing for Rupert Murdoch to get his hands on the Wall Street Journal. He suggests that the tycoon would likely interfere, introduce bias, and take it downmarket. Wolf is not alone.
But Wolf’s view of financial newspaper journalism looks worryingly upside down to me, and could be a source of risk for the independence and quality of the very publications that he seeks to defend:-
Business magazines and business television stand on the shoulders of the few newspapers that do the reporting, and analysis, day in and day out. The Journal is the world’s leader, if only by circulation. It is also two papers in one. Its news coverage is independent, questioning and authoritative. Its research is superb and its editing professional.”
I’ve been reading Martin Wolf’s stuff for a very long time now, and must have internalised a huge amount of his views and thought processes over the years, perhaps proving his point that as a financial journalist I’ve stood on his shoulders. By contrast, for geographical reasons, I’ve never been much of a WSJ reader, even though my work appeared regularly in the Asian edition for a while.
What newspapers do is provide a digest of news. But now the world is more complex than their pages can accommodate. Some days their expertise, particularly that of their regular columnists, is stretched to fill the space with relevant material that is interesting and entertaining. Since other newspapers have focused more on business, the FT and WSJ have moved to cover more lifestyle issues, necessarily diluting their focus and the homogeneity of their resources.
The web, while full of dross, gives direct access to much of the source material that journalists use. It also makes available a host of equally (if not more) thoughtful academic and business commentators who may be better placed to detail and analyse events than their individual newspaper counterparts. Electronic publications can expand and contract; bloggers can comment when they feel they have something to say. But a blank newspaper demands to be filled. [See our recent Taleb interview.]
The FT and WSJ rely heavily on trade magazines and newswires. These provide the bulk of independently reported facts in the business world, and these are the shoulders that are stood upon, not the other way round. The majority of business journalism is more specialised than the FT or WSJ. The FT and WSJ get the pick of this expertise to work from.
The problem for these newspapers is that the aggregation job they did so well for so long is now done by technology in real time, and can be personalised using services like Google Reader. Contrary to Wolf’s assertion, there is every risk that newspapers could go away sooner rather than later. At the Knackered Hack, though, we try to avoid prediction. Like CDs, a newspaper is what technologists call a “form factor“. What matters to the reader is the information, what matters to the advertiser is both the quantity and quantifiability of attention. Newsprint comes out poorly, and gets worse as the open source movement drives Web 2.0 forward at an accelerating pace. Indeed, the online edition of the Wall Street Journal was directing its readers to the Knackered Hack a few weeks ago. I’d like to think some considered editor read our material and thought it worthy of their readers’ attention, but the realist in me understands that keywords and algorithms were the drivers here. If you are directing your readers away with the one hand, you need to be sure that there is much more to attract them back on the other.
Newspapers may have been around for a long time, but they are dead trees with ink on them in the last analysis, and that is an expensive and inflexible way to deliver information on a daily basis.
So, for the WSJ and FT to survive in the way Wolf thinks is valuable for public discourse (and I do too), they need to start doing something different, and be able to do it online. That may involve descending first from a rather high horse.
Journalists who have struggled to reach the zenith of the publishing hierarchy, or who walked out of an Ivy League or Oxbridge quadrangle directly into a seat of journalistic excellence, are least likely to be receptive to the democratising chaos that Google brings. Every day they see a physical product — the newspaper — that reinforces the illusion of permanance of what they do and the brands they work for. Above all else, their ageing aunts and uncles know what they do for a living when they descend for Christmas or Thanksgiving to devour the plump, roasted turkey — that same turkey which only weeks before enjoyed the free run of the farm, as much organic corn as it could eat, and a feeling of intense smugness in relation to its battery-reared cousins. [Watch New Scientist in the coming year for possible evidence that turkeys do indeed experience smugness, even though political scientists remain confused over their voting intentions 
]
Those journalists won’t have had to stare under the bonnet of the open-source world, e-mail its mechanics for help, and get their hands dirty trying to assemble its various options in a way that will attract an audience of 50 today, and perhaps (through some viral jump) 500,000 tomorrow.
The challenge with electronic dissemination and the rise of the XML language is that it atomises content. Before Web 2.0 and RSS feeds, investment banking already experienced this with a proliferation and integration of new sources, where historically there were just two or three (Reuters, Dow Jones or Bloomberg, and each of those on a separate screen). In this put-everything-in-one-stream world, branding and separation of one source from another becomes more difficult. “Where did I read that again?” is often the refrain. I should know: this loss of corporate news identity was one of those hidden causes that knackered the hack.
Where newspapers and newswires, with their large international staffs, can differentiate themselves is in collaboration. Optimistic editors will probably tell you that they already work closely together, and might point to the archetypal teamwork of a Woodward-and-Bernstein. But this is not what Silicon Valley understands by the term.
In network theory there is an oft-maligned concept called “Metcalfe’s Law“. It concerns the power of networks — rather like Moore’s Law for integrated circuits — and states that the power of a network is equal to the square of it users or “nodes”. Take 10 journalists. Their power when networked to one another is 100. Halve the number to five reporters, and their combined power is a quarter of that — only 25. But networks can be latent, or active. From a distance, two cars may look identical. It’s only when you sit inside and drive them that you know if they are firing on all cylinders. So, if five of the 10 are not cooperating, the network power of that entity collapses by much more than half.
The problem for the FT and WSJ is that they need to move quickly. The tendency is for these old organizations to think they need to interact more with their audience. That’s important. But they will be a whole lot better, and surprise us all, if they interact more thoroughly with themselves.
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Related to local newspapers, rather than business ones, but Simon Willison (Bath Uni graduate, now working for Yahoo!) recently did a talk called “Doing Local Right” at @media 2007 in London based on his experience working for the Lawrence Journal-World during his sandwich year.
http://simonwillison.net/2007/Jun/11/local/
See also: The People Formerly Known As The Audience:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html
It’s a very interesting piece, which raises many important questions.
Ultimately, there seem to me to be two issues here. First, do we need quality control somewhere? Second, how do you get people to pay for the costs of producing reliable information, given the public goods nature of this output? The answer to these questions may be that nobody is going to do quality control in our brave new web-enabled world and nobody is going to pay for reliable information either. The results could be dreadful. Indeed I would argue they are already dreadful. The quality of public policy debate is abysmal in most advanced countries, partly as a result.
Hi Knackered Hack
I’m enjoying your blog. And agree with you on this one except to say that if newspapers can raise their efficacy to the power of ten by collaborating more internally, they can do the same with their readers, and even their erstwhile ‘competitors’. As you say, the problem is the newsstand is a combative environment. From the outside, I don’t think they really get collaboration even though they’ve embraced the technology.
Martin. We’re told not to believe everything we read in the press but all to often we do believe it because of the veneer of respectability. On the Web contentious items are debated, and vilified and the reader must make up his own mind. Take a look at this from Foreign Policy. If newspapers are going to claim superior quality control, they’d better get their own houses in order!
Sorry, here’s the link: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/5116
To (very selectively) quote from a study on media transparency: “The greatest surprise of the study was how most news outlets handle corrections. Only 11 out of the 25 news sites visibly post corrections…”
Richard and Tim
It may seem strange to say, but I think there is a lack of confidence in the mainstream media, sort of echoed by Paul McCartney’s observation about record companies. It is probably a generational thing, but it’s changing so fast, that for some of these institutions to survive, they don’t have a generation to wait for managers to rise up the journalistic ranks who understand what is going on. I also suspect the more enterprising aren’t so attracted to the old media.
Corrections are an issue, and in my experience can be a big source of strength if you adopt the correct process toward them. In financial markets, your reputation depends on accuracy, and a slip will result in a sudden and very unpleasant relationship with your readers. But if you are pushing for results/exclusives/differentiation in a crude way to defend audience share, then you will make big mistakes from time to time. And this is where much of the press have put themselves.
In that light, I agree with you, Martin. It has been said by others that discussion of politics is constantly framed around the personal, so the issues aren’t really getting covered. It’s harder to frame a story around a complex subject than tell a tale of two ordinary Downing Street folk. I believe the paying audience is there, and globalization might make it larger. It would take patience to develop.
Just taking a wild swing here, but what about complacency? Not only are people distrustful of the media, they just don’t care much any more so at the same time they can’t be bothered to challenge it. It’s partly because of all the spin (politicians and the media are tarred with the same brush), and partly because of prosperity. What we need is a good old-fashioned recession to shake everybody up!