Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?
Michael Massing
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That digital technology is disrupting the business of journalism is beyond dispute. What’s striking is how little attention has been paid to the impact that technology has had on the actual practice of journalism. The distinctive properties of the Internet—speed, immediacy, interactivity, boundless capacity, global reach—provide tremendous new opportunities for the gathering and presentation of news and information. Yet amid all the coverage of start-ups and IPOs, investments and acquisitions, little attempt has been made to evaluate the quality of Web-based journalism, despite its ever-growing influence.
To try to fill that gap, I set off on a grand (though necessarily selective) tour of journalistic websites. How creative and innovative has digital journalism been? How much impact has it had?
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Du même auteur :
Digital Journalism: The Next Generation
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Similar questions about mission and impact beset digital journalism in general. There’s been an explosion of narrowcast sites providing in-depth coverage of single subjects.InsideClimate News, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for its reports on the flawed regulation of the nation’s oil pipelines, has a staff of a dozen covering climate change, clean energy, and fossil fuels. SCOTUSblog follows the Supreme Court with a depth and comprehensiveness unmatched by any other organization, online or off. The Hechinger Report and Chalkbeat cover education and its discontents with more manpower and energy than any newspaper can muster. And The Marshall Project, created by documentarian and ex–hedge fund manager Neil Barsky and headed by former Timesexecutive editor Bill Keller, is dedicated to exploring prison overcrowding, prosecutorial overreach, and police misconduct with similar thoroughness.
On virtually any subject these days, you can find opinionated, informative, provocative sites and blogs. There’s Feministing on feminism, Tablet on Judaism, PandoDaily on Silicon Valley, The Millions on books, Inside Higher Ed on academia, Balkinization on the law, Aeon on philosophy, ALDaily on arts and letters, Deadspin on sports, and on and on and on. By geographic region, there are sites on cities (Voice of San Diego,Baltimore Brew), states (Texas Tribune, MinnPost), countries (Tehran Bureau, Syria Deeply), and the world (GlobalVoices, GlobalPost, Goats and Soda). As traditional news organizations shrink, NGOs and advocacy groups are helping fill the gap. Human Rights Watch, for example, has ninety researchers in thirty-four countries, who contribute correspondent-like reports to its website. Meanwhile, a boom in podcasts, led by Serial, has opened up a new world of high-fidelity news and information, while a young generation of restless videographers, led by Vice, has established a beachhead on YouTube.
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I recently asked a friend who divides her time between writing about the environment and working at a nonprofit to list the sites she follows. Like so many other news consumers these days, she says she doesn’t actually go to sites but instead receives feeds arranged through Facebook and e-mail that deliver a steady flow of information from a multitude of sources. They include Environment and Energy Daily, an online policy newsletter; Dot Earth, a blog by Andrew Revkin carried on the New York Timeswebsite; Yale Environment 360, operated by the Yale School of Forestry; Grist, a Seattle-based source of climate news; and the website of Field & Stream magazine, which features pieces on conservation aimed at the hunting and fishing crowd. She also follows the environmental coverage on the websites of the Times and The Washington Post. “I can’t tell anymore whether a story I read counts as digital journalism or not,” she told me. “It ceases to be a meaningful distinction.”
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Some of the most heralded innovations on the Web have failed to pan out. An example is “longform,” a movement dedicated to presenting extended, essay-like pieces online. It has had occasional triumphs, like Jon Krakauer’s withering takedown (posted onByliner) of Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea. Too often, though, longform on the Web has meant slow, writerly, peripheral. Here, for instance, are some of the titles offered by The Atavist, one of the movement’s leaders: “Company Eight,” about corruption among firefighters in the 1880s; “The Zombie King,” about a 1929 book that introduced zombies to America; “Cloud Racers,” about a group of aviators in 1933; and “The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang,” about bank robbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Occasionally, The Atavist does run something of a more urgent nature, like “The Trials of White Boy Rick,” Evan Hughes’s report about a Detroit cocaine dealer of the 1980s who remains in prison long after other, larger dealers were set free. For the most part, though, these longform sites fail to take advantage of the Internet’s immediacy to run stories that might grab hold of readers and change the way they see the world. (Last summer, Byliner itself was reported to be on the verge of closing; it was eventually absorbed by Vook, a digital publishing service.)
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Similarly stillborn has been citizen journalism—the gathering of news and information by nonprofessionals. Overseas, in countries gripped by war or ruled by repressive regimes, citizen reporters and photographers have made a vital contribution. In this country, citizen journalism made a splash in 2008, when Mayhill Fowler—following presidential candidates as part of The Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” campaign—caught on tape Barack Obama’s comment about bitter people who “cling to guns or religion.” Since that incident, I had not heard much about Fowler; from an online search, I discovered that in 2010 she had severed her ties with The Huffington Post because of its refusal to pay her for her work. Reporting, it turns out, is expensive and time-consuming and not something readily performed between shopping and the laundry.
Input from citizens has proved useful in certain limited ways, like providing leads and checking facts. The initial questions about Brian Williams’s account of coming under fire in Iraq, for instance, were posted on Facebook by helicopter crew members who had been on the scene. (Stars and Stripes did the critical follow-up reporting.) And cell-phone cameras have proved an invaluable source of eyewitness footage, as shown in the police-related deaths of Eric Garner in New York, Walter Scott in South Carolina, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
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As for that once-alluring dream of all writers on the Web—going viral and reaching the multitudes—it has proved mostly illusory. “The odds of going viral are comparable to winning the lottery, but the lottery, to its credit, actually pays out in cash,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and expert on the Internet, has observed. Perhaps because the monetary returns from the Web have proved so meager, many writers seek to drive up their Facebook likes, Twitter followers, most-emailed rankings, and other measures of digital worth. It’s now even possible to hire a writer to prepare a glowing entry for oneself on Wikipedia—a clear violation of the honor-code spirit of that site.
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When one considers the amount of resources that the sites I’ve mentioned have consumed, the level of attention they’ve received, and the number of people they employ, the results thus far seem dishearteningly modest. That’s especially so when compared with the consistently high-quality material produced by such traditional institutions as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. These organizations are commonly referred to as “legacy” institutions—a gently derisive term that lumps them in with Blockbuster and Radio Shack as enterprises that, once thriving, were undermined by more innovative startups. When it comes to actual journalistic practice, however, it’s the media startups that in general seem the laggards.
Yet there are many promising journalistic experiments out there. In a subsequent article, I’ll describe some of them and try to suggest a path toward a new digital future.