Phil Meyer, raising the ante again
SHOWCASE | March 28, 2008 Following is the text of Meyer’s talk on the occasion of a two-day symposium celebrating his retirement as holder of the Knight chair at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
By Philip Meyer
pmeyer@email.unc.edu
Perhaps the most quoted line in Precision Journalism, is this: “They are raising the ante on what it takes to become a journalist.”
I used it to open the third edition, published in 1991. And now I have a confession to make. At the time I wrote it, I could not be certain that it was true.
It was time to raise the ante, sure enough. But the mainstream media were being painfully slow to keep up with the need for better and more skillful journalism. I guess I thought that if I announced that standards were rising, perhaps that might nudge the process along a bit.
An “ante,” of course is what you pay to buy into each hand of a poker game. It ensures that you have a stake, some commitment, before you see your cards. Putting time and money on the table for journalism education is the way that most people in newspapers and broadcasting make their commitment. And now, 17 years after I made that rash claim, the ante really is being raised. This time, I am certain. And technology is the cause. While we were worrying about other things, learning to do journalism got harder.
And it’s going to get harder still. The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it – digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.
This is why we still need newspapers – or something like them. Ronald Coase, the British economist, once asked why we need business firms. Why can’t all their activities be coordinated by individuals contracting with one another instead of working in a bureaucratic, command-and-control environment? The answer, he said, is transaction costs. If a manager had to negotiate with a free-lancer for every task, the cost in time would be unbearably high.
Searching for information on the Internet involves something like transaction costs because we have so many varied sources to evaluate. We need somebody we trust to organize them for us. That can be the task of the new journalism.
So far, it seems from my old-guy perspective, new technology has been employed mainly to give us clever new ways to do the hunting, gathering and delivery of information. And I worry that journalism education will spend so much time on the new tools that we’ll short-change our students – and, by extension, society – in the value-added part. Piling up facts and putting them in clever packages isn’t enough. We need to supply the interpretive framework, too.
Traditional journalism goes after events. But behind every event there is a pattern. And behind the pattern there is structure. (This concept is from Peter Senge in his management book, The Fifth Dimension: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.) Citizens, to be enlightened need to know more about public affairs than just the events. They must understand at those higher conceptual levels, the patterns and the structures. Event-centered coverage of public meetings and press conferences won’t do that.
The current Columbia Journalism Review has a good example. Dean Starkman writes that business reporters were so preoccupied with financial performance, strategies, and profiling corporate leaders that they missed, for the most part, the big story of the credit squeeze on the middle class. They saw the events but not the pattern.
In academe, we have a parallel concern. Patterns and structures are what lead us to theory. The social sciences have been chronically short on theory. When I was a first-semester graduate student at this University, I took Alexander Heard’s seminar in the scope and methods of political science. In our conversations, sparked by an amazing list of guest speakers, including Angus Campbell and David Truman, the scarcity of theory was a recurring theme. Without theory, research isn’t cumulative. It just stacks up loosely related facts. Oh yeah, right on point, please go read the entire article!
Personally, I think the ante may have been raised, but someone forgot to notify the journalists!!!
In fact, just check out this news summary of the STATE of the NEWS MEDIA today, it will open your eyes if they are not already open. Following are some excerpts:
A Limited Domestic Agenda:
In 2007, we learned that many of children’s toys were unsafe as were a dismaying number of food products that needed to be removed from supermarket shelves. A landmark energy bill passed that set new fuel economy standards for the automotive industry for the first time in more than three decades. A heated battle erupted in Congress over a plan to expand health insurance for children.
Yet an examination of the mainstream news agenda in 2007 reveals that a broad range of domestic subjects was given limited attention by the media. And at least in theory, these stories were logistically much easier to report on than the Mideast or North Korea.
The half-dozen broad topic areas that generated the least coverage last year included development and urban sprawl, the legal and court system, religion, transportation, education, and race, gender and sexual identity issues. None of these attracted more than 1% of the coverage over all.
Least Covered Domestic Issues
Percent of Newshole
These lesser-covered subjects do have something in common. Matters of religion, gender and race relate to the social underpinnings of the culture and the way people feel about their daily lives. Similarly, development, transportation and education relate to institutional underpinnings of daily life. Broadly speaking, they are the bread and butter subjects that most people deal with on a constant basis. Why weren’t these subjects a more significant part of the news diet in 2007?
Topics by Media SectorSource: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2007Top 15 Single-Week Stories, 2007Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2007Public Interest vs. Media Coverage.
In my opinion one of the most important charts!
2007
Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2007
