The Internet: Not a parasite on journalism
I enjoyed this post by Shane Richmond at Telegraph.co.uk, in which he discusses David Simon’s ignorance about the Web and online journalism: If ‘amateurs’ like David Simon can make The Wire, why can’t they do journalism?
Unlike some folks, I do love The Wire, the TV series about the mess most American cities are in because of a combination of drugs, poverty, lousy schools, a leadership vacuum, and crappy newspapers. But just because longtime Baltimore journalist (and creator of The Wire) Simon produced a Dickensian epic about our urban quagmire, it doesn’t mean he’s qualified to testify about online journalism.
He starts out well enough:
The internet is a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery system of our future, but thus far it does not deliver much first-generation reporting.
But then:
Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin — namely the newspapers themselves.
In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.
“Parasite”? Oh, please, get over it. Was the printing press circa 1501 C.E. a parasite on the manuscript culture of the monasteries of Europe? Sure, the printing press eventually killed manuscript book production. But a parasite would have died after the host was gone. Do you think the Internet is going to die?
Implying that readers abandon the printed newspaper solely because the Internet offers them an alternative ignores the very issues that Simon addressed throughout the fifth season of The Wire.
Don’t get me wrong — Simon reprised those issues articulately in his testimony at the Senate committee hearing on May 7. But when he talks about the Internet, he’s clearly out of his zone of expertise.
Categories: ideas
Simon, an amateur?
What bullshit. And you bought that ridiculous analogy.
Simon left journalism after writing a book on homicide detectives, then apprenticed under Tom Fontana on the show Homicide writing from 1992 to 1999 and working as first a staffwriter, then a story editor and finally as a junior producer on that show from 1995 to 1999. Then he did a miniseries for HBO on the Corner, his second book, in 2000. Then finally, after years in this business learning at the right hand of some of the best professionals out there, he created The Wire. Amateur? Richmond is goofy; just look up Simon’s careful and long climb on IMDb listings.
The analogy doesn’t hold, especially since Simon isn’t saying that journalists have to be journalism majors or graduates or such. Only that they be PAID AND TRAINED FULLTIME REPORTERS. He’s arguing that journalism is not a hobby but a profession that requires fulltime commitment. And if you’ev ever covered a beat as a reporter — spent years learning a police department or school system to do the job — you’d get it. Richmond set up a straw man, and you’re in awe that he knocked it down. Congrats.
I agree that journalism is not a hobby, and to see it done well, we need full-time reporters, editors, etc., who are paid to do the work, day in and day out. But to say that cannot be done online, or in a format other than the 400-year-old newspaper model (well, the current model is younger than that) is naive.
What I know about the news business is that everyone comes into it green as a new sprout, with or without a journalism degree, and there’s precious little training in most newsrooms (especially in the last few years). The beat model has been undermined for a long time by the expansion of metro papers to farther and farther suburbs.
Mindy,
You are still fighting straw men not Simon. You need to actually go back and read his full testimony on the committee website.
He’s not arguing that the internet is not the delivery system of the future or that printing the paper and delivering it to doorsteps is not anachronistic. In fact, HE SAYS BOTH THOSE THINGS IN THOSE EXACT WORDS. He knows that online is the future; but he’s arguing for the profession, and that means PAYING AND TRAINING PEOPLE, AND CREATING AN EDITING BASE TO ENSURE QUALITY.
Are you interested in arguing against Simon, or against some blogger’s half-baked version of what he wants Simon to be?
As to what killed newspapers, Simon’s testimony spends as much time critiquing their performance as that of new media. And his critique is a lot more pointed about why beat reporting is dying than “the expansion of metro papers into farther and farther suburbs,” which has exactly nothing to do with the trend, editorially or economically.
Read the actual testimony, then maybe comment. That might be a good discipline going forward.
I have sympathy with David Simon’s sincere and heartfelt testimony.
I do also think that he’s speaking for thousands of print journalists out there, articulating the pain and betrayal that many of them feel with the companies and the papers they spent their lives serving.
However, I disagree with David’s contention when it comes to the Internet (although towards the end of the testimony, he conceded that there is no other way to go).
Yes, the Internet did change our world. New media does for some part ride on the back of print. But that doesn’t mean that high-end journalism cannot be committed online.
Yes, online news is freely available – but don’t underestimate readers’ intelligence.
If you have a brand that people trust, whether in print or online – and your online content is top quality, there should be no reason why people wouldn’t want to read you…Or for that matter, pay to read it. Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?