The Changing Conversation

Focus of the media is shifting to the publication of public opinion rather than individual editorial material

Via Mike Licht, flickr

By: Arina Kharlamova, Staff Writer

As soon as newspapers went wireless, the whole conversation around news-consumption changed. Where before we had Firewire pages and ICQ accounts, now we have Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. While this may not seem like such a far jump, it is. The world of online news transmission has grown up to be its own creature, one that hasn’t necessarily turned out to be McLuhan’s worst nightmare.

“The medium is the message” is what young journalists and writers hear in incubation. It is what dominates the headspace of theorists and English professors worldwide, and its what makes this conversation – the one I, the author, am having with you, the reader – so dynamic, because it is online as opposed to through a page of a newspaper or book.

When The Sun, The Post, and The Times were still black and white and re(a)d all over, this transmission was a one-way street: writer writes, reader reads. But now, this is a back-and-forth conversation; it is a debate, a dialogue, an exchange of ideas. The path to such a democratic media was arduous, but it was also natural with the development of online communication tools (chat rooms, blogs, forums) that eventually led to the development of social networking sites.

On the Internet, where one can watch millions of hours of fetish pornography and then learn how to knit a blanket for their pet bunny, everything is fair game. Morality is no longer a binary, but a sliding scale of strangeness on which you inevitably fall. It is a space that many people are surprised and disgusted by, but ultimately it is a tool for communication, whether that is to transmit sex positions or local news.

When I think of people who have never used the computer, using the internet for the first time, I think of one word: overexposure. Bombarded by information and colours and motion. Everything is “SPECIAL” or “FREE” or “VIAGRA,” and it is all very timely; it is all happening now, closing soon, and ending often. The “need” to choose mounts within milliseconds, and we start thinking about what we want, instead.

Readers these days are becoming pickier about wants. And it is not because they are reading more – it is because they know how the Internet is designed to work, and they know that they need to dig deeper to find things they want.

However, publishers are finally cluing in to the fact that people are bored of the FRONT PAGE NEWS in lieu of personalized interests like sports, recipes, or art critiques. When ad numbers are down and nobody is paying attention to your best-paid stories, the stories that do generate reader interest – through comments, hits, Likes or +1s – manage to perk up publishers’ eyebrows. It is what has been happening all through the web-sphere since comments became commonplace. People are forcing publishers to change the conversation, to focus not only on their own editorial ideas, but also on public opinion, and they are largely accomplishing this through social media – the great equalizer.

In this way, readers are slowly reversing the journalistic process by telling writers what they want to read about. Readers are slowly democratizing the online media space.

OLD SCHOOL

Journalism schools like Ryerson still teach the basics, says David Silverberg, managing editor of DigitalJournal: how to ask the 5 W’s, how to find proper sources and attribute them correctly, how to write eye-catching headlines, how to include appropriate and impactful photos. These are still important tenets of honest journalism, and the social media speedway is not changing that anytime soon, even if social media sometimes makes the message more garbled.

The tenets of journalism, however, are also no longer only respected and applied by accredited journalists, adds Chantal Braganza, Toronto editor of OpenFile, “Even if this person doesn’t have the same level of experience, they can still potentially do as good of a job.”

Increasingly, people are relying more on trusted personalities than trusted companies, because the idea of a “trusted company” has become a joke. Before the Internet (B.I.), readers relied on a certain company or news source to get their information, like the Star, the Globe and Mail, or the National Post.

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People are forcing publishers to change the conversation to…public opinion, and they are largely accomplishing this through social media – the great equalizer.

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In fact, these companies are still a main source for news for people all over the country, and it is because they are mature institutions with cultivated opinions. They give you what you expect – national coverage, heavily sedated opinions, and “insight”. They are accredited massive conglomerates that pump out news, even if it’s trite, spoon-fed uselessness.

The bureaucracy involved in these media companies prevents reporters from having real opinions on important topics, which is a shame to our journalistic history and to journalistic integrity as a whole. Kai Nagata, a bureau chief for the CBC, quit in the summer, claiming on his blog that he did not feel like he had enough of a voice to be able to say anything in his reports.

“I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out,” Nagata wrote. He mentions that broadcasting companies assume that “the target viewer… is also supposed to like easy stories that reinforce beliefs they already hold.” This is not clear and explorative news. This is not open media.

NEW SCHOOL

The world was revolutionized several times over in the past few years when world events broke not through reporters, but through tweets. The Iranian Green Revolution, the Egyptian Uprising, the Libyan Rebellions, and the London Riots are all examples of the people taking phones in hand and showing the world what the reporters wouldn’t, or couldn’t, show. The result was extraordinary and so fast that some people were catching up weeks later.

In order to be in the journalism business these days, you have to be as fast as Michael Phelps is in water. But what underfunded and understaffed news organization can afford to keep reporters everywhere while keeping content honest, credible, and meaningful?

DigitalJournal can. DJ is a new form of media slowly taking prominence in the information-delivery industry because it is citizen-based. You are the journalist, you are the writer.

What began as a little idea in 2006 is now a world phenomenon. Journalists, or enthusiasts, write what they’re passionate about. If there is a writer in Egypt witnessing the revolution, that goes on DJ; if there is a rabid NASA fan, that goes on DJ; if someone is a die-hard Maro the Cat fan, that goes on DJ – after certain editorial fact-checking procedures, of course.

Citizen journalism is about user-generated news and participatory media. It is also faster than traditional media, which has been struggling to keep up with projects such as DJ and OpenFile. Any user can go through the process of becoming a Digital Journalist, but not every Digital Journalist will be well-received or well-paid.

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“That’s an important thing for journalists to understand: they’re no longer in the hallowed halls position of power and exclusive knowledge”

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“We give a lot of power to our users, and we can only suggest assignments in our assignments tool. We can stress to certain writers that they should try Op-Eds because they have a good opinion on things, but we can’t really say, ‘You have to do this,’ or ‘You have to do that’. Part of DJ is that we’re democratizing news: we’re letting people decide what they want to read and what they want to write,” admits Silverberg, with an earnestness that solidifies his obvious belief in the idea.

Social media is a big part of their marketing strategy and overall process. In fact, DJ would not be possible without the community it has built up on the web through social media and social networking. “A lot of newspapers are moving online after failing to define a community in print,” says Silverberg, adding that their community comes from having a “clutch social media strategy”. This includes: posting at the best time for feedback on Facebook and Twitter (4 p.m. on weekdays, 11-1p.m. on weekends), posting questions instead of statements, and asking for responses to surprising or eye-catching stories.

Ultimately though, the issue is not when you post, but what. Silverberg says, “the thing about journalism is that readers always know more than you as a reporter.” That is what makes citizen journalism so appealing, and user-oriented news so engaging. The conversation around a news article, thanks to social media, jumps from paper-based to user-focused. “I think that’s an important thing for journalists to understand: they’re no longer in the hallowed halls position of power and exclusive knowledge,” admonishes Silverberg.

The new process of writing, Braganza notes, “doesn’t necessarily end the day the story is published. It remains a living thing.” OpenFile is another new company leading the charge in user-driven content. “We ask readers to open a file with us or to suggest a story to us – things that matter to them locally, stories that they think larger news organizations aren’t necessarily paying attention to,” says Braganza.

This file is, like the name, “open” for as long as readers are interested and contributing: they can add photos, pose questions, and leave comments for the author, the editors, or others to reply to. The story really becomes a living thing – reactive, questioning, growing.

With social media in the mix, it also becomes a tool for social change. In 2008, the Ontario government repealed their proposed restrictions on teenage drivers due to a Facebook campaign, and it’s not the first time that Facebook campaigns have affected reality. Hell, Harper even went on Facebook to name his cat.

THE DOWNFALL

With so much information being produced daily, the input quickly becomes overwhelming. The challenge becomes news curation: how to separate the insight from the rest of the drivel being exposed on the internet like an unwanted flasher. Not only are we overwhelmed by the news, but we are underwhelmed by the quality of it, and frustrated at its accuracy (think celebrity gossip, or twitter-mergencies).

“When we heard about the Arab uprising in Egypt, there was a lot of news coming out of Twitter really fast, and people writing furiously about what they were seeing on the ground, but no way to verify whether what that person said was true or not,” notes Silverberg. This means that reading, not only participating,“has to be a really active process for the reader.”

While there is no excuse for shoddy reporting, when citizen journalists are involved, the question very quickly turns into, “Who do I trust to tell me the truth?” This forces people to put in their own filters, and obtain a little skepticism where it matters. Some news outlets, like OpenFile, have hired News Curators to ease the mental burden on their readers.

These are people who hold a myriad of responsibilities that differ from those of the journalist: “Are they going to find out and tease out the things that are truthful, add some context to it, give it some perspective, point out things that are ludicrous?” asks CEO of OpenFile Wilf Dinnick. That is what he’s hoping his new hires will do, even though his company deals mainly with recognized reporters who know how to craft the right type of story.

“People are hungry for the human curation as opposed to machine curation to filter out what’s important to them, what’s repetitive, and what’s irrelevant,” adds Silverberg.

IF THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

What does social media say about the message news organizations send out?

Dinnick thinks that, “the crux of the entire premise is that news is no longer a product. It’s not the 6 o’clock news, or a morning newspaper: it’s a service.” If news is a service, then, how do the responsibilities of our new servicers change?

“It says that the power of news is being wrested out of the control of corporations, and given to people who are experiencing the news themselves, and want their voices to be heard in am meaningful way,” says Silverberg, “So much so that corporations will flounder and die if they ignore these changing rules, and flourish if they bring those kind of people into the news conversation.”

ARB Team
Arbitrage Magazine
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