The Friday Spicy: Three Questions About This Week in Journalism that ONLY an Academic Will Ask
It’s week five of this ongoing but brief media critique of the questions that didn’t get asked by the people best empowered to ask them: those with regular gigs at news orgs with the huge platforms from which to scale their arguments. I don’t usually write for free anymore, so I’m surprised I’m still at it — but maybe the critique and monitoring discipline doing something like this imposes is worth the free content I’m supplying to Medium.
Up this week: 1) What do we make of The NYT’s new look?; 2) Why the Poynter Media Trust Survey tells us nothing and everything about the state of trust in the news media; 3) Are journalists fanning the flames of teen suicide?
1. What’s really at stake when it comes to the changes on The New York Times’ homepage?
Ok, everyone always has an opinion on The New York Times, always. It is in a category of one but somehow it sets the direction for innovation for the rest of the news media. It’s been my job since 2009 or so to obsess over every little move that the newspaper makes, which I guess comes with the territory of being the author of THE book chronicling The New York Times’ move into the digital era (Free, here, but buy it!), so I’ve got a bit to say on this. With that in mind, here’s my takeaway: this is more than about the homepage of The New York Times, this is about the future of what it means to be a newspaper and a journalist in a digital era.
Gone: The traditional notion of what a lead looks like.
Gone: The need to click through to a story to learn what the key points are.
Gone: The cues that the most loyal readers use to navigate to news they trust from journalists they respect.
Gone: The incentive journalists have to become a star, as weak as it was in the digital version of Page One.
Gone: The need to digitally subscribe to the NYT to get its best morsels.
When I go into newsrooms, I still see journalists (including at The Times) with stacks of print papers from their latest Page One story. I hear a lot of requests for “homepage love” — journalists knowing that having their story featured prominently on the homepage not only is a way to garner readers but also a way to show the world they’ve done a good story. The “star system” of journalism has been a motivating factor for journalism for decades, at least as long as bylines have driven status (and perhaps longer). When Page One reaches fewer and fewer people in print, all journalists have is that 2 hours of prominent homepage love. Now, that ego is shredded as a major scoop becomes a generic bulletpoint for the best journalists in the world.
Moreover, in a time where accountability and trust is supposed to matter and retaining loyalty is the key to keeping readers paying for news, making bylines harder not easier to find seems to be deeply problematic. There’s also a question about what happens to the soul of the newspaper in the digital era: the homepage is the most comprehensive way today to craft a singular editorial vision that is both temporally relevant yet reflects the underlying news judgement of the newsroom. This is the last bit of control that news organizations have to show what matters the most to them before everything descends to the article level of sharing. Homepage traffic is dying, so maybe good design is the rationale, as Michael Calderone reports, and perhaps this move helps save the homepage. I’m not sure it helps save The Times, and I’m pretty sure we’ve just seen something fairly revolutionary happen in journalism — or at least the whispers of a sea change.
2. Ok, so is this Poynter survey about trust in news actually good news?
Poynter’s latest trust in media survey seems to be good news for local news, though it’s further evidence that national media should be taking the blame for the trust problem in news media, as I argued last week (so on it!). I’d argue these findings, though, are a net nothingburger for telling us much that’s useful about trust in news generally.
Note what the incredbile Joy Mayer, who oversees a project that helps 53 local news outlets with trust, had to say: “Most local journalists are not covering things that relate to national politics.” This means that local journalists aren’t covering the root of the rot in the US, and in not writing about this rot directly, aren’t vulnerable to the partisan overreactions that their national journalist compadres face. The trust problem is not local. People do not distrust the local media that they rely on for journalism and news about their communities. We know people trust the news they use the most, as the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report finds. Those who do write about national news from local and regional outlets on national topics get the brunt of the nasty partisanship — Rex Huppke of the Chicago Tribune shared his mailbox this week on Twitter:
I have many critiques about studies that fail to specify what trust in news media means. Trust and bias are often conflated in people’s minds (one might think: I trust The Post or CNN, but I think they are definitely lefty, for instance, so I’m not sure I take the politics reporting as “fair”), and trust and credibility are also different (I trust The Times, but I am pretty sure that they’re often getting played by sources inside the White House, making some of the insider reporting less credible).
Finally, trust in news media cannot be compared longitudinally without a lot of statistical controls and contextualization. To compare 1972 with one population of respondents to 2018 with another population of respondents is a classic example of both a “history effect” and a “maturation error” any responsible academic (or any of my former GW students) could point out. In short, stuff happened along the way from 1972 to the present that cannot be controlled for so as to permit a valid apples to apples comparison. And the population has changed over time, too, meaning that the sampling has a different characteristic and a different potential set of errors/problems. Longitudinal trust studies about journalism are completely useless; regular media trust studies can turn trust in media into a horse race rather than an ontological and empirical problem that merits careful and nuanced consideration.
3. Are journalists fanning the flames of teen suicide?
There are some seriously *ucked up people in this world, some of whom might have gotten some terrible ideas about how to torture vulnerable people online from Black Mirror (BBC, stop!). The Blue Whale Challenge is one of these terrible memes that capture public (and media) imagination, but in talking more about it, journalists draw further attention to the phenomenon. This one ends in suicide, or has for some people, and journalists need to regard writing about horrible online memes with the same kind of caution they do about reporting about actual suicides themselves. If you follow one article from a major outlet popular with teens, you’ll find an irresponsibly positioned hashtag that if you click on, will lead you to a dark dark place on the Web that I recommend avoiding (note, I’m not linking to the article).
Including the hashtag to get to this meme of darkness and dispair is in keeping with the transparent see-it-for-yourself, linky-internet reporting philosophy, and that’s generally a good thing, except that giving kids direct links in your reporting to viral suicide/self-mutilation/self-hate meme challenges is downright irresponsible. This publication has massive online following, despite its legacy status, and is still read by a lot of teens, and others have made the same error. You saw a similar situation when news and entertainment media drew attention to Thirteen Things I Hate About You. As a graduate of the #itgetsbetter hashtag myself (before that was a hashtag), the more you know about darkness, the easier it is to be convinced that you are not alone in being alone, which can backfire from solidarity to further despair. This is dangerous, and journalists need to treat memes about violence and death and bullying as carefully as they would writing about suicide. Y’all need to be careful about fanning the flames of teen suicide.
Bonus material:
- I got asked by a Bustle reporter this week for my gender pronouns as part of her checking how to spell my name/honorific. This was amazing. I wonder whether journalists might also start asking about preferred vocabulary when describing someone’s race, religion, or ethnicity, rather than sticking to what the convention is for the news outlet or AP style more generally.
- Back to school! It’s well past the time when anyone working in a journalism school should imagine they’re teaching a classroom full of future journalists. More on that later, but journalism and mass communication is the English degree of the 21st century: digital humanities + added data literacy and numeracy thrown in, too. Let’s treat it not as preparation for a job, but preparation for a way to think and to communicate in this incredibly complicated information environment.
Note: I see how this format has made Frederic Filloux’s Monday Note a regular read and Frederic one of the most knowledgeable in the news tech business. He’s on #508! That’s a pretty solid goal of what to live up to.
