Journalism is Dead, Long Live Journalism (Part I)

Ever since I read Breaking the News by James Fallows, I’ve had carried around this sense of unease about how media and professional journalists were executing their roles in a democratic society. In particular, whenever I encountered a newspaper or magazine story about my own little niche, toxic chemicals and the adverse effects associated with them, I often came away feeling dissatisfied that the writer didn’t get it quite right. Still, where would blogging be without newspapers?

We may find out soon, because the number of failing newspapers is piling up. Clay Shirky has written an essay about how the internet is shredding newspaper business models. According to Dr. Shirky, it wasn’t that newspapers didn’t see the internet coming. It’s just that all of the plans and ideas for business models at a time when technology supported freely passing around content, had unraveled, until the unthinkable scenario – newspapers becoming obsolete – started becoming more real. We’re observing a revolution, in which the old rules (“we can still make people pay for our content”) no longer apply.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Essentially, the problem being solved by a publishing industry, making information available to the public, has gone away presumably with the onset of the internet. It might not be so easy, though. Newspapers benefit society as a whole (even if “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” isn’t much of a business model), and it’s difficult to say what’s going to replace them. Two key points are: 1) we should be experimenting with lots of forms of newsgathering, and 2) journalism has always been subsidized, by advertisers, by someone rich with an axe to grind (think Randolph Hearst or Richard Mellon Scaipe), or these days, by ordinary people donating our time. As Dr. Shirky notes, there are models that seem to be working, such as Consumer Reports and NPR, ProPublica and WikiLeaks; I’d add SourceWatch to that list too. There are going to be gaps, such as who’s going to go investigative reporting, something that has to be someone’s day job backed by an organization with some clout so that reporters get their phone calls returned. In the end, what we need is journalism, not newspapers. I wouldn’t call myself a journalist, but in some ways I have to wonder if what I’m doing as a blogger represents a piece of the future for environmental journalism.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason?

An essay written by Dennis Perrin suggests that critical thinking is overrated, especially as practiced by the public intellectuals and other smart people around here. He argues that critical thought needs to occur within some distinct boundaries, if you want to remain relevant particularly within political and media circles:

To write for the New York Times, for example, you have to seriously believe that the United States is a force for Good in the world, sometimes mistaken, but always sincere. I've known or chatted up a smattering of Timespeople, and while privately they were some of the most cynical types I've ever met, none of their personal critiques would appear in the Times, simply because they'd never dare submit such nonsense. And these are supposedly the "smart ones," those who set the journalistic/critical/aesthetic standard.

An he's not terribly sanguine about things changing with the onset of the now-the-adults-are-here Obama administration. Though we seem to be on the precipice with environmental collapse, financial meltdown and a half of dozen other unpleasantries, he feels that "nothing substantial will change because too many people don't want substantial change" - and this is referring to educated people who presumably know better but are anxious to maintain whatever perks they enjoy:

Such degraded conditions are anathema to real critical thinking -- if anything, this inspires further devotion to the main narratives. Think all those reporters who've lost their jobs are gonna become an army of I. F. Stones? It's a nice idea, and if probable, I'd certainly champion it. But as you can see, there's no money or honor in such tawdry pursuits. If you want to eat using your words, become really good at selling shit. That's where critical minds are most needed.

Which doesn't bode well for our ability as a society to weather crises. NPR recently interviewed Jarred Diamond, author of Collapse, published back in 2005. Diamond concludes that a society’s fate in response to these crises is determined by how well its leaders and citizens anticipate problems before they become crises, and how decisively a society responds. In the NPR interview, he amplifies that one of the predictors of successfuly resolving a crisis is the role of the elite, the decision-makers, the politicians and/or the rich people within the society:

If the society is structured so that the decision-makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they're motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole society, whereas if the decision-makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society, then they're likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.

Uh-oh. We're so screwed, aren't we?

He observes that part of the foot-dragging in New Orleans about flood and disaster preparedness that led to the disaster following Hurricane Katrina occurred because the well-off people recognized that they lived on higher ground that wouldn't be flooded. In contrast, the Netherlands takes flood control more seriously because the rich folks are living below sea-level along with the proles.

So, if we're going to steer ourselves into making better choices, the rich and powerful need to feel more of the pain, so they become the agents of change.

Speaking of inability to feel pain and steer us in the right direction, the Senate is fighting the Obama Administration's plan to pass cap-and-trade legislation for greenhouse gas emissions. The opponents are bipartisan, and the dividing lines are betwen regions, depending on who's mining, generating or using a lot of coal-fired electricity. There isn't a lot of critical thinking going on here, since the longer we delay acting on climate changes, the slimmer our hopes are of resisting it.

Not that I think cap-and-trade is going to accomplish all that much in terms of addressing adverse climate change.

Even in places where you think paradigms whould be shifted, the critical thinking stays within its lanes. Worldchanging.com recently had a post about the spectrum of environmental thought, showcasing "bright green", "dark green" and "light green". It's interesting that Worldchanging offered no label for those who might be drawn to James Lovelock's pronouncements that planetary feedback mechanisms have been perturbed past a self-correcting point (i.e. we've killed Gaia), so that we're now the stewards of the Earth. Under this scenario, none of the shades of green offered here are meaningful environmental management strategies. No color scheme is offered for the combination of high technology projects for energy generation, transportation, agriculture and medicine, to hold civilization together while global geoengineering and bioenginering projects attempt to correct the climatic and biodiversity injuries we've created. What would that be, blue green?

I'm not confident that bright green will slow the trajectory of adverse changes in time, especially after reading the work of John Sterman at MIT (the "bathtub effect" guy). Dark green is Rapture for deep environmentalists; simply an invitation for death on a grand scale from war, disease and starvation. Light green is irrelevant on the scale of problems that need correcting.

Pres. Obama's stimulus package, as misguided as it is (particularly with spending on GM, the banks and fixing roads) at least gets people accustomed to spending money on a grand scale and to seeing something of the magnitude of the effort needed to turn this ship. It still needs to translate into the will to create the mother of all global scientific and engineering projects (one that makes the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project combined look like entries at a junior high science fair) to make sure humanity has a future over the next few centuries.

Maybe I'm just not thinking critically enough about these matters.