Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Be it: If news were food it would taste like whipped air

Published on 09/04/07
by Zac Echola

I’m going to go out on a limb here and piss some people off by saying news is stupid. It has to be stupid because people are stupid (not you, of course; people in general).

Here’s how a modern newsroom generally works:

Step 1

A news tip is given to a producer, reporter, editor, or a monkey at a typewriter. These tips come from the public, PR firms, organizations, police blotters, general news releases and (increasingly) other news organizations. BIG SECRET: There’s not a ton of digging going on in America’s newsrooms.

Step 2

Some well meaning person in a suit decides if that tip will lead to an article, you, the reader needs to know about. Generally, news has to fit into one or more of these categories:

  1. Timeliness Is this THE BIG SCOOP?
  2. Prominence How many other well-meaning people in suits are involved?
  3. Proximity How close to home is the news? (Note: only about a dozen newspaper journalists are in Iraq right now, probably because its so far away.
  4. Conflict Could this be a big fight?
  5. Magnitude Could it blow your mind or face off?
  6. Impact Does it hit hard, or like a little girl?
  7. Oddity Does it involve Anna Nicole Smith, a cruise ship, or a squirrel that can water ski?

Step 3

Somebody writes a story about the news tip. They ask a few questions here and there. They write the most general part first and the most specific stuff last. An editor checks it over for any glaringly factual errors or typos and then it’s off the whatever medium it belongs in: radio, TV, Internet, or newspaper.

Rinse and repeat ad infinitum, with the occasional wacky idea or investigative piece.

Step 4

The final piece, or at least a truncated version of it, gets shipped off to a consortium like the Associated Press, where other news organizations pilfer the news, possibly rewrite it and pretty much claim it as their own ad infinitum. Without ever giving credit to the originator of the piece, mind you.

Why this system sucks eggs

The outcome of news orgs using the above system to decide what is news and what isn’t news, and what happens when news orgs share news with the like of the Associated Press, is that they create an echo chamber of information.

And, since the news is a business competing for eyeballs, whoever beats a hot news item into your face the longest and hardest seems to garner the highest ratings. Gross.

It’s basically digg with suits in offices instead of nerds in basements.

The problem with echo chambers is that they say the same thing over and over and over and over again. The message itself because less valuable because it’s become a mass-produced commodity. One hundred people saying the exact same thing is much less valuable than one person saying something else, because once I’ve already gleaned the information I need from one or two sources, the rest of the sources become irrelevant to me.

Few people wish to read basically the same news article over and over and over again, unless that information is extremely important to them. Diminishing returns applies to news as much as it applies to business economics.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the majority of news found in newspapers contains such valuable information to most people they’re willing to face the echo chamber for long periods of time.

News is not an island, but it should be

Here’s a problem with journalism. If you were to hand me a newspaper and strip away all the datelines and the masthead, I’d have a tough time telling you where the paper was from. I wouldn’t have a tough time because of the lack of datelines and mastheads. I’d have a tough time because almost all newspapers are identical in the way they report the news.

Hardly a paper exists that accurately reflects the place it’s located, the people that read it and the values of their community.

What newspapers should be doing: reporting more news, not less. What they should be doing: reporting the same thing that the competition is reporting. And while they’re at it, they should just plain dump the AP.

If I live in Minneapolis, Minn., my newspaper should provide as much local news to me as possible. The national news shouldn’t be the same stuff that I can read or see anywhere else. That isn’t to say there only needs to be one reporter in Iraq for all of news media, rather the news that comes out of Iraq should affect me as a Minnesotan from Minneapolis if I’m reading the Minneapolis newspaper.

Since most newspapers aren’t in the national news game anyway, beyond AP coverage, there’s no differentiation between the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Bumfuck, Nowhere Daily News. Which means that the AP coverage the paper is paying for becomes much, much less valuable on the Web, since it’s EVERYWHERE.

If newspapers want to strengthen their product, they need to report more news from their circulation area than ever before. And yes, that means covering the kid soccer games and all the other shit that is traditionally “beneath” the newspaper. The news might not be valuable to America-as-a-whole, but you know what, it’s highly valuable to the people who your advertisers want to sell to and, who, quite frankly, aren’t America-as-a-whole.

The simple fact is, people are not as stupid as we’d like to believe. If they were, they’d stare at the same stupid content all day and newspapers, TV stations, et. al would be seeing huge upturns in their audiences. Not slow declines.

The end. Or is it?

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