Craig Newmark Retweets Jay Rosen on Umair Haque's "The Nichepaper and the Failure of the Fourth Estate." Early in my career I worked at weekly newspapers and from time to time publishers and editors would fearfully and resentfully mention Craigslist, as if Craig Newmark's vision was responsible for the failure of their own imaginations. I agree with Haque that newspapers are suffering because they failed to protect the public interest, which is their job.
"If newspapers had protected the public interest like they were meant to, they would be more profitable. Everyone would be better off today — including newspapers — if newspapers had chronicled this transfer of value," Haque wrote. "Yet, by failing to protect the public interest, they helped create the conditions for the transfer of value away from people who do stuff, to people who speculate on stuff."
But this piece all but ignores the role of readers and the demand for coverage of issues that protect the public interest. I do not believe that the news industry will transform without an increased awareness of what actually constitutes "news." The same way insurance companies want drivers to wear seatbelts and take steps to educate the public about car safety, the news industry should take stock of the public's taste for complex information that can be synthesized into a meaningful plan of action.
"Yet, almost no one protected the public interest. Almost no one chronicled Wall Street's excesses. Almost no one kept watch over Washington's capture. Almost no one defended the swelling ranks of the vulnerable. Those few that did were marginalized — instead of lionized — by the industry itself."
Almost no one--but a few of us did, at various levels and for various organizations. When I wrote "
Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast," I did so for an organization called CorpWatch. My job was to investigate the FEMA contracts and corporate profiteering and I did this for six months. When the report was published, it was widely covered internationally, though most often the quote I gave in the press release was the extent of the reportage.
"Where was the fourth estate when our political, economic, and social institutions were being systematically dismantled?" Haque wonders. "What has happened to our economy parallels what Mugabe did to Zimbabwe. Was the fourth estate asleep while this happened? Like other power brokers, it was negligent — and, perhaps worse, complicit."
But not every outlet was complicit. Take the Huffington Post, which invited me to publish an
open letter to then First Lady Laura Bush after we attended conferences on two different floors of the same hotel. Hers was about creating cultural tourism, a boon for old railroad and Main Street towns that have lost almost everything else but a danger to places in the midst of losing their living culture, such as New Orleans, where the conferences took place. The one that I attended, run by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, was about how we could prevent New Orleans from becoming nothing more than a tourist town, with the costumes of extinct Mardi Gras dancers hanging in museums like dinosaur bones. I thought people would be outraged that Laura Bush didn't bother popping in despite being one floor away for two straight days with the environmental and cultural leadership of New Orleans gathered in one place.
In order for the news industry to function, the public has to understand the value of news. And I don't just mean paying for content. I mean the ability to contextualize what it means, not just in the short term, but in the long term. News outlets that can harness the energy of readers, measure it, channel it and give it a home will thrive.
"Newspapers are full of awesome journalists who are deeply ethical people who chose journalism exactly because they want to do meaningful stuff that matters," Haque wrote. Yes, many journalists are diligent, thoughtful, investigative individuals who took up the task out of a desire to protect the public interest. This was my original motivation, and it was catalyzed by
Dan Eldon. But this assumption overlooks the fact that many journalists got too cozy with the arrangement of not questioning sources, ignoring important stories that didn't have an obvious, immediate news hook, quoting too many anonymously and copying articles from competitors instead of generating news. If it is just the fault of the management that newspapers failed, then journalists are not to blame in any way for their own lazy or dangerous reportage. As the industry evolves, the relationship between reporters and the public will be critical to its success, and the hubris generated by the refusal to accept responsibility for a collective failure isn't beneficial.
"But newspaper management — like the management of nearly every other industry under the sun — traded tomorrow for today," Haque wrote.
Until the mindset that contributes to this error is undermined, it will keep happening.
