All the news…
In 1988 when I quit my job at CBS News and moved into Gaza with a small video camera, the very idea of doing that was rare.
There wasn’t a lot of in-depth coverage coming out of Gaza, and it was the First Intifada, so as a result, there was a value to what I was offering.
When I came back to the US, The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour paid me $50,000 for two 7-minute reports from Gaza.
Even then, some 21 years ago, video news coverage was a relatively rare commodity and so had some value.
Later I took my camcorders to Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge and Uganda to find the first cases of AIDS. Again, the pay was good because even then there was relatively little coverage coming out of those places.
The same holds true for print in an earlier era. When there were few print journalists going to Africa, Henry Morton Stanley could extract a vast price and large readership simply for making the schlep.
The ubiqity of the web, of bloggers and of cheap video cameras has for better or for worse removed the rarity of almost any kind of reporting. As a result, both print journalists and videographers find that there is a diminishing value to their reporting from almost anywhere in the world.
It is this kind of search for rarity that drove Laura Ling and Euna Lee to North Korea, perhaps the last place on the face of the earth that carries some kind of ‘rarity’ quotient with it.
Reporting done from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Poland or even Darfur is just so common that there is almost no value to it.
This, along with Craigslist, is what is killling both newspapers and journalism in general.
It just isn’t so unusual for someone with a laptop or a camcorder to go just about anywhere in the world anymore.
News is becoming a commodity of diminishing value.
This dimunition of the value of reporting is also an opportunity to invent an entirely new kind of journalism; to effectively re-define what we mean by journalism, and what brings added value.
One of the things killing the potential value of journalism is the relatively recent notion that journalism should be ‘objective’. While I understand that this is the lifeblood of instruction in journalism schools across the country, I personally think the entire premise is wrong.
“Objectivity” is also banality.
Oatmeal.
It sucks the life and passion out of journalism and turns it into a commodity that is, by definition, replaceable.
Objectivity or balance is the death knell of journalism in an era in which everyone can participate.
Rather, I think, the future of journalism may lay in an entirely different direction and that is as an art… as opposed to a craft,
This is not so radical (well perhaps it is in light of the past 50 years), but not so much in light of journalism’s roots.
The first journalists were in fact authors, writers and novelists – literary figures exploring the world of non-fiction.
If you read Daniel DeFoe’s London In The Plague Year (1666), what you get is the first ‘journalism’, but also a great piece of literature.  Art plus reality, or rather, reality as art.
Painting also, the rendering of war scenes for example, before the era of photography, was also an attempt to marry reportage and art together as one – and they can be incredibly powerful stuff.
When photography came along, it killed portraiture, but it also opened the door to Impressionism – the freedom to use the craft of painting not to reproduce reality as such, but rather to reproduce feeling, passion, emotion or capture a moment in time.
The ubiquity of cheap technologies of recording and distribution have devalued the idea of ‘reporting’ to the point where there is almost no value to it. But that, I think, is because it is inherently barren – devoid of emotion or passion or feeling.
The future of journalism, I think, lies in another direction. The journalist as an artist; the transmission not of data, but rather of emotion.
2 Comments
Adrian Monck June 09, 2009
A Journal of the Plague Year is a work of genius, but it was written 57 years after the Great Plague. So probably more history than journalism!
Paul June 08, 2009
Flawed argument this.
Being objective doesn’t necessarily mean being dispassionate, banal or devoid of emotion. The best journalism offers color, emotion, light and shade. But it also offers balance. The best journalists paint vivid pictures, evoke atmospheres and tell good stories. But they can still achieve what we might call objectivity.
I don’t agree that objective reporting is ‘oatmeal’. Often because it’s not objective.
It’s true to say that the world is now a smaller place. That one send a laptop and camera to every corner of the planet. But the beauty of journalism is that 10 journalists can each have a different interpretation of the same event. And guess what – they can all do this and also achieve objectivity.