Remaking the News

When I was young, our family subscribed to two newspapers. Not that there was much choice locally or nationally. I didn’t listen to the radio and we didn’t have a TV until I was in my mid-teens. TV news was read by newscasters with little supporting video; I found it boring and preferred the newspaper – mainly for the comics and the sports section.

Nowadays, I consume my news through the Internet. My main topic of interest is world affairs, and I typically read a variety of international sources – Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, Channel News Asia. I occasionally read articles from The New York Times (my spouse has a subscription), sometimes CNN, and I nibble on NPR and a smorgasbord of online articles that catch my eye. I rarely stream video as I much prefer reading text at my own pace. I avoided Buzzfeed. My social media usage is low, and I almost never click on any news links in that stream.

The death of traditional news media has been making the news regularly over the last decade or two. Fake news and alternative facts have muddied the waters, as a plethora of news ‘sources’ vie for your eyeballs on the Internet. Are there guardians of the truth any longer? Were there ever? What is truth anyway?

In her new book Merchants of Truth, Jill Abramson juxtaposes the stories of four news outfits: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed and Vice Media. Four different philosophies guided the rise of each, but as you would find in any good story, they face various travails and challenges, and each has evolved with the times to stay fresh, to stay afloat, and to keep you coming back to them. This is where things get interesting.

Before the heated competition of the Internet, the venerable New York Times kept its business arm separate from news content. It was considered a conflict of interest for the ad and revenue folks to strategize with the content folks – the journalists and editors, the marquee defenders and guardians of the truth. Buzzfeed’s strategy was to first steer eyeballs to its web content – by hiring quick-hack editors to speedily repackage original content from sources such as the New York Times, but with catchier headlines and ledes. Costs are low because you don’t need to pay journalists to find original news-breaking content. Once you have the eyeballs, you can steer ad revenue to your site.

The effectiveness of these upstart strategies, particularly in cooperation with Facebook and gaming Google page-rank, was devastating to traditional newspapers – many of which have closed shop in the last two decades. Vice Media’s early focus on video content, and the blending of content and advertising from auteurs such as Spike Jonze, further hastened the economic precipice facing traditional media. Where the eyeballs are concentrated is where the advertisers flock. Traditional media, having built its empire on the willingness of advertisers to cough up huge sums of money for ad placement, was thrown into crisis as revenue dried up. It was simply too expensive to maintain a stable of journalists and editors to keep up the delivery of new content. But then new media realized that to thrive, they needed to generate news-worthy content, and they began to add old-school type journalists to their ranks.

The death of traditional colleges and universities has also been making the news regularly over the last decade or two. Is it getting too expensive to maintain a stable of professors and administrative staff to keep up the delivery of content? Worse, isn’t most of it just old recycled content? Users are supposedly paying to ‘learn’ the content. So how does one learn anyway? Reading complex material is hard work. The more background you have, the easier it becomes, but the early stages can be tough-going. Perhaps if the material is presented in an ‘interesting’ way, it becomes ‘easier’ to learn; at least that’s the premise of new media’s approach: repackage and jazz things up with video.

I dream of the magic bullet that will make my students understand chemistry. They dream of it too. The content of a standard college chemistry curriculum has been known for many, many years. You’d think that our various leaps in media technology would have ushered in a golden age of learning osmotically – efficiently imbibing new content into our consciousness. But new content doesn’t stick unless conceptually mapped to old content, made and remade in the hard work of learning. Complex content is even more challenging with layers upon layers of knowledge, built hierarchically and dynamically, in our three-pound brains in a process that remains mysterious.

If as a society we are no longer willing to do the hard work of complex learning, or to take time to understand the complex issues of today, we are in trouble. Subsisting on listicles, personality quizzes, and celebrity voyeurism – all excellent eyeball-attention-grabbing moneymakers for ad revenue – will lead us down the road to idiocracy. Perhaps that is one takeaway message from Merchants of Truth. The merchants may end up defining truth. Or perhaps ill-defining it. Remaking the news remakes more than just the news.