October 20, 2009 Special Issue

Media in the fast lane

Deciphering the role of journalists in a high-tech craze

by Tu Thanh Ha

Tu Thanh Ha is a reporter with The Globe and Mail.

Before Google and the iPhone, if you needed to check trivia at night, you called a friendly media person. On Twitter over 75 per cent of users have 10 or fewer followers and also that over 75 per cent of users sent fewer than 10 tweets

Along with the first broadcasts of MuchMusic, the Reagan presidency and really tacky hairstyles, the 1980s were memorable to me because they were marked by profound changes in a small dusty office at Concordia's Hall building where I wasted time rather than attending classes. There, The Link was in the midst of a digital revolution.

During my first years at Concordia, putting out a newspaper meant manual typewriters, Liquid Paper and X-Acto knives. Then, The Link acquired desktop computers and typesetting equipment.

Twice a week, amid a whirring of miniature gears, the typesetting machine churned out our stories on smooth rolls of photographic paper, in sharp, elegant swirls of seriffed type.

Soon, the typesetter made way for desktop publishing. Meanwhile, at the Canadian University Press, the national cooperative of student papers, the news service was in the midst of switching from mailing a weekly package of printed articles to posting them on a computer bulletin board—a BBS. Remember them?

It was new, it was exciting. It was empowering because we no longer were shackled to a print shop or a typesetting shop. Deadlines could be extended. Stories didn’t need to be retyped as they migrated from one support to another.

This process was so arduous and so high maintenance that being a student journalist was a long-running, burned-out haze as we struggled to learn, operate and maintain that growing array of new gizmos. And we did it for free.

This reminiscence might strike you as being as irrelevant as the recollection of a time when the Sir George-Loyola shuttle was just a minibus and a parking lot sat where the Webster library is now.

But it was my first taste of the highs and lows of new technologies.

These advances brought new promises, opened new doors, but they demanded more from us. Technology made the jobs of paid typesetters redundant and let us, volunteer student journalists, produce egregiously ugly products while we learned to master our new toys.
In those days in Montreal, if you wanted to look at an old paper, you went to the library. If you wanted to read a foreign paper, you trudged to Metropolitan News, a store off Dorchester Square.

Imagine my surprise when I interned at the Ottawa Citizen and discovered a magical terminal connected to a database of everything the paper had published in recent years. There was also a database of American newspapers but—ooooh—you had to be a librarian with a special password.

Accessing information was so restricted that, while a reporter on the night desk, I would get calls from barflies who wanted to settle a bet. Before Google and the iPhone, if you needed to check trivia at night, you called a friendly media person.

And so today, we journalists are no longer the gatekeepers of trivia or old newspapers. Raw data and personal opinions are cluttering the bandwidth, waiting for anyone to access them.
If greater access is a premise of the digital age, a corollary to that is the age-old fact that there will always be a need for brokers, guides and helpers to steer people through the forest.
For all the hand-wringing, these changes have been healthy for journalism. The lazy reporters can’t just work leisurely, regurgitating yesterday’s news for tomorrow’s paper.

Today, it is no longer enough to tell people the When, Where or What. Journalists need to tell people Why, How, or, better yet, “What Does This Mean?”

Do you feel like reading parliamentary transcripts or financial filings every night? Do you feel like spending the day watching live video feeds from of press conferences, court hearings or shareholder meetings? Handling raw data is like drinking from a garden hose; it’ll keep coming until you can’t ingest anymore. Already in 1971, the economist Herbert Simon warned that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Even as a professional newsgatherer, I appreciate the work of people who can connect the dots for me, who can tease out patterns where I only see confusion.

I find suggestions that vigilant citizens or dedicated hobbyists will fill in the gap for journalists to be, well, premature wishful thinking.

Is relying on cheap labour or volunteers a form of democratic improvement? The Silicon Valley researcher Niklas Damiris says the digital age brings hopes of a new Athenian Agora, a place for participatory form of democracy.

Yet, go look at the comments page of any newspaper or broadcast company. Take in the churlish hectoring, logical fallacies and conspiracy theorizing. It won’t remind you of ancient Athens but of an infernal scene from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

And those are just a minority. Most people, I suspect, have lives and jobs and children that restrict the time they can spend in front of a computer screen. The data analysis firm RJ Metrics found that on Twitter over 75 per cent of users have 10 or fewer followers and that over 75 per cent of users sent fewer than 10 tweets.

The new media are good at reaching large populations, providing sweeping amounts of information, and are great tools for people who want to spot emerging trends or get a sense of the current zeitgeist. They have difficulty, however, teasing out what is hidden or only known to a few people—the fraud artists, the records buried in court archives, the opaque procurement contracts that hide slush funds and kickback schemes.

Furthermore, while the Internet is great at tracking what I want to know, it isn’t so great at finding what I ought to know.

There’s only so many times one cares to read about the latest celebrity trivia or the latest viral video on YouTube before feeling like the universe has turned into a colossal supermarket magazine rack, crowding ever more computer servers and fibre optic lines.

Now that we have cut out the complacency, the paternalism of old-style journalism, it is time to rediscover the merits of investigative journalism, of public service journalism and of trustworthy, value-added content.

Journalism is not high science. You don't need a license or a degree and a non-professional can venture into it, but it can be costly and time-consuming. Hence, there is a lasting need for journalists.

So will journalists become like gas lamplighters, people whose craft became irrelevant with the advent of electricity? Think of our trade instead as something similar to the restaurant business. Even though most people can cook, there's still a need for restaurants, because they’re convienient. Because it’s good to have people who dedicate themselves full-time to their craft. Because the better professionals can do things that are hard to replicate yourself.
But I know of no restaurant that can remain in business by handing out only free food. Even Clay Shirky, everyone’s favourite doomsayer, looking at his hometown paper, notes that journalists are “critical to the orderly functioning of that town” but happen to be “trapped inside a burning business model.”

If anything, the current financial crisis suggests that when it comes to critical and complex matters, leaving things in a laissez-faire state may not be the best option.

“The financial crisis we're living through [...] shows that more than ever we need a choice of high-quality news providers which are confident in their ability to explain complex [and] important issues in a clear and accessible way,” the BBC business editor Robert Peston noted in a lecture this summer.

“We have to ask whether there is any rational basis for believing that withdrawing all regulation and subsidy from the news market would be any less costly to our way of life.”

Tu Thanh Ha is a reporter with The Globe and Mail.