fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Donica Mensing | 05.12.2009

Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, wrote a column for the Miami Herald yesterday titled, “What readers want vs. what they need.” It represents in one concise package the cultural divide that is preventing so many newsrooms from progressing.

This column neatly identifies some of the tenets of journalism as it has been practiced, in particular the relationship between journalist and the audience. What are the tenets of this tradition?

(1) That the audience doesn’t want or appreciate serious journalism. Wasserman argues that it’s problematic for journalists to find out what people want from the news and then do journalism about those stories. Why? Because “for journalists the hitch has always been that news, if done honestly, is routinely unwelcome…”

Hence, the paradox: If all you do is give the public what it thinks it wants, you aren’t doing your job. But if you ignore those wishes, you won’t have a job.

What does he think the public thinks it wants? He doesn’t say, but whatever it is, it’s not what journalists are paid to do. He does mention: “That’s not to say readers don’t want to be amused or don’t like reading the comics and hearing about celebrity bust-ups or money-saving recipes.” So tenet number one is that readers are most interested in things like comics and celebrities, not real journalism.

(2) The audience that matters are the people in power. When Wasserman asserts that journalism is “routinely unwelcome” it is difficult to believe that he’s asserting that people really don’t want to know about government corruption. Is he saying that people don’t want to know that their doctors are prescribing drugs pushed by the pharmaceutical industry? They really don’t care that the school test scores in their neighborhood are lower than in the rest of the city? They could care less that bus service is being cut back and they really don’t want to know how regional climate change might affect their economic future?

If we assume that he would have difficulty arguing this point, then who else might find journalism “routinely unwelcome”? Answer: People in power, who might be the target of some of this reporting. Might Wasserman really be thinking of sources when he writes about unwelcome journalism? If he is conflating “audience” with “sources” then he is expressing a common mindset among journalists. Who else are they writing for? The ignorant public who would rather read comics than carefully crafted investigative packages? No. Many journalists are writing to sources, the people on their beats who they routinely come in contact with. Journalists have a circle of sources who cheer some stories and hate others and it is that dynamic that is the focus of many journalists’ conception of audience.

(3) The role of the public is to react to what journalists publish. Wasserman says of the audience: “And they aren’t passive receptacles: They’ll make vigorous use of new media feedback channels to dispute, correct, redirect and enrich the news they get.” In other words, the source of information and reporting is the journalist. The public is in the position of reacting and arguing. The journalist selects the news worthy of publishing and then the audience’s role is to react via new media.

(4) The public looks to journalists as trusted sources to tell them what’s going on. Wasserman says:

“people look to journalists for a special service — keeping them on top of what they need to know. They can’t say exactly what that is, any more than journalists know in the morning what they’ll report that day. But they trust the news source to tell them.

Wasserman believes that people trust journalists. The audience might not like what reporters produce, but they trust them nevertheless. The audience believes that journalists have their best interests at heart and will voluntarily remember to attend to what the journalists publishes.

(5) Journalists understand what their communities need and they shouldn’t ask anyone else for advice. In other words: “After 160-plus years, even without surveys a great newspaper like the Chicago Tribune should have a pretty good idea about what its city needs.” Wasserman believes that journalists intuitively understand their communities and can produce what the audience in the community most needs. To consult with the audience however, is a compromise of independence and is unnecessary.

(6) The audience is a mass audience and journalism is delivered via mass media. Wasserman doesn’t say this explicitly, but underlying his description of the journalist-audience relationship is an assumption of an undifferentiated audience, a mass public that has base desires and a paternalistic journalism that has the role of informing this mass public that doesn’t understand what it really needs.

These are some of the primary tenets that have produced the church of journalism as we know it. Wasserman argues that this tradition has served us well and should continue. Anything else might be considered “unethical,” a violation of the religiously held principles that have guided the best newsrooms of the past decades. He doesn’t even mention that there might be alternative ways to view what he is preaching.

Yet journalists and the public are engaged in a theological debate that vigorously questions some of the tenets outlined above. The tenets of “reform journalism” are evolving and mostly unformed, but some of the fundamental premises are clearly taking shape. These could be pulled from many different places, but Emily Bell is the most recent to put them in cogent compelling lecture, “Lecture to Falmouth.”

Her description of the journalist’s relationship to the audience is far from that described by Wasserman. It is a tradition shaped by Gillmor, Rosen, Jarvis and others:

Your readers and audience know and see more than you ever could. Find ways to let them add their knowledge.

….we cannot do journalism to the best of our abilities without the
audience and they cannot project stories as well as we can. We need them,
they need us…..

In this version of journalism, the public is a partner with the journalist, not an ignorant mass that can’t be trusted to know what it needs. Reform journalism also recognizes that journalism operates within a network of multiple publics, of differentiated audiences with overlapping interests and chaotic (for now) patterns of media use:

…Any communication organisation needs an audience. So find one. If you build it they won’t come because they are busy elsewhere. So go where the audiences is.

The idea that we can shepherd viewers or readers or listeners into one place at one time is gone – we all consume our news comment and analysis through many, many different sources.

Wasserman’s objection to the surveys sent by the Chicago Tribune is a reaction informed by a set of traditions that are slowing giving way to another set of practices, born of experience and experimentation. The sooner we acknowledge this transition in journalism, the better equipped our news organizations and journalism schools will be to lead and adapt to a future that “doesn’t resemble the past” (to quote Emily Bell).