I went to see Joanne Silberner at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation tonight. Silberner is an elite American journalist who reported public health stories, most notably for NPR.
The title of her talk was “Global health and the media: what’s news and what’s not, and why.” The audience were statisticians in public health and the purpose of the talk was to give information to them so that if they ever met with a journalist, then they would have background on the kinds of information which would be most likely to be published media. This is a very useful topic for discussion, but the irony that I felt in the room was that Silberner, a woman who had every reason to be confident in a lifetime of enviable journalistic success and recognition, spent an uncomfortable amount of time defending herself and her industry as she perceived it. It seemed to me that she was feeling the pains of competition with new media, and she had decided for herself that her reaction to it would be rejection of it and competition against it rather than embracing it. The things she said go against the ethics and customs of my generation so thoroughly that she seemed alien to me.
I am grateful for her talk and insight and I have a lot of respect for what she has done, and she did say useful things which I did not know and which were insightful. However, I like blogging about the conflict between people opposed to using computer technology and people who enjoy it, so that is my focus.
Silberner mostly talked about newspapers, but some of her advice was about preparing articles for journals or news or radio broadcasts. At the beginning of her talk she said, “Do not get me started about bloggers” and she said it in a way that I interpreted to mean that she felt bloggers were so far removed from journalism that they were beneath discussion for the evening.
She stated that “news is something which happens to editors,” meaning that if editors have a personal bias in their lives because of their personal experience, then they are more likely to write about this. While I can accept that as editor’s behavior, that fact mattered a lot more in the days of newspapers and magazines when people read what was placed in front of them. Nowadays I get my news from an aggregator so I would say that news increasingly is what happens to readers. She gave advice about establishing relationships between the PR offices of organizations and journalists, and this seems like a good idea, but not on the basis she was suggesting.
She talked about other similar issues which take into account a lowest common denominator – the news publishes fear pieces, the news will not publish numbers or statistics, and the news will not publish things which require technical background. All of these issues assume that the readers have no choice in what they consume, and speaking for myself I am age 31 and have never lived in a world where highly specialized news tailored to my interests was not always delivered to me. I am aware of the kind of reporting which happens in America which ties all issues to a political interest and feeds a demographic which seems to me to be scientifically and technically illiterate and also ignorant of global affairs, but I do not participate in that subculture. I regret that Silberner ever had to cater to those tastes, because she is brilliant, but I could not help but feel that she did not realize that because of computer advances she did not have to live in that strange world of having intelligent things to say but being obliged to dumb everything down.
When she took questions after her talk I was feeling dumbfounded. For the first question, someone (not me!) asked her to talk about bloggers and they specifically asked why she had said that the audience should not have her start talking about bloggers. She said the predictable old line – they are not trained, they have no editorial review, and they have no system for proving integrity. What I felt was missing from her answer was a critique of blogging as a medium – to me blogging is a radical new way of communicating, but my understanding of her perception was that blogging was a system by means of which new competitors pour low-quality product into her familiar existing medium. I felt like she was missing the point entirely. I found her twitter profile and she uses it irregularly a few times a month. I took a picture of a recent conversation she had.
She said that most journalists have become “content providers” and she expressed sadness at the trend. I also think it is regretful, but I think that I see something see does not – another class of people outside of the social circle of old journalists are becoming the new journalists, and if any of them reached out to the old guard I think that the old ones would tend to say that all journalists are being laid off rather than say that many journalists are getting replaced by workers for other forms of media.
It is my opinion that the quality of media content has never been greater and the quantity of the same has never grown so fast.