Some days back our host here unleashed several responses to the withering newspaper industry. As often happens when proponents of new media celebrate their ascendancy, a goodly handful ink-stained wretches typed quickly in answer, seeking at least to suggest that however stupid and venal the newspaper tycoons may well be (and have been), the collapse of their industry was not something to be wished for in a participatory democracy.
On my way to an under-six soccer game, I joined that rapid typing, for I have been a foot soldier in the print world for 32 years: typesetter, writer, editor, art director, publisher. I approach the one-year anniversary of my withdrawal from that world — the closing of a magazine which I loved — with increasing confusion. I can no longer see a future which makes sense.
And, if you'll bear with me, I have issues.
Kos himself responded to a couple of my notes, and not kindly. I do not have a thin skin, and am not averse to the brusque exchange of ideas. Beyond that, Mr. Moulitsas has erected a new media structure which appears to work, which has promoted him into the punditsphere, which evidently pays his bills. And so I pay attention.
And I have some questions.
(1) We play here, at daily kos, in a two-tiered society. As best I understand things, main page contributors are paid, while the rest of us are not. Why not? Once a week high-impact diaries are listed, so clearly the technology exists to measure the value of contributions (and mine are negligible, to be sure), so that theoretically some portion of the revenues produced by our labors at this site could be shared.
Let me be clear: I raise this principally as a theoretical argument, not as a practical one. It is not my intent (nor would it be within my capacity) to stir a revolution against our host. Indeed, as a serial entrepreneur I understand and respect how capitalism works, and I consent to come here, to play by these rules.
Which, by the way, are clearly stated in the FAQs (albeit in the context of disallowing idiotic conspiracy theories to come to roost here):
Doesn't the First Amendment give me the right to talk about whatever I want here?
No. Daily Kos is owned by kos. The servers are his. He pays the bandwidth charges. He makes the rules; we are here as his guests. If he decides tomorrow that anyone not posting in iambic pentameter will be banned, your options are either to brush up on your poetry skills or find/start another forum.
But am I alone in thinking that there are ethical challenges (a) in creating a liberal media environment in which the workers are not compensated and (b) in arguing for the destruction of the old media environment in which the workers were compensated?
Surely commenters here would be shouted down should they celebrate the collapse of the UAW and the destruction of that industry, would they not?
(2) Are proponents of new media really uninterested in grammar, accuracy, and fact-checking?
Here's part of a down-thread response (yes, to me, but that's not the point) by kos from the discussion mentioned above:
As for copy-editing...whatever. Writers can fix their mistakes later. And fact checking? Let the audience/readers help out with that. This stupid assembly-line view of news reporting is obsolete.
Later...in the blogosphere, later is never, isn't it? Isn't the life cycle of a blog on this site somewhere between an hour and a day? So if I make a factual error in this post, and X number of people read it, then correct it later on, those initial readers are apt never to know that I was wrong. Or to know it, think less of me as a writer/blogger, and not know that I corrected it. Or to repeat the error.
Isn't one of the common complaints against the daily newspaper that it can rush to get a story wrong on the front page, ruining someone's reputation, and correct it days later in a paragraph buried on an interior page?
Beyond that...why aren't there copy-editors on the internet? (At least on the main page here, where I regularly see typographical and spelling errors that seem never to be corrected.) Because it slows the process down? Really? Good copy-editors have been working on daily newspapers for decades. Or is it the simple labor cost which is being done away with? (For the record, I've never been a copy editor. I suck at it. I depend on good copy-editors to watch my back, and mourn their absence in this and other spaces I frequent.)
Past even those technical issues, how are we meant to trust the future of the information age to a system which doesn't care about accuracy?
(3) How will journalism be conducted absent its present commercial patrons? Let me concede the point that many daily papers are wretched, have been consolidated and bled dry by large corporations, have ceded much of their responsibility to television or the blogosphere or to sheer indifference.
What is argued is that citizen journalists will replace professionals, and that investigative journalism will flourish minus the tiresome nigglings of editors and fact-checkers.
(a) By its nature, good investigative journalism takes a lot of words. We have just come through the Bush era in which science and knowledge were devalued, in which the gray zones of knowledge were disallowed. Let's not create a future in which that is the norm, eh? But the internet is not, in general, conducive to long bits of writing. Some years back The New York Times noted that comparatively few readers turned to the second (much less third or fourth) page of their online stories.
(b) Investigative reporting is time-consuming. Who's going to pay for that? Or is journalism to become the new province of trust-funders? Sure, various organizations can be found to underwrite certain kinds of stories. But who's going to cover the school board? Not in a big market like Oakland, where the pittance online advertising pays might be enough to support such an extravagance, but where I live, in a county of 20,000 people, of whom maybe a couple thousand might periodically care about what's going on in their schools? Newspapers, who pay their writers to work on a handful of stories simultaneously, can theoretically afford to send somebody to each public meeting (or at least they should), to track down stories which may front page only once every year or two. Sure a local citizen might take that on in the blogosphere for a year or two, but at some point their child will graduate and they'll lose the incentive. Or they'll get a job. Or whatever. The unpaid citizen bloggers is not necessarily a renewable resource.
(c) Investigative journalism can be dangerous and can place the journalist/blogger in direct combat with, say, Monsanto or the U.S. Government. Provided that writer can win over his/her editor and publisher, there's a chance a big media company can hold their own in that setting. I sure can't. Threaten me with a lawsuit, and I'm done. Had my magazine been sued, almost certainly the cost of defending -- regardless the merits of the case -- would have put us out of business.
(d) There are legal protections in place for professional journalists, and some bloggers have met that threshhold. But surely we do not mean to extend those protections to everybody with a website? Do we?
Mindful that I've already written too many words, let me add one last question, and have done.
(4) An enormous transfer of power is now taking place. Where once the monies from recorded music fell into the hands of record labels, now those funds enrich the makers of the hardware which plays free music, hardware which is designed to be replaced every 18 months or so. The workers -- the musicians -- are no better off, and may be worse off in the long run. The monies made from writing -- whether we're talking about writing blogs for sport, or the Kindle -- are now enriching ISPs and the makers of computers and computer software, instead of enriching publishers. The workers -- the writers -- are getting screwed.