Professional journalism and the art of shark hunting
April 30, 2010 4:51 AM
By Andrew McGill
SOURCE
Ever hunt a shark? I haven't either. But I've seen movies.
Sharks aren't just the deadliest hunters in the sea -- they're also stealthy, voraciously hungry and relentless in their pursuit of prey.
Indeed, a single shark can shut down a sleepy seaside community for an entire summer, leaving devastation and mangled bodies in its wake.
OK, maybe that's just "Jaws." But you get the point.
Journalism is changing. More accurately, journalism is declining.
The money isn't the same. Newspaper staffs nationwide have fallen to what they were in the 1970s, when people thought it was a good idea to write headlines in Helvetica.
Circulation has dipped too, as has overall profitability.
By the time you read this, my bankrupt hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, might have a new owner.
It's a tough time to be optimistic about the traditional model.
That's why people are talking about "social media," one of those harmless phrases spin-tested to appear innocuous, like "climate change" or "collateral damage." It's raised a number of children-- "crowdsourcing," "community engagement," "citizen reporting."
Proponents say the decline of traditional media is long overdue. Journalists held themselves above their audience, they say, making themselves out to be experts in fields they knew nothing about.
Editors were jealous gatekeepers, selecting the news that was to be published on their own whims.
The Internet has leveled the playing field, rightfully raising ordinary people to the level of professional reporters, giving them the tools to force their voices above that of the staid mainstream media.
That philosophy has given birth to plenty of news sites based on social reporting, hosting limited staffs that rely on social networking technology to curate a report from what people are talking about online. The Drudge Report -- wait, THE DRUDGE REPORT -- was one of the first, but it's been joined by The Huffington Post, The Daily Kos, PerezHilton.com, and so on. The latest is the recently named TBD.com, a Washington, D.C.-based local website that is hiring "community hosts" to work with readers and bloggers to get the news out.
Let's jump back to the ocean for a minute. These operations are small, but they cast huge, huge nets. Something goes up on Twitter? Boom -- posted. Someone records a presidential candidate making a gaffe? They've got their Google alerts primed and ready. I imagine them as tuna trawlers, a dot on the ocean, throwing their nets wide to catch whatever passes through. And believe me, they catch plenty.
But they'll never catch a shark.
Walter Reed Army Medical Center was a shark. For years, the overworked facility provided shoddy care to returning veterans, housing them in quarters plagued with rats and cockroaches, forcing some to pull "guard duty" to clear out the drug dealers hanging around outside.
Pedophile priests and the church administrators who hid them are sharks. The story broke in Boston, but it quickly spread throughout the world, uprooting our ideas of the sanctity of the church.
To this day, more and more is still being discovered about exactly how much the Catholic Church knew.
There are more sharks than you can count.
Dirty politicians. Pirates in the boardroom. Corrupt cops. Crooked judges. Even tax assessors. Sharks are dangerous, fast -- and nearly impossible to kill with a net.
To catch a shark, you need a shark hunter. You need a bigger boat. You need a guy who spent his or her whole life pursuing sharks, dogging them, wearing them out and moving in for the kill.
In short, you need a reporter.
You'll never catch a shark by following them on Twitter.
Your part-time community blogger doesn't have the time to sniff out their blood trail.
Crowdsourcing? The crowd doesn't even know what these things look like.
I'll never believe journalism should become an amateur sport. There's value in having a person whose full-time job is to make his or her own phone calls, to follow leads, to run down the story. Some news won't come to you. Sometimes, you have to hunt it.
I'm not willing to trust the tuna trawlers to keep Amity Island safe.
And new media -- well, let's just say I'm steering clear of the beaches.
Ben - I've been sadly pondering the ragged deterioration of Journalism as a profession and the resultant effect on society. I saw this column and felt it examined the problem succinctly. I mourn the slow passing of traditional reporting.
