Hal O'Brien

James Warren has a piece in The Atlantic that raises the usual complaint by old-line journos about blogs:

"As I write, the headline on the lead Huffington Post story is about the Bush administration “Burrowing Political Appointees into Career Civil Service Positions.” Upon closer inspection, this Huffington Post Story turned out to be a truncated version of what was in fact a quite interesting Washington Post story. (And upon even closer inspection, the actual story made clear that this had been common practice among all administrations in their final days and cited about 50 examples of the Bill Clinton administration doing the same thing.)

The cooption of that Post story serves as a clear reminder of the extent to which newspapers serve as daily tip sheets for other media outlets."

So, what's the problem here?

The problem is, the newspapers themselves routinely crib from each other, and there's far less "original" journalism than one might think from the whingewave from older outlets.

C.J. Koch called them "matchers" in The Year of Living Dangerously, drawn directly from his experiences as a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in the 1960s. Tim Crouse called it "pack journalism," in The Boys on the Bus.

I realize I'm laying myself open to my own traditional, "If Johnny was to jump off the Empire State Building..." critique. But writing that one is shocked, shocked, I say! that bloggers feed off the press when the press itself has been feeding off each other for decades is perhaps the most lame of all possible criticisms of blogging as a threat to journalism.

Or to riff on an earlier post riffing on Clay Shirky: Have you ever seen the news story where you're told there're a bunch of reporters at an event, but not much is happening just then, so they all end up interviewing each other? I've seen that story. A lot.

Dave Winer points to this piece by Reuters, which manages, appallingly, to set up a false dichotomy in the very title:

"Storytelling, not journalism, spurs most blogs"

Look, Mr. MacMillan -- Journalism is storytelling. Mind you, it's a very specific kind of storytelling, hence the title of this post. A different way of putting this is when I point out, "There's a reason why the Journalism School of most universities gets peeled off the English Dept., and not the History Dept."

Consider the very base unit, the atom, of journalism. It is -- surprise! -- the "story".

Because journalism is told in stories, that means those stories generally follow narrative structure. There is a protagonist, an antagonist, conflict, and a story arc. There isn't always a resolution, because those darned deadlines get in the way. Which means journalism stories are also generally serials.

It is precisely for this reason that "good news" is generally underreported. Why? Well, the Wall Street Journal had a feature story (there we go again) about a decade ago, and the response of most editors ran along the lines of, "We don't report 'good news' because it's boring."

Pause and think about that.

The response wasn't, "We don't report 'good news' because that would be inaccurate." Nor was it, "We don't report 'good news' because it's unimportant."

No, the argument made was, "We don't report 'good news' because it's boring."

From a strictly factual, "unbiased" point-of-view, why would "boringness" -- that is, there is no conflict, so there is no story arc -- why would it matter?

Answer: Because news -- journalism -- is the business of telling stories.

Hell, it says so on the label.

This is why I loved Neal Stephenson's piece, a few years back in Wired, where he suggested there be cameras put in a regular grid -- say, 10km by 10km -- around the planet, and then have a cable channel that did nothing but randomly broadcast footage from those camera at about a minute apiece (I'm summarizing, and missing the fine points, I'm sure). His point was that such a channel would show just how densely concentrated "news" is, and how in the overwhelming majority of places on Earth, to the overwhelming majority of people, "news" doesn't happen.

It's just a serial, like Dickens, or King. Only, you know, non-fiction.

PS: Amusingly, Robert MacMillan, the author of Reuters' piece, has a blog of his own. I guess it's for stories that get spiked. Or he can't stop storytelling. Or something.