A look at the underbelly of TV journalism

And this time, not from the U.S., but from Canada.

Oh, Canada! Could it be so bad as Kai Nagata (formerly of the CBC) laid out in his 3,000-word post on why he quit as CTV's Quebec City bureau chief?

The most quoted quote from Nagata, 24: So I didn’t quit my job because I felt frustrated or that my career was peaking. I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life. The ends no longer justified the means.

But here's also another:
I have serious problems with the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years. But as a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. If I invented a better mouse trap, they owned the patent. If I wrote a novel, they got a cut. Rhymes on the back of a napkin? Bellmedia is hip to the jive, yo. And if I ever said anything out of line with my position as an “objective” TV reporter, they had grounds to fire me. I had a sinking feeling when I first read that clause, but I signed because I was 23 and I wanted the job. Now I want my opinions back.

We can now cue the ongoing and seemingly never-ending debate about whether postmodern journalism can exist without an acknowledgment that objectivity is dead - long live transparency and knowing where the journalist is coming from.
 
In a nutshell, Nagata trots out many of the same criticisms we've often heard about shallowness, chasing the royals when there is "real news," ideology passing for news, etc. Read it and make your own decision. From my days in TV and my continuing association with those in that end of the business, it certainly rings true, but is it too strident, or perhaps not strident enough?

The CBC follows up with a chat with Nagata and a link to a slightly snarky response from a National Post reporter. (In essence: What? Nagata discovers journalism is a business that has some boundaries? Heavens me.)

INMA's Wilkinson: Culture trumps strategy

Earl Wilkinson, head of the International Newsmedia (formerly Newspaper) Marketing Association, professes surprise at the theme coming out of the INMA World Congresss - that changing newsroom culture trumps strategy.

Or, to put it another way, all the paywalls in the world and all the gimmicks and marketing strategies don't mean scratch if your organization continues to project the kind of thinking about deadlines, story forms, priorities, incentives, etc., that had become standard in newsrooms for about 45 years (I say 45 because, really, it was from the 1960s on that we began having that strange confluence of factors that produced halcyon days for newsrooms until the bottom fell out in this decade).

I like Wilkinson. I've chatted him up at j-prof conventions, and he was the main force behind trying to get AEJMC to produce more research relevant to newsrooms (though whether news managers ever read what was there already and was pretty damning was always open to question).

But forgive me if I suggest that INMA and its members are coming a little late to the party. Research on newsroom sociology and culture has for decades, and certainly in the past decade, pointed out the corrosive effect of existing culture and the tremendous challenges - but also urgency - needed to change it.

Here are Wilkinson's take-aways:

1. Separate the business model from culture in print vs. digital discussions. Or, as he puts it: The emerging consensus from New York was that a digital business model can't replace a print business model. Instead, the digital model must be additive to the print model — if for no other reason than the inclusion of print is part of a publisher's USP vs. media competitors. I suspect he'll get his share of blowback on that - that it still elevates the declining print model to the detriment of digital. But in the context he puts it - that it is a way to differentiate a full-service media organization - it can make some sense.
2. Encourage speed, place small bets, be willing to fail (fast). How long have those watching the evolution of digital been saying this? At least since 2006 and API's "Newspaper Next" project. So far the results have been, shall we say, less than stunning. I'll believe it when I really see a newsroom culture that allows failure. In fact, if there is one defining point for me, it is that. But that raises all sorts of questions. For instance, can there be journalism fail as part of that? If so, to what extent will it be tolerated? It seems to me that's the tough nut. Is it desirable or even possible to have a split organizational personality: Well, yes, you can fail on the "business" side in the name of taking chances. But on the journalism side, nope. It's that fear of failure that makes news organizations still even reluctant to handle corrections with the comprehensiveness and alacrity that digital allows. It still pervades many newsrooms, and, like a poison gas, it seeps through all layers of the organization.
3. Transparency will change your mindset. Let's just say Wilkinson's concern with transparency is not quite the same as others writing in the same space.  His seems to be a marketing perspective. The [Financial Times] paywall allowed for a transparency in viewing its audience and segmenting its readers based on their engagement — in turn, driving its audience and advertising strategy in ways once thought unimaginable. INMA is hearing this repeatedly from publishers who are implementing paywalls. While the user data is overwhelming, there are mind-bending lessons that are emerging from people willing to pay for digital content — distinctly different lessons than from people only willing to view your content if it's free. Let me put it this way: people willing to pay for digital content are not reading what you are producing. Your differentiators online are different from your differentiators in print which are different from your differentiators on the mobile.
4. Relentlessly focus on differentiators. Changing the corporate culture to focus on strategic differentiators and cut away non-differentiators was another recurring conference theme. Actually, as coldly marketing as that sounds, I rather think it's something important journalists need to think about - how is what I am doing different from the others and how does it bring utility to users/readers? It's utility that sells in digital, rarely content alone.

All in all, if this means executives are coming around to the idea that you can't a) dictate culture (or strategy, for that matter) from the top down and b) you can't just bolt new ideas onto existing newsroom cultures, then progress is being made.

Catching up - White House plagiarist and other things

As usual, am shoveling as fast as I can, but not fast enough. While this week was spent getting a presentation ready, looking at specs for digital signage in the j-school, assembling midsemester exams, writing a column, etc., some things got by:

• Nancy Nall found a columnist at the Fort Wayne News Sentinel whose wording was amazingly similar to another person's. Tim Goeglein admitted the copying. Goeglein is the White House liaison to religious organizations. Or make that "was." He resigned yesterday over the brouhaha. (Disclosure: I used to work at the competing paper of the joint agency, the Journal-Gazette.) Way to go Nancy!
• In the middle of the John McCain-did-he-or-didn't-he dustup with the New York Times last weekend, David Leavitt passed along a nice post about "why we need newspapers and why their business model is struggling." The CliffsNotes version: Who but well-endowed newsrooms such as those at newspapers will be there to dig out the tough questions and seek answers? (OK, we'll stipulate that a lot of people disagree that the Times actually did that, but that misses the point here.) And they are struggling because of exactly what the Times did not do -- be transparent. As Leavitt writes: It's not good enough anymore to just write a story and walk away from it. The New York Times should have set up online chat session with the reporters. And they should have printed a sidebar explaining: how they learned about the allegations, when they started investigating them, why they waited until Feb. 20 to post the story.
• David Sullivan continued his fine series of posts looking at the comparison between the troubles of department stores and newspapers.
• Neil Thurman of London's City University wrote to note the publication of a paper that deals with how online news media were moving to incorporating user-generated content. Here's the nub from his abstract: This article argues that the adaptation of established news websites to the increasing demand from readers for space to express their views is driven as much by local organisational and technical conditions as it is by any attachment to traditional editorial practices. I used the word "were" intentionally. The survey involved was from 1995 2005 (sorry about that, Neil). One of the pitfalls of legacy academic publishing models is that they tend to put large amounts of time between the study and the publication. (I know; I have a couple of things in that limbo now.) Also unfortunate is that the final paper is behind a pay wall at New Media and Society, but Thurman has been kind enough to post a PDF preprint version on his Web site. I look forward to reading it in more detail.
  

Finally, one that got away -- but no longer. I never saw the excellent discussion from last August on John McIntyre's blog about the use of race in crime story descriptions. (See the follow-up post here.) The paper took a tremendous amount of heat over omitting the race of a suspect because it was deemed too general and possibly inflammatory. This is not a new debate, nor will it be the last. In these times when race lurks under the surface of many things, we struggle on.

Doing away with the 'noddies'

I missed this when it first ran in September. Good piece from BBC's "Newsnight" about FiveNews, which has banned the artificial nod, walk and other cutaways from its pieces. The news director argues that it will help credibility. What do you think?