'Aging' still an important part of news process
One of the more painful videos I've watched as a newspaper journalist is a clip from a recent "Daily Show" in which Jason Jones buckles the knees of The New York Times, "where reporters deliver the news the old-timey way."
In the bit, Jones interviews various Times newsroom executives - all looking eerily cast from the snobby, button-down Times parody in the movie "The Paper" - and he appears to stymie them with quips like:
• "Show me one thing in here that happened today,"
• "Your lifeboat is made of paper."
• "What's this? A landline phone. Look at me, I'm a reporter from the '80s making sure everything's factual. Ah, it feels like a walking Colonial Williamsburg in here."
• "What's black and white and red all over? Your balance sheets."
Ouch.
Jones ostensibly sets out on his profile of the Times in a quest for value of what he calls "aged news," as opposed to "new news." If he had any success in that mission, it doesn't appear in his "report."
Far be it from me to attempt to succeed where the venerable Gray Lady failed, but over the past two weeks, I have been put in mind of the value of our "aged news" as I've followed events from the streets of Tehran.
There is no question that the critical reporting giving us a view into a crisis that the government of Iran does not want the world to see is not old-timey but newfangled. It's Twitter. It's MySpace. It's Facebook. It's cell-phone cameras, blogs and text messaging.
The Iranian demonstrations are reaffirming a truth that's been predicted and observed for years - that viral, grass-roots citizen reporting has changed the nature of journalism. The 20th century magazine writer A.J. Liebling famously said that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Now, everybody owns one - and the explosion of mass information is all but uncontrollable, as the dictators and ayatollahs of Iran are quickly learning.
Yet, that doesn't leave us purveyors of "aged news" entirely out of the picture. Indeed, in many ways, it makes us more critical than ever, for somewhere in all this cacophony and clamor, people need some way to organize the disparate reports and images and to separate fact from fiction.
It may be true - as Liebling also said - that people often "confuse what they read in newspapers with news" and the explosion of personal media may allow people to, for example, turn Susan Boyle into an international phenomenon even before the newspapers have ever heard of her, but there's a corollary to that observation as well. That is that people still need help finding stories that affect their lives that they may not find on their own - stories, for example, like the effects of a proposed county sales tax hike or the village's decision to allow electric cars on the streets.
And people need something else that isn't coming through Twitter or an individual blog: the other side. Given, the "other side" in Iran is an unreliable despotism, but Americans desiring to understand the full context of what's happening in Tehran won't get that from just reading blogs or watching MySpace videos. It's only through reasoned analysis and the little bit of distance print media can provide, that people can see beyond what is happening to understand how what is happening will affect their lives.
In short, if you want to know what happened 15 minutes ago, you won't do better than the Web and the host of other electronic tools available, but if you want to know what's going to happen 15 minutes from now, newspapers and the context, depth - and yes, aging - we provide are still your best bet.
Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.