Brendan R. Watson

Today a colleague asked if I had seen Obama on 60 Minutes on Sunday, and I retorted that if I watched Obama every time he was on T.V. I would do nothing else.

I was only half-joking, but hadn’t really stopped to think about the concept of Obama’s media overexposure until tonight. I hadn’t planned on watching his prime-time press conference. I had studying to do. But I turned on NPR while I was making dinner and I was hooked. I had been very skeptical of Obama’s budget and its effect on the health of the economy down the road. I feel that we’re spending too much money to fix the economy instead of fixing our abuses of the economy (over consumption). But Obama did explain the rationale of his budget and some of its nuanced mechanics in ways I hadn’t heard in other sound-bites, mostly in my sporadic morning consumption of CNN and NPR while I get ready for work in the morning.

Despite having an essay to work on, listening to his speech was very interesting and worthwhile. Maybe it didn’t convince me completely, but I feel this president is actually intellectually honest and gives us legitimate differences of opinion to base our debate on, instead of forcing down our throats a self-serving ideology. But does the substance of the debate get lost in his media exposure, especially on ESPN and “The Tonight Show?” All we all too prepared to tune him out, even when he offers serious substance?

I first dismissed the notion when I heard it discussed on CNN last week, but having nearly missed a great opportunity to hear the important issues of our country discussed in real terms, I realized my own exhaustion with Obama-mania has gotten the best of me. Politico offers a thoughtful discussion/critique of the Obama’s media strategy.

The New York Times had this funny piece about naked hikers in the Swiss Alps on its homepage yesterday night. (And no, I am not linking to it again). What’s more disturbing? Naked hiking in the snow or the fact that naked hiking in the snow is news worthy enough not only to warrant coverage by the New York Times, but prime real estate on its website?

I would surmise the New York Times’ editors probably don’t think it that news worthy. But they know there’s people like me sitting in front of our computers watching mindless television and equally mindlessly perusing the web who will post these stories to our Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to humor our friends — and sure enough three friends quickly commented on the article on my Facebook profile. And in the era of hits as the end-all-be-all of defining value on the web, this is precisely how stories like this become “news,” and proliferate in various iterations of the news-of-the-weird (cute-puppy-dog, bikini-shot and stupid criminal stories).

I’ve gotten more invitations to join “Save Newspapers” Facebook groups. Forget it! I’m not joining. Save newspaper journalism? Sure. Where do I sign up. But these groups make no distinction between medium and message and newspapers in of themselves as a medium are not worth saving. Lets stop trying to save the dinosaurs and think about how we can influence this new medium, while preserving the message.

And could we not start by refusing to pass along worthless stories? Granted, they’re sometimes funny, but they have no value. The person counting the clicks as we pass along the stories on Twitter and Facebook — and not the intangibles (or at least the much more difficult to measure tangibles) of the impact of real, public-affairs news — doesn’t see that. Instead of joining meaningless “Save the Dinosaur!” groups on Facebook, it would be much more productive to concentrate on an area of social media where journalists could demonstrate an impact by only passing along news organizations’ serious, public affairs journalism, and encouraging their networks to join the group and do the same. This will actually help expand the market online for the serious newspaper journalism that we want to save.

Good post from Innovation in College Media: Can newspapers learn anything from the Obama campaign? Number one suggestion: Excel at leadership:

Excel at leadership: Whatever you think of his politics, Obama led his campaign with poise and calm. While John McCain “suspended” his campaign to deal with the financial crisis, Obama maintained a calm head and famously said “a president should be able to do two things at one time.” Obama’s top advisers, too, kept cool heads – Axelrod, Plouffe, Gibbs – were cool heads in the midst of a tempestuous campaign.

Newspaper leadership doesn’t seem too calm right now. They chase quarterly profit margins by laying off hundreds of workers, producing short-term gains with long-term harmful consequences for their products. In this way, their actions are more in line with the McCain campaign’s “news cycle” approach to the election.

Bryan is commenting on leadership at the institutional level. But leadership at the personal level is just as important. The idea that good reporters must make good editors (and by extension good managers) has created a generation of too often toxic leaders, who are ill-equipped to exercise steady leadership, particularly on a personal level. The notion was that good journalism could substitute for good management. Well these days, that doesn’t cut it: Newsrooms need both.

Obama won not because he reinvigorated our trust in the political system, but he spoke to individuals’ concerns and built trust that he’d personally address those concerns to the best of his ability. How many of us have experienced that type of leadership in the newsroom? Yet many newsrooms are simply changing around seats under the name of “reorganization” instead of identifying who the truly managers are and putting them at the center of innovation in the newsroom. That approach is only going to deepen the whole.

Mindy McAdams posted a call for good storytelling earlier this week on her blog. I asked, “How relevant are stories to contemporary journalism.” I believe that focusing on stories, particularly individual’s stories, rather than stories of collective experiences, is problematic in contemporary journalism.

There is no lack of stories on the Internet. Millions of people are pouring their hearts out online about their struggles with poverty, battling cancer and of personal triumphs. If anything, we’re overloaded with stories and we have started to tune them out. The journalist’s role shouldn’t be to tell more stories. Rather, they should start to see existing stories as data points, which the journalist can help the audience visualize in relationship to one another. The journalist can create connective tissue that weaves these individuals’ stories together to show common experiences, trends, etc. and to give shape to a community to spark and sustain discussion.

Just look at how Google is using individuals’ experiences of the flu to track activity of the disease. Undoubtedly untold numbers of stories will be written on this exact subject throughout the winter, but Google’s view of Flu activity is far more comprehensive.

Chuck Peters, CEO of The Gazette Company, has more thoughts on the issue on his blog:

For some time, I have been saying that the problem with the media industry is that we are stuck on stories, or packages, whether they be articles with photos in print or online, or video packages. I have limited time, and limited brainpower, and I want to see current, relevant information, in context, anywhere and anytime. I don’t think we can get there until we create our content, in the first instance, as a “post” or “tweet”, and organize from there.

What he calls for is more conceptual clarity to aid in this type of reporting. This is where I would like to see more academics pick up the exploration of new forms of presenting information rather than assuming traditional forms in their research and teaching.

The fundamental role of journalists is to help make the public well-informed, active participants in a democracy.

The contemporary media landscape makes this goal difficult, if not impossible, particularly given our existing journalism models. Information overload drowns out much of the significant work journalists do, not to mention the infotainment, merely a marketing gimmick to compete for an increasingly fragmented audience, which makes up much of the day’s “news.” Overwhelmed by a deluge of information, much of the public simply tunes it out, or pays attention very selectively, picking from the media that adds clarity.

The great irony of the Internet is that despite being a repository for an amazing wealth of knowledge, it has largely acted to reinforce and amplify individuals’ existing beliefs, allowing the audience to seek out opinions that confirm theirs. That’s partly why the electorate is currently so polarized. The unprecedented around-the-clock political coverage hasn’t resulted in more informed voters, but has deepened existing biases, reinforcing voters’ ignorance.

What is needed is a fundamental shift in journalists’ biases, away from reporting on what is new, even when it is not significant. This existing bias only adds to the information overload. The more we bury the audience with information, the more they have to dedicate cognitive resources towards to the search process. These finite resources are draw away from processing information.

What journalists need to do is redefine the gatekeeper role — perhaps we see this role as a guide or a reference librarian on steroids. Instead of primarily creating new information, the journalists’ primary mission becomes helping the audience to aggregate and analyze information. What form this is communicated to the public is unknown, but the hyperlinked world of the Internet makes it infinitely easier to aggregate and illustrate connections between sources.

This new emphasis doesn’t eliminate reporting. Reporting remains an essential element of gathering sources and analyzing information, and remains critical particularly in areas of investigative journalism. Establishing expertise in a given area/beat is also critical to meaningful aggregation. But there is little information that the journalist has that is new, that isn’t accessible to the public elsewhere. Thus, the primary role of the journalist becomes acting as a filter/editor/analyst of existing data. Some editor-driven aggregation sites like The Daily Beast and to an extent the Huffington Post are already leaning in this direction.

However, I would argue about these sites, if their primary goal is to inform, they should eliminate all non-moderated content. Much of what passes as “citizen journalism,” and especially reader comments, doesn’t contribute anything beyond simply creating more information — frequently inaccurate — for the audience to sift through. Philosophically, I think it is important to incorporate feedback from the audience. But you don’t have to blow down the gate to let the audience in. Really, all forms of journalism need to be reassessed: Do they communicate meaningful information, or are they simply acting to add to the noise?

The goal of the researcher in helping to define this new model of journalism is not to start with biases of traditional journalistic forms, which result from imagining the research question from the perspective of the media. But rather is to approach media from the perspective of the audience, understanding their cognitive processes and information needs in order to suggest an effective and sustainable journalistic model.

I ran into Christine Montgomery, managing editor for tampabay.com, my former employer, this past week at ONA, following Amy Web’s presentation. I joked with her that I don’t envy her position of having to make sense of all of the ideas Amy was throwing at us, especially since the common theme of the conference was that despite a lot of creative ideas, few if any have yet arrived at a long-term, sustainable business model. The Las Vegas Sun, who is doing some of the most creative web journalism I saw, describes itself as being in “start-up mode.” A former colleague of mine who now works at a news-related start-up said his employers business model was “TBD.”

A bright spot of the conference, though, were the discussions about “geobrowsing” and services like Where, which enables GPS-enabled searches to find people and places located near you. If I were a local news publisher or editor, this is where I would be focusing my attention. Success for publishing local news (and advertising) is delivering that content at the height of interest, which is heavily determined by one’s location. I want to know why there is police tape outside my house, or which bar near by has the best drink specials. Imagine if I told a publisher I was shopping for shoes, and they could deliver relevant advertising to me based on the mall I was shopping at. The potential is almost unlimited for delivering breaking news, advertising, using staff and user-driven reporting.

Geobrowsing is scary stuff. It looks and feels a little too much like big brother. But if such services were user initiated, where I chose to tell you where I was and what I was looking for, I think publishers could overcome users’ concerns.