The Cathedral and Coffee House

8/8/2019 The Cathedral and Coffee House

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The Cathedral and the Coffee House

figured out how to make a good-enough index and the new generationof online publishing tools based on the blog model started to emerge.

If The Guardian or the BBC or the New York Times were going to shapetodays environment they should have been there in 2001. Now allthey can realistically do is acknowledge the shift and decide how to

deal with it. Their power to influence events is extremely limited, andthey are beginning to realise this. A newly connected New York Timestries to re-enter the conversation by allowing readers to Digg stories orpost them to Facebook, while the desire to be at the centre ofcommunity still dominates the thinking of even the most progressiveplayers, leaving them out of the loop. We may not expect TheGuardians Polly Toynbee to lower herself to the level of commentingon other peoples blogs, but not even media pundit Roy Greensladeseems to have realised that the conversation could be happeningelsewhere.

The decline of trust in what mainstream media outlets are deliveringtoday, coupled with the rapid emergence of new sources of apparentlytrustworthy information, means that every current provider of newsand views must find a way to survive within the new informationalecosystem.

It is more than likely that some form of journalism and news media willpersist in the new media age. The current era of blog populism andsocial networking sites is a transitional stage, marking the end of oldways of thinking as much as the emergence of stable new models, andwe should not assume it provides us with a good basis for predictingthe future of journalism.

The days of monolithic corporations providing an authorised view ofthe news, setting the agenda and accepting no challenge from otherpoints of view are already gone, and there is no need to mourn theirpassing. Yet peoples desire and need for information about the eventsof the day has not vanished, and their wish to see such informationplaced in the public domain so that it can be the basis of the ongoingdemocratic conversation remains, even if it would never be expressedas such.

There is a desire to know what is going on, one which is largely onlyshown in the response to the exposure of states of affairs which call for

something to be done, like famines in remote countries, corruption ordeceit in local politics, hidden epidemics and unnoticed immigrants.This can probably be met by journalists whose job is to report, analyseand comment within a framework of editorial integrity andprofessional codes of conduct even in a world of citizen journalists andwitness-generated reportage.

If they are to reinvent themselves and reassert their values in the

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networked world then the first step must be a clear-headedassessment of what went wrong and why the emergence of the net hasbeen so catastrophic for todays players. Hubris certainly played a part,as most established media outlets ignored the disruptive potential ofthe internet during the mid 1990s when it was already clear that it

fundamentally challenged their business model if not their grasp ontheir audiences. However it is not clear that they could have doneanything about the more fundamental problem, which is that the ageof one-way media is over.

The Cathedral of News

Modern mass media, whether print or broadcast or online, is builtaround the same information processing model as the Catholic churchin the medieval age, and the nearest analogy to a newspaper, newsmagazine or TV news show is a gothic cathedral, with a team ofacolytes working to embed the message in the stone, the stained glass

and, above all, the word of the priest speaking from the pulpit.This model emerged along with the profession of journalism in theeighteenth century and has survived vast technological, political andsocietal change in the last two hundred years. One reason for itssurvival was that it relied on the perceived or real scarcity of channelsthrough which to reach large audiences. The barriers to entry werevery high, and in a mass embrace of cognitive dissonance most of theaudience came to believe that if someone was clever or powerful orrich enough to gain access to one of these scarce channels they must,merely by virtue of their ability to address the masses, have somethingimportant to say. Walter Kronkite, Robin Day, Jeremy Paxman, AnnaFord and the rest were believed to merit attention because they hadmanaged to climb into the pulpit, and only those who deserved itwould ever be allowed to do such a thing.

Early websites, filled with static pages which brooked no argument andoffered no space for discussion, no opportunity for links or trackbacksand no way to challenge the views offered, were just the latest versionof pulpit media, using the screen as a one-way channel to the audiencejust as print or radio or television had done for so long.

Today the cathedral doors have been forced open, the pulpit torn downand the carefully wrought stained glass windows smashed. Thepriests voice cannot be heard above the hubbub of voices shoutingout from the pews, and the gospel is only one view among many. In aworld where anyone can speak and be heard, thanks to blogs, socialnetwork tools and the public Internet, the mere fact of publication orbroadcast is no longer enough to merit trust or attention.

The long decline of Christianity can be traced, in part, to the spread ofthe ability to read and the translation of the gospels into the



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vernacular. The church was no longer the only place that the storywas being told, and people found that the skill which unlocked theBible also unlocked other sources of knowledge and made other pointsof view available.

Today the cathedrals of the mass media are empty because the people

have a new skill, one that goes beyond the ability simply to read andunderstand what others are saying. Now they can speak as well aslisten, and this new form of literacy is the real wellspring of therevolution in news journalism that we are currently experiencing.

We have abandoned the cathedral, and moved away from the burningwreckage to congregate in a nearby coffee house, where entry is freeto anyone who can afford the price of a drink. In the coffee houseanyone can speak, and instead of the clearly enunciated and carefullyconsidered tones of the priest echoing off the stone columns and overthe heads of the congregation the conversation is open to all.

Credibility comes not from occupancy of the pulpit but from onesactions, from what is said and done today, what was said and doneyesterday. In the age of conversational media, the voice from thepulpit can barely be heard over the hubbub, and anything said canimmediately be challenged, questioned, taken out of context,criticised, dissected and absorbed into the zeitgeist.

Once news journalism becomes a conversation rather than a matter ofissuing communiqus from a position of superior access it requires avery different set of skills from its practitioners or rather, additionalskills over and above the traditional ones of listening, judging,balancing, questioning, evaluating and story-telling. We have seen,

most notably in the way that Guardian and Observer journalists areattempting to engage with their former audience on the Comment IsFree blog, that this is not always easy. Some of the great and goodseem wholly unsuited for a world in which comments on their workappear with equal prominence on the newspaper site, like squeaky-voiced actors forced to appear in talking movies.

A bigger problem faces the commercial side of the business. Buildingconversational structures around the work of journalists andcommentators, making money from providing them with a place tooperate and a channel through which to speak, bears little relationship

to the old established practice of holding talented journalists in towwith contracts, printing or broadcasting their words or stories andpersuading those with a commercial message to preach to hitch theiradvertising to your rolling wagon. In the new media world the oldmedia certainties are gone, and the ways of making money or tellingstories are no longer theirs to control or even shape. A blogger withan AdSense account can make a modest living, but providing therevenue flows needed to sustain a print and online newspaper is



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incredibly hard.

The new environment

The new new media are not being built from nothing, and theemergence of conversational media is happening in a world of mature

media outlets, with complex and sophisticated interconnections anddependencies. This is not a new ecosystem colonising a lava field, withthe adventitious plants breaking down the previously barren rock toprovide nourishment and space for the later arrivals. Rather we areseeing significant speciation and adjustments to changing nutrientlevels in a mature ecosystem, brought on by external factors.

The cloud blotting out the sun, killing the plant-life of advertisingrevenue and damaging the reproductive potential of the big column-writing carnivores is, of course, the Internet itself. Craigslist hasreduced sunlight levels in the classified world, blogging is making thepond water cloudy with algae and keeping the oxygen of readershipfrom those who seek it so desperately, and new forms of investigativelife are scuttling in the undergrowth, recently evolved from newsreporters but clutching camera phones and laptops.

In this world the existing players are faced with a choice. Newspaperreadership is in decline, but may bottom out at a level that allows aslimmer business to continue to make enough money out of splashingink on dead trees, and there are world markets to explore, especially inIndia and China where the network is not yet widely available andnewsprint is still a convenient way of providing information to people.Scheduled television shows delivered to flickering screens in the corner

could attract enough of an aging audience to satisfy advertisers,especially if Google and BSkyB find a way to target the adverts moreeffectively and stave of complete collapse. Newspaper and televisioncould, like crocodiles, step out of the limelight, find a niche and avoidevolutionary pressure. After all, the crocodile has changed relativelylittle in 60 million years, even if it has had to live in the mud and watchthe mammals take over almost every ecological niche going, to thepoint where one particularly aggressive ape is on the verge of wipingout its habitats.

The alternative is to embrace change and take a lesson from theastonishingly successful reptiles whose 100 million year reign came toan end as the worlds climate shifted. The mammals may havecolonised the earth, but the dinosaurs grew wings and feathers,lightened their bones and soared into the sky..

It is not too late for the big media companies to emulate them, toembrace the future and, like the dinosaurs, find a role in the world tocome.



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Notes

Doing new new journalism

There is a zeroth law of thermodynamics, which states that if twothermodynamic systems A and B are in thermal equilibrium, and B and

C are also in thermal equilibrium, then A and C are in thermalequilibrium1.

The term zeroth law was coined by Ralph Fowler and is used becausein many ways this natural law is more fundamental than any of theothers. However, the need to state it explicitly as a law was notperceived until the first third of the 20th century, long after the firstthree laws were already widely in use and named as such.

Something similar has happened to journalism. Once we wrote the firstdraft of history, but now this task falls to others and reporters arewriting the zeroth draft. We have to learn to live in this world. Not only

does it mean that we have to work faster, it also means that DanGillmor is right when he notes2 that in a craft that's shifting fromlecture to conversation, the publication (or broadcast or whatever) isnot The End. It is somewhere in the middle of an emergent system inwhich we all can keep learning, and teaching.

Our zeroth draft is merely the starting point, the mulch which feedsthose who will come after, use, reuse and (surely) abuse what we havestated and argued. The story is not the end, and the way in which wewrite and present the story no longer needs to pretend that it is.

This means that the testimony of the citizen reporter, the eyewitness,

the accidentally present audience, can stand with news reports andinitial analyses as an equal record, as likely to be incorrect but asimportant a source for those who will come after. The reporters whowrote that Jean Charles de Menezes had leapt over a barrier and runonto a tube train wearing a bulky jacket with wires protruding were noless wrong that the eyewitnesses who told them these once-believedbut clearly imagined stories, so why should we privilege their versionstoday? And if not later, then why at the time?

What is citizen journalism?

Citizen journalism is an ugly construct for several reasons, not least of

which is that it implies that we professional journalists are not alsocitizens.

Serious journalism, the sort that requires the resources of a large

1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_law_of_thermodynamics)2http://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/showPost.cfm?myComm=BA&bid=2271,

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company, significant investment of time and money, as well as skillswhich are only acquired through years on the job, is still needed. Thesort of journalism that involves digging, fighting with those who wantto obstruct the story, going against the interests of those in power andgenerally doing what is needed to get the story out, will always be vital

in any open society where, because human nature is what it is, somethings are done corruptly and in secret.

But it has always been the case that the starting point for such aninvestigation may be the work of an unskilled observer. In the past thiswould begin with a letter or a phone call to a journalist, who mightsmell something in the tale being told and begin to look at it. Now it ismore likely to be an email, but we also have to accept that many ofthose who in the past would have turned to the press to uncover moredetails will now blog what they have seen or noticed or experienced. Itis up to us as reporters to be aware of what is being said, to follow upand work on the background, and to do the things which only we can

manage.

Its not all journalism

When we talk about the cathedral versus the coffee house we must becareful not to include every video uploaded to YouTube, blog postingon Typepad or diary entry on Livejournal in our analysis. Not all writingis journalism, and not all online content is either. We must beware thecategory error of assuming that everyone who writes online does so inorder to reach a wide audience or be part of the ongoing conversationthat we call the news media. Many do so, of course, and even if we

should exclude from our analysis those online channels which areabout personal expression or aimed at friends, family and real orimagined lovers, we should not go the other way and refuse to admitany who wish to join the conversation.

In a caf anyone can come in, pay for their latte and sit at a table.They can talk to their friends, and be overheard, and we do notexclude them as patrons just because they are ill-informed or biasedor simply boring and badly-spoken. So it is with journalism: thedefining characteristic of journalism, the one essential quality, is that itis intended for publication, aimed at an audience. Ideally, of course, itshould be non-fiction, but we cannot be too prescriptive. It should be

accurate, well-researched, properly-grounded, factual, timely andobjective too, but those are at best guidelines for distinguishing goodjournalism from bad, and not enough to say something isnt journalismat all.

The crisis of old new news

The New Journalism of Wolfe and Kesey and Hersh was about new



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voices and new modes of expression. Radical and ground-breakingthough it was in the 1960s it was easily assimilated into the existingstructures, and while it provided those who liked to read with morevariety, the journalists themselves were, like most punk bands, just asenthusiastic about making a deal with the publishers as they were

about preserving their authentic voice or bringing down the system.The new new journalism is different. It cannot be assimilated, becauseexisting structures of news reporting and comment are completelyincapable of absorbing the range and number of voices. It cannot bedismissed because it exists independently of the existing structuresand voices. And so it must be accommodated, and the way the newsmedia work must change to include and allow these new forms ofexpression.

If this does not happen then the casualty will not be the new voices inthe blogosphere but the old media, who will become as irrelevant to

the process through which information is made public and absorbedinto the discourse of society as the Lord Chamberlain became to theprocess through which plays were produced in the UK.

Journalistic practice is challenged on many levels and in many ways.The most obvious, and the one that bring sleepless nights to peoplelike Carolyn McCall, CEO of the Guardian Media Group, is that thebusiness model is completely broken, since the aggregation of contentand advertising is no longer an effective or even plausible way togenerate income.

Another problem is that audiences for news media are increasingly

disillusioned and unconvinced by what they are told. As they age, orabandon current publications and programmes, they are not beingreplaced because there is now a much wider choice available.

Finally, many of those who write or broadcast on established outletsare too far distant from their audience to be interesting, relevant oruseful. Just as a Radio 1 morning presenter on 800,000 a year cannever speak of his nights down the pub with any credibility, so thearistocratic Simon Jenkins is now plugged into the wrong sorts ofnetworks to have anything to say to the wired children who arediscarding their parents newspapers.


The Cathedral and Coffee House

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