WARNING: The following commentary has been REPURPOSED. It contains no original SOURCING. It was sparked by a magazine report of an absurd program aimed at re-training (i.e., CONTROLLING) writers like me. This column is NOT news, but an essay REPURPOSED on the basis of having lived 65 years on this planet.
By Joel Thurtell
The Florida-based Poynter Institute will spend three-quarters of a million smackers trying to teach people like me how to do what we already do.
Which is writing our blogs.
Wonder if any of that largesse will trickle down to me?
Wonder if I qualify?
Don’t worry. I have not applied.
An independent journalist does not apply for or accept freebies — that includes free concert tickets, free plane rides, free hotel rooms and free tuition to journalism seminars meant subtly or not to bend our brains.
What Poynter does is pretty neat for those lucky stiffs who win the prize: refuge from a week or two of newspaper drudge. Asylum, free of charge, to those newsroom proles selected by their newspaper managers for this distinct honor. Newspaper managers are the people who each day decide what news will make the paper and what news will be suppressed.
And who will get the carrot of a free vacation in Florida.
Actually, although at first glance I thought the Poynter program was aimed at me, a more careful reading of the April 19, 2010 NewsPro article suggests that I’m not a target for Poynter’s “Sense-Making” program.
True, they’re pointing at bloggers, and I plead guilty to blogging.
It’s true also, as they point out, that my blog isn’t making money. It is my contribution, I hope, to the greater social good. Or something.
Impecunious blogger I am.
Beginning journalist I am not.
And that is the kind of blogger Poynter wants, according to the institute’s News Transformation Initiative. Yes, the $750,000 also goes to fund a second “iniative” (sic) beside the one called “Sense-Making.”
News Transformation wants “those members of the fifth estate who are without journalism experience but who are ‘committing acts of journalism.’ ”
Very cutely put, but what sense does it make?
Parsing doesn’t help.
The key word is “journalism.”
Who is a journalist?
Well, we know who a doctor is. A doctor has a degree of some kind in medicine conferred by a recognized, accredited academic institution. Further, a doctor has a state license to practice medicine. Ditto lawyers, certified public accountants, plumbers, barbers, hairdressers.
What kind of license does it take to be a journalist?
None.
Nada.
Zilch.
So how do we define a journalist?
Must a journalist have a diploma from an accredited journalism college to practice his or her trade?
Well, I cashed newspaper paychecks over more than 30 years of reporting, yet I never took a class in journalism. I taught writing and journalism in college, but never formally studied the subject.
Does that make me NOT a journalist?
Wait a minute — I wrote thousands of newspaper stories that were published. Furthermore, I was paid for my work.
I do the work of a journalist, regardless of pay, therefore I think it’s reasonable to conclude that I was a journalist.
Despite my lack of compensation as a blogger, I am still working as a journalist. I write news and I comment on news. (Please, let’s not get into defining what “news” is.)
Therefore, it follows that I am a journalist.
By extension, given the lack of licensing for journalists, it follows that anyone must be a journalist who, as Poynter says, “commits acts of journalism.”
What do they need from Poynter?
We’re bloggers. We’re blogging. We do what we do, thank you.
But what we do is of great concern at Poynter. It seems that we don’t conform to certain standards set by old-school newspaper journalists.
We do what Poynter calls “repurposing.” That is another vague term, but I think it means that we comment on news provided by others.
Is this something new? If I am not mistaken, newspapers have writers they call “columnists.” That is a glorified way of saying these writers are allowed to expound for the length of a newspaper print column on whatever subject it pleases them to write about. We assumed, though often it was not true, that “columnists” were paid better than mere reporters of the news. Anyway, I don’t recall ever seeing a “columnist” referred to in print as a “repurposer.”
Or would it be “repurposist”?
Newspapers have their in-house “columnists,” their syndicated “columnists,” and they thrive on material regurgitated from wire services and other providers of free or cheap matter.
Yet they don’t think of calling these people “repurposists.”
Then came bloggers, doing the same thing as newspaper columnists, syndicates, wire services and public relations companies.
The difference?
Bloggers publish what they like, when they like, and if they don’t feel like publishing, they don’t.
Bloggers have a freedom that newspaper people must envy, given their minute-to-minute deadlines, their layoffs, firings and furloughs, their discriminatory merit pay systems and their propensity for re-inventing stories in different guises to promote personal or institutional causes.
I think Poynter feels threatened by bloggers.
In the same issue of NewsPro, a report announces, “Web Now ‘Most Essential’ Medium.”
A study by Arbitron, Inc. and the Edison Institute asked what is the most essential media in people’s lives. It found that 42 percent of Americans list the Internet as the “most essential to their lives.” Thirty-seven percent said it’s TV, 14 percent said radio and 5 percent gave newspapers as the key ingredient in their lives.
Five percent!
This is amazing. The industry that is considered “most essential” by a mere five percent of Americans is trying to tell us forty-two-percenters how to do our jobs.
This is like the class screw-up trying to hand out lessons to the valedictorian.
Forty-two percent of Americans say the Internet — sole home to bloggers — is “most essential to their lives,” yet the people who can’t make their antiquated business model work are lecturing us on how to do things better.
Absurd.
And the Ford Foundation donated $750,000 so they could somehow make the blogosphere conform to their standards.
What might those standards be?
Well, bloggers aren’t putting out enough information, it seems.
A Poynterite says, “In the old system of journalism in the U.S., a certain amount of information was generated every day, and the facts were reported every day, mostly by newspaper reporters and local TV news. A small number of people dealt in opinion and repurposing. The number of people collecting news has decreased significantly, and the number of people who are repurposing has exploded.”
That is a perplexing statement. By including television, the speaker describes a brief moment in the history of news dissemination from the late 1940s to the present, excluding the history of news from colonial times through modern times. The “old system,” then, is not so old. Supposedly, this “old system” put out “a certain amount of information…every day.” How much information? How much information was suppressed every day?
If you were a trade unionist, say, or someone with a beef against government or industry, where would you take the story? To the local news monopoly? Well do I recall the coverage that monopoly in Detroit gave to labor news before, during and after the Great Newspaper Strike of the 1990s. Fair and impartial? Bullshit!
We have a great example here in Detroit of the news monopoly for years ignoring the story of the bridge monopolist who controlled the flow of freight between the U.S. and Canada. Who knows why the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press ignored that story for years, but the fact is that they did.
And mostly, they still do.
What do these five percenters have to teach us about standards of journalism?
According to the Poynterists, “We want to deal with the ethics of moment-to-moment publishing, and provide the tools for people who have digital-media ideas but lack journalism sourcing.”
What the hell does this mean?
Is the Ford Foundation getting their $750,000 worth with this kind of mush?
“Ethics of moment-to-moment publishing”?
What about the ethics of day-to-day publishing? When newspapers had the monopoly, ethics was a hobby horse to be played with when there was no great homicide or political scandal to ignite news people.
“Tools”?
What tools?
I have WordPress, my computer and my Internet host. I also have my eyes and ears, and I can read. What other tools do I need?
Under the “old system,” if you had paper, ink and a printing press and providing nobody smashed it, you were in the news business. Who needed “ethics” and “tools”?
“Journalism sourcing”?
Something magic here? Let’s see, make a round of cop calls in the morning, then stop by city hall for a handout of the day’s press releases, make another round of cop calls, then spoon-feed all this government-generated crap into the paper. If there’s still space to fill and no more ads, pilfer reports from other papers. Then call it a day.
Nowhere does Poynter mention an activity that should be in every journalist’s so-called toolbox: the practice of thinking.
Why not spend three-quarters of a million teaching all people “committing acts of journalism” how to ask questions, how to challenge authority, even constituted newspaper authority?
Why not teach writers how to THINK about what they’re writing?
I’ll tell you what this Poynter thing is: It’s the last gasp of an industry that floundered its way from monopoly to 5 percent of people giving a damn about it. They want to get back some control, and that means subtly or not so subtly convincing bloggers to do their jobs according to the “old system”.
Sorry, newsies: That boat has sailed. You’ll need far more than a barge load of money to tow it back to shore.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
