I fell in love with the wrong profession. And I was born in the wrong time, a time where technology meant the democratization of information that sacrifices reporters (at least their salaries) that no longer can serve as gatekeepers to information and guardians against disinformation.
I believe basically everything in this (original) writing piece by Jason McIntyre of his self-made, now-USA Today-affiliated site The Big Lead. It's about the morphing business model of CBSSports.com, which serves as a window to McIntyre's inspection of the current and future state of journalism. I was pessimistic about the industry now, seeing as I am blogging about this while working in an industry that is not what I went to school for. And I have never visited CBSSports.com much because ESPN.com was the first sports website I went to upon the birth of the Internet in 1993-4 and, besides Dennis Dodd on the college football beat, I never had a reporter I liked so much that I would follow him or her to a different website.
Nevertheless, what apparently is going on over there (and, once again, I believe McIntyre's take on the low morale over there completely) makes me very sad for Dodd, who's still there, the people working there, and the profession in general. Put aside the important fact that their boss and the guy who runs the website seems to be an abusive asshole. Journalists are now being forced to justify their jobs and existence not through how good their reporting is but by how many clicks/pageviews they can get for their work. That convinces companies to purchase ad revenue on the website, which generates the money for everybody who works there to get paid. I understand the business model, but it's sad that this, logically means that to make money, you have to have something that grabs eyeballs.
And note that I didn't say "write," just "have." McIntyre is saying that CBSSports.com is rapidly changing their workforce, replacing traditional reporters that go out, research and interview for stories with bloggers and -- that blasted word -- aggregators, people that sit in front of their computers and scour social media (Twitter seems to be the site du jour) for any granular information that was actually "found," throw in some words of their own to make it "theirs," make the headline as salacious as possible, and hope for the best. The thinking goes is if the only thing that matters is pageclicks, why pay anyone to find news when you can pay some schlub much less in order to, basically, steal news from someone else (which, just to evade accusations of plagiarism, is parsed with some thought or opinion from the blogger/aggregator or an attribution)? That's what CBSSports.com is doing right now. And, really, the business model demands that all journalistic websites, and really all journalism entities, should (and will) go in that sorry direction.
If that's the case, what's the use of reporting? There will be no news. Instead there will be just ... "stuff," probably put out by the entity itself, and therefore will be spun in a way that puts them in a positive light. That's why I hate that every single team now has a writer. All of them used to be reputable reporters at newspapers, but they're now the whore of the team, so everything they write should be considered not as fact but as public relations. And forgive me to sound paranoid, but if go down that rabbit hole to its most efficient conclusion, there will be no "facts" to report, no "truth" to be found. Instead we'll go on the Internet and see things that powerful teams and corporations want us to see and convince us is true.
I know there are people that want facts, that want the news that we need to know, not just crap that want to know. But there aren't enough of those people, and the people that want facts may or may not want to pay for it. That's why journalists willingly work for teams that will pay them a good salary, and that's why powerful sports websites just turns into a waystation where news is passed around like bongs, where any tweet becomes information, and where everyone will debase themselves just so they can hit a number and get the approval of their prick boss.
Journalism may be dead. Take it away, Brian Wilson/Beach Boys:
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