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You want fries with that? “We think people want SERIOUS, and they do, but they only want about 3 inches of serious on most things. USA Today got it wrong . . . they didn’t go far enough. I'm getting more and more convinced people want a smattering of everything but just a smattering, and you’d better tell them the nut graf quick. I call it ‘drive-through journalism’: filling and fast. And don’t forget to give them a side of fries or an apple pie along with it.”
—Dawn Dressler, executive editor, Amarillo Globe-News, 2008
Speak up! Feedback and suggestions—printable and otherwise—always welcome. After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “There are no false opinions.”
Pease’s Soapbox:
Columnist Erma Bombeck once observed, “In general, my children refuse to eat anything that hasn’t danced on television.” So newspaper editors like Dawn Dressler may be overly optimistic—expecting not just fries with their in-depth 3 inches of serious news, many Americans under the age of 50 have been raised on fast-news diets that sing, dance, throb and link them to YouTube while texting their Fave 5.
This is distressing not only to editors of dead-tree journalism, but to anyone concerned about an informed and engaged citizenry in a participatory democracy. Back in the early 1990s, one Midwestern editor told me he wouldn’t really want his kid to go into newspaper journalism, which he predicted would soon be “like being a cowboy on a dinosaur ranch.” Not that people using other media can’t be well informed and engaged, but the suggestion that our attention span for actual knowledge is so abbreviated that USA Today’s formula is too long, and that we lose interest after 3 inches is . . . well, most readers have already moved on from this sentence to join the 51,077,905 people who have seen Charlie bite his brother Harry’s fingah....
As a print journalism, I bemoan the fact that having newsprint on my fingers might be a distant memory. Then when I see how 51 million have watched "Charlie Bit Me" which, by the way, I've seen before, could be equally discouraging. But I was overseas this summer visiting my son and three other 20-somethings who taught in Japan. They were thoroughly knowledgeable about American politics and hungry and ready to debate the pros and cons of this election coming up. They were reading online newspapers, blogs and columnists. Perhaps it's not so much that the public is ill-informed and lazy (which, sadly, they are) but it's that we need to feed the hungry minds that are out there because they're looking for intelligent discourse but they want it served up in a manner they understand. My sons have no idea why we say "dial" a number, but they're always on the phone. They have no idea bologna sandwiches once came wrapped in waxed paper, but they understand microwaving a Hot Pocket. I think we journalists need to find a way to get the news to them in a way they can understand and digest. That's our job. The minds are out there, waiting to be fed something other than conspiracy theories on YouTube and videos about a helium-voiced high school kid who tries out for the school play (over 7 million hits). The burden's on us. -- Denise
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the burden's not just on us - journalists.... its on society....
ReplyDeleteThis post-1970s phenomenon of shortening attention spans - caused I'd venture to say - by prolonged exposure to electronic media - is a major issue.
I remember in journalism school, as a mature student in 1990, being frustrated by the lecturers breaking the flow of the class every 10-15 minutes to allow my early adult peers to stretch, talk, scratch their butts or whatever.... I'm capable of sitting and focusing and absorbing for long periods of time - they apparently were not.... (my own children - aged 28, 26, 21 and 5 also are so capable)....
If people dont have the attention span to read a newspaper or magazine article, would they bother to read a book?.... Books (still) are the main repository for the sum total of the history and learning of the human race.
And if they're confining themselves to electronic media to get their information - which is technically limited in its ability to provide depth and context - we're going to end up with an ill-informed citizenry who make decisions based on the 'junk food' they've been fed on YouTube - oops, forgot, that's what we apparently already have!
Perhaps I am a dinosaur, but it seems to me that if you give in tho this demand to use these forms of media to disseminate smaller and smaller pieces of information that lose all sense of perspective, then we're contributing to the decline, rather than providing an alternative for those (few) who want more and those (few) who might in the future seek more ....
Oops I forgot again - under the current business model, that would mean that we would probably have to run the newspaper business at a loss - cant have that now, can we???? Because its not about information, its about money!
Have often argued that there is a place for newspapers etc in this society, but its not in the media industry anymore - newspapers simply cant compete using the old business model. But that doesnt mean they need to die out, they just need to change direction.
More WORDster reax:
ReplyDeletePart of the problem is that too many media make serious dull. It doesn't have to be that way.
—Guido Stempel, Ohio University
Going by that formula, the newscast layout first invented by Frank Goerg (George) at KDKA and later WIND, Chicago, is the correct balance. Three minutes of news, local included, every half hour throughout the day.
We acolytes of Goerg always believed that our three minute newshole (stories usually had three lines max..what happened, who did it, where, etc..) would be enough to send interested parties to the newspaper for more detail.
Certainly, we didn't expect them to run to the TV as they seem to do now, since TV was using the same formula (started in the sixties).
—Jim Slade, ABC News (retired)
This quote captures the essence of market-driven journalism and the antithesis of any claim of journalism to professional status. The professional must educate the client to want what's needed and provide that when what the client wants is harmful or ineffective. Three inches won't capture the complexity of our problems. If anyone can explain the Wall Street implosion in three column inches, I'd sure like to see it.
—John McManus (www.gradethenews.org)
Am ashamed to admit that I must have contributed to this problem in the 1990s!
ReplyDeleteAs a radio and teletext news editor and also assigned to a role within our broadcast organisation providing a synopsis of news, sports and finance stories via fax stream to business clients every morning, it was my job to cull down pages and pages of reporting sourced through AAP, BBC, Reuters, AFP, etc and from our own reporters into the format required for commercial newscasts - no item could be more than 20 seconds long, which meant that at 3 spoken words/second, any news item had to be covered in 60 words, including audio!
It was a little better for our public radio newscasts - there one had the luxury of items being permitted a maximum of about 30 seconds, 45 seconds if the story and audio was compelling - yeehah!
And for the text product I put out every morning at 4.30am - 5 stories each for news, sports and finance - they were allowed no more than three lines each, or about 40-50 words.... and the limitations of the medium meant you couldnt go over that three lines, so sometimes you were reduced to substituting words - and losing nuance - and messing with the word order to save/create some character spaces! I amused myself by competing with myself to better the number and quality of witty/pun-filled headlines I could create each day!
More feedback:
ReplyDeleteShe's an executive editor of a newspaper? She sounds like one child left behind to me...