Journalism has many bastard children: PR, marcomms, opinion polling. It’s not proud of them, and they return the favour. So how about a chip off the old block that journalism could be proud of? A new discipline that journalism could pat kindly on the head.
I’m talking about something deeply unsexy – public information. Now journalism has always been a bit half-hearted about its responsibilities when it comes to informing the public.
In the 1930s Time-founder Henry Luce warned with characteristic overstatement “never in the long history of Western civilization was the purely informative function of journalism more important than it is today.”
At the same time journalists on the Washington Times were being told that the average reader:
does not care a hang about tax-rates, budgets, insurance, disarmament, naval appropriations, public utility policies, municipal improvements, or scores of other subjects which may appear to be important … Let us disregard, or cover perfunctorily, subjects which are merely important, but not interesting.
William Randolph Hearst, who owned the Times, noted that a good editor “would prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty.”
Informing the public is an incidental, occasionally accidental function of journalism, what economists might call a positive externality. Journalism has been a rather inefficient means of delivering enlightenment to the public.
But new means of aggregating and distributing information are radically changing the way we keep track of politicians, for example. In the UK, a not-for-profit like theyworkforyou.com provides information at a depth and with a convenience that far outstrips what old-style political reporting could deliver.
So what would the birth of a new discipline of public information mean?
It could mean measuring the gaps between officially mandated levels of information provision and actual delivery.
It could mean mash-ups and scrapers, re-purposing information and making it publicly available.
It definitely involves freedom of information.
And beyond that it wants to champion the provision of information to remove what biz school types would call asymmetry – in other words to stop institutions insider trading on information for their own political advantage at the expense of the public itself.
Or doing the kind of stuff Tony Collins documents so well (which actually is good-fashioned journalism).
6 responses to “From journalism to public information”
It’s worth keeping an eye on the lanch of NHS Choices in a couple of weeks time.
http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/item.cfm?ID=2748
If the government lets it live up to its promise, it will be addressing many of the issues you raise in your post.
Thanks for the heads up.
great point Adrian, but facts are in short supply, and expensive to obtain.
from Bill Moyer’s “Buying the War”:
WALTER ISAACSON: One of the great pressures we’re facing in journalism now is it’s a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters. And in the age of the internet when everybody’s a pundit, we’re still gonna need somebody there to go talk to the colonels, to be on the ground in Baghdad and stuff and that’s very expensive.
DAN RATHER: Reporting is hard. The substitute for reporting far too often has become let’s just ring up an expert. Let’s see. These are experts on– international armaments. And I’ll just go down the list here and check Richard Perle.
I agree talk has always been cheap.
The money is moving out of network news – Cronkite left with 20m, Couric can barely get 6-7m. It’s moving out of papers too – Boston Globe shutting offices. But look at a lot of what came out of those places when they were open for business…
But Bloomberg are opening bureaux. So’s Al Jazeera. And an outfit like Channel 4 News in the UK (who supply a lot of packages for NewsHour) do international news off a very low cost base. And McClatchy’s Inside Iraq blog gives a fascinating take on life in Baghdad.
I think the inquisitive citizen is much better able to serve him or herself now and much better served for it.
Katie Couric?
what can you say about a journalists who proudly announces to People magazine that on the morning of the Asian Tsunami she phones the newsroom desperate for the latest on Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston.
She reads the same stuff off the prompt that Dan did. He’d probably have been fishing instead…