CJR, Media Gurus, the Future of News, and How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Appreciate Fiction with Cute Girls in It

A long time ago, back when I was just out of college, an older buddy and I were getting together for a beer. “How about Palmer’s?” I asked.

“Ugh, no way,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere I can look at cute girls, not old alcoholics.”
Fair enough.

When we got to whatever bar we decided on — it was probably in Uptown — I asked him if he read a particular piece in one of the monthly national magazines that just came out. “Ugh, no way,” he said. “Why are you even reading that? Here, I bet it says…”

He went on to encapsulate the article, which was a pretty standard tome at the time — it was probably on Iraq or the patriot act or the breach in the hull of the American empire or the failing media complex — and I asked him, then, what he was reading.

“Fiction. Fiction with cute girls in it.”

Again, fair enough. 

I was reminded of that conversation this week after reading Dean Starkman’s egregiously bad piece “Confidence Game: The limited vision of the news gurus” in the Colombia Journalism review.

It’s the kind of writing that doesn’t offer any surprises. It’s a simple, intellectually pre-fabbed item crafted to deliver clicks from Twitter, and sure to get a short amount of buzz as it takes up an entrenched position in a simplified look the current media zietgeist.

While on the side of the critical (to say the least), I’m by no means an acolyte of these gurus. I’d say I’m much more of a realist than Jarvis and Shirkey, and I support regional journos more than Rosen.

Starkman, whether fan or foe, paints a very unfair picture of these critics by mischaracterizing the media landscape.

“Confidence Game” lays out Starkman’s quick summaries of those gurus, the most widely read critics of the dying Media Industrial Complex, and essentially chastises these critics, whom are mostly academics, for not being successful media entrepreneurs or saviors, and not successfully ushering in a new era of old journalism. 

This approach is completely in vain, since the Media Industrial Complex™ is complex—there’s national news, information, intelligence, and entertainment,  in a variety of media formats, and the same happens regionally and internationally—and governed by corporate lords—which Starkman acknowledges with his Gannett remark—and garrisoned by clerics like the CJR.

It’s also not the job of a media critic to save the flailing MIC™ much in the same way it’s not the job of a restaurant critic to save a city’s food scene and not the job of a national food system critic to take on each and every restaurant.

The comparison I’m getting at this: When news critics in the media talk about news, they mean the output of newspapers. When newspaper folks talk about news, they mean newspaper reporting previously done at newspapers, like Watergate. When TV reporters talk about news, they mean packages featuring anchors driving around in tanks. When blogs talk about news, they mostly mean cable television. When Twitter users talk about news, they mean pictures on Reddit.

But when Rosen, Jarvis, Shirkey, et al., talk about news, they’re more broadly talking both about the decade long changes (characterized by them as failures) of Media Industrial Complex™ and the very significant changes happening to it because of the huge developments in communications technology.

These new gurus are much more focused on things like the dichotomies between reporting and repeating, between investigating and simply interviewing, between distribution of information and publishing, between immediate and actionable intelligence and proprietary formats, etc.  

These gurus are not just saying, as Starkman falsely characterizes, “Hey, there’s an easy new way for media, here it is.” Everything but that.

So then, Starkman’s piece is a real misunderstanding of the Gurus’ message, and that is itself one of the key reasons the MIC™ itself has continued to atrophy. And that, as an issue, has already been covered by the New Gurus, which makes the whole thing already very hashed out.

Ugh.