When I became managing editor of the Ottawa Citizen in 2011, I started to have a lot of contact with readers — emails, phone calls, and a surprising number of handwritten letters. It was through this contact that I began to get a sense of what our readers really cared about, and what they valued in their subscription. Two things surprised me.True up to a point but I think missing the fundamental changes.
The first was how deeply readers cared about things like comics and puzzles, the daily weather map, horoscopes, and the TV listings. Somedays it seemed like we could have put a picture on A1 of the prime minister consorting with alien space prostitutes, but if we also printed the Sudoku upside down or got the “On this date in weather history” wrong, that is all I would hear about.
The second was that readers would often call, angry, because we had downplayed (or ignored, or missed) a story they knew all about from another media outlet. This baffled me at first. If you already know the story, why are you angry at us for not covering it? But I soon realized they weren’t angry because they had been left uninformed, they were angry because we had, in one way or another, let them down.
The lesson I took from this is that for a great many readers, consuming the news is not about gaining information. Instead, it is about routine (hence the calls about the messed up horoscopes and crosswords) and identity (hence the anger about missing stories they knew about). People don’t pick up a daily newspaper to learn new things. They do it to have their habits, lifestyles, values, and identities validated and reinforced.
Media used to be hugely profitable and consequently they could cast a wide net, invest heavily in some distinctive reporting, offer up a smorgasbord of tidbits, and indulge some serious writers. There was a lot of substance in most mainstream papers.
All of them had pretty distinctive voices and partisan orientations but they seemingly tried to pitch to most. At least in the US. In Europe, media-party affiliation has always been much stronger, but also predictable. You wanted the Labour Party view of the world, read the Guardian. The Tory Party? Read the Daily Telegraph, etc. But beyond the obvious party affiliations, there was a lot of non-partisan content that could be very good.
Compare the Guardian of the 1970s to that of today. The British Labour Party of the 1970s was distinctly hard left, bordering, indeed flaunting Marxist. But there was quite a lot of interesting and well reported non-ideology content. Good stuff.
Today? Not Marxist so much as postmodernist social justice squish. And not just in the political pieces but everywhere. There is no nonsense so absurd that they don't have someone pumping out their 1,500 word quota.
Not that there is much right leaning journalism given that all journalism schools are hard left incubators but the same dynamic is visible on the right.
Everyone has collapsing revenue, rising costs, few degrees of quality control and fact checking, much more straight from keyboard to internet reporting, far more focus on the clicks and eyeballs metrics, far far more reliance on press-release journalism and younger (and therefore cheaper) journalists from middle-upper class backgrounds, no real education but prestigious credentials and virtually no well-rounded life-experience. All preaching the postmodernist social justice nonsense, none of them doing in-depth investigative reporting, and virtually none of them with a wide range of interests or curiosity. They write for ideological conformity rather than cognitive stimulation.
Or so it seems to me.
For serious news readers from yore, we lament not necessarily the declining standards and ideological conformity (though there is that.) I suspect what most of us miss is good writing, distinctive voices, content appealing far beyond identity, and facts that stimulated us rather than pablum that dulls.
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