What Kind of Future Does Journalism Have?
Felix Salmon points us at David Plotz, who writes:
Worrying about aggregators: David Plotz: That’s one of the things that I think about when I’m talking to young journalists, is that so many of them are going to go into jobs that are not reporting jobs, or even editing jobs—they are aggregation jobs. That’s a worry...
And Felix comments:
Plotz does go on to say, quite rightly, that “there’s been just a massive proliferation of new journalistic content.” Kirchner’s dystopia of a world with “nothing left to link to” has never been more distant. But at the same time, Plotz seems to agree with Kirchner that if you’re linking and summarizing, you’re not producing original content, and the rise of such activity is worrying.... The biggest thing that’s missing in the journalistic establishment is people who are good at finding all that great material, and collating it, curating it, adding value to it, linking to it, presenting it to their readers.... [R]eading is to writing as listening is to talking — and someone who talks without listening is both a boor and a bore. If you can’t read, I don’t want you in my newsroom.... So I’m not worried in the slightest by the rise of aggregation jobs, and of people devoting their days to linking and summarizing. That’s a crucial journalistic skill and service, it’s what readers want, and there aren’t nearly enough people who are good at it. It’s certainly much more useful than being the 35th reporter in a press conference, writing down whatever the Important Person up front is saying, or being part of some media scrum trying to get a quote out of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer...
So I thought: I wonder what David Plotz has produced recently in the way of "original content"? So I googled, felt lucky, and got:
St. Patrick: No snakes. No shamrocks. Just the facts: Posted Friday, March 17, 2000, at 9:30 PM ET: Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the Irishman who didn't rid the land of snakes, didn't compare the Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn't even Irish. St. Patrick, who died 1,507, 1,539, or 1,540 years ago today—depending on which unreliable source you want to believe—has been adorned with centuries of Irish blarney. Innumerable folk tales recount how he faced down kings, negotiated with God, tricked and slaughtered Ireland's reptiles.
The facts about St. Patrick are few. Most derive from the two documents he probably wrote, the autobiographical Confession and the indignant Letter to a slave-taking marauder named Coroticus. Patrick was born in Britain, probably in Wales, around 385 A.D. His father was a Roman official. When Patrick was 16, seafaring raiders captured him, carried him to Ireland, and sold him into slavery. The Christian Patrick spent six lonely years herding sheep and, according to him, praying 100 times a day. In a dream, God told him to escape. He returned home, where he had another vision in which the Irish people begged him to return and minister to them: "We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more," he recalls in the Confession. He studied for the priesthood in France, then made his way back to Ireland.
He spent his last 30 years there, baptizing pagans, ordaining priests, and founding churches and monasteries. His persuasive powers must have been astounding: Ireland fully converted to Christianity within 200 years and was the only country in Europe to Christianize peacefully. Patrick's Christian conversion ended slavery, human sacrifice, and most intertribal warfare in Ireland. (He did not banish the snakes: Ireland never had any. Scholars now consider snakes a metaphor for the serpent of paganism. Nor did he invent the Shamrock Trinity. That was an 18th-century fabrication.)
You get the idea. Those are the first three paragraphs. No links, no sources. The only thinks Plotz mentions (but does not link to--for those you have to go to Wikipedia) Patrick's Confessions and Letter to Coroticus.
Paragraph 4 mentions, but does not link to, Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization. The last paragraph mentions, but does not link to a Fox TV movie about St. Patrick.
I just have to ask: What is this?
It is certainly not "aggregation"--there are no links and pointers, no attribution of ideas and thoughts to anybody who previously expressed them (except for St. Patrick and Cahill).
But I would not call it original reporting either.
I would not call it analysis.
And Plotz's voice doesn't provide clues as to what he thinks the value he is adding is here.
I am with Felix Salmon: I want to read people who are engaged in and contributing to interesting conversations--and whose writings provide me with ways to quickly enter that conversations. If you are contributing, you have to be contributing something: source criticism and evaluation, original reporting, analysis, whatever. But you are adding value, you are making it very clear where you think the value you are adding is, and you are providing links.
