Giving them what they want

In my journalism classes, I keep hearing that it's the journalist's responsibility to make the media look like the community they cover. Reporters work too much on the official level, which peoples the papers with old white men (who represent the country's power demographic).

Image courtesy of Naples Daily News

I think of the story I've heard a professor tell a couple of times about when the Miami Herald debuted its Spanish edition (novel idea, right?). The Cubans had finally proven themselves enough of a market for the Herald to tap, but no one bought the Spanish edition of the paper when it first came out. It turns out that the Herald's problem was that it simply took all the news from its English edition and translated it. The moral of the story, says the prof., is that the paper's Spanish-speaking audience cared about different things than its English-speaking audience. So, after a while, the Herald had to take a new angle with it in order to really connect with the people it was trying to sell its Spanish paper to.

The joke that everyone seems to miss when he tells the story is how ridiculous it is that the major daily paper in Miami, a city with a 65 percent Latino population, has content that alienates its Spanish-speaking audience that much. Three-quarters of Miami's residents speak a language other than English at home, and 67 percent of those say they are not fluent in English. I understand that the days of major daily representing their respective metropolitan areas are over, but that doesn't mean they need to turn into Whites-Only productions.

So, if the media are going to look like the people, what will they look like? A quick peruse through Wikipedia's entries for "hyperlocal websites" (blog-ish, open-forum websites where people in specific geographic locations can wax about whatever they can come up with as citizen journalists) reveals that it's mostly meetings, personal notes, community events (plays, historical societies, etc.), a smattering of sports, social action and a University of Missouri, Colombia, journalism student being protested by neo-Nazis for his Marxist affiliations.

All and all, pretty bland stuff. Probably because I don't live in any of those places.

But mainstream media are adopting the hyperlocal dictum as well. Rob Curley, a New Media innovator extraordinaire, has been traipsing around the country from our fair Lawrence, Kan., to Naples, Fla., to Washington D.C., leaving a trail hyperlocal-ish online multimedia news websites in his his wake. His recent snatch-up by the Washington Post suggests that not a few media bigwigs want to tap his locally focused formula as part of media's next big thing.

We had a visit last week from a Rob Curley protege, Ellyn Angelotti, New Media Sports Editor for the Naples Daily News. Though her visit's purpose was undoubtedly important (to let us students know what we can do to prepare ourselves for a career in the New Media World) and she is unquestionably bright and qualified, somewhere in her schpiel about building a sense of community via a professional, highly technological, ambitious and profitable push for coverage of high school baseball, I zoned out.

Well, actually, I thought of Chomsky:

"I have the habit when I'm driving of turning on these radio call-in programs, and it's striking when you hear the ones about sports. They have these groups of sports reporters, or some kind of experts on a panel, and people call in and have discussions with them. First of all, the audience obviously is devoting an enormous amount of time to it all. But the more striking fact is, the callers have a tremendous amount of expertise, they have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things, they carry on these extremely complex discussions...

"...And when you look at the structure of them, they seem like a kind of mathematics. It's as though people want to work out mathematical problems, and if they don't have calculus and arithmetic, they work them out with other structures...And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow...

"Well, in our society we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way -- so what they do is put their minds to other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff...So what's left?

"...And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves society in general: it occupies the populations, and it keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions."
(from Understanding Power, pp. 99-100, taken from Elliptic Blog)

Even esteemed multimedia mentor Rick Musser, during Angelotti's presentation, mentioned that if he were to go to a new town and start a news website for it, he would focus on high school sports. It makes sense. If you want to reign-in an audience, this type of thing will do it. It's what people really care about.

This makes me sad. It's becoming increasingly apparent to me, though my academic studies of media, that the American public simply does not want good journalism. Of course, when I think of the term "journalism," it's always pretty linked to politics, to democracy. And more and more, it seems to me that America does not want democracy.