Essays: August 2006 Archives

I've seen Benji boogie and watched the Jayhawks jam. I've born witness to the weird and been privy to the perverse .

And it's all thanks to YouTube.

Many claim this viral video vixen may hasten the demise of television news as we know it.

I'm not one of them.

Is YouTube entertaining? Absolutely! Newsworthy? You tell me. Go ahead and take a look at YouTube's news category. I'll wait. Back? Now, tell me: what does this have to do with news? Nothing, as far as I can tell. Yet, it – and many other priceless gems just like it – pop up under the site's news and blogs category.

That's the problem with YouTube. You have to sort through plenty of trash before you can find the occasional treasure. And I'm just not sure I want to get my news from the same place that considers this worthy of my time.

YouTube is a lot of things. What it's not is a credible news source. And that's a shame … especially, when you consider the site's incredible marketing potential.

In fact, the site's now 30 million visitors a day rival the total number of viewers who tune in to all three network newscasts.

While It's easy to be blinded by the hype surrounding YouTube, the site has yet to unveil a profitable business model or a plan to fend off other, more reputable film aggregators.

If YouTube wants to take a bite out of the mainstream news market, it'll need to do some major marketing and perhaps, undergo a bit of a redesign.

Because if I'm searching for the news, I really don't want to wade past this to get it.

When the 2006 MTV Movie Awards aired Thursday, June 8, I was at work. The following weekend, my buddy Nelson asked me if I had seen Gnarls Barkley's performance. The answer, of course, was no. The group's latest appearance on MTV, had been a characteristically quirky performance where they dressed up in Star Wars costumes and rocked their hit single "Crazy."

So I turned to YouTube for help. Within moments of booting up my computer I was already watching the clip. And yes, the Star Wars costumes were just as amazing as my buddy had described. I wasn't alone, either. More than 100,000 other people also went to YouTube for a second chance to watch the clip. That number has since grown to more than 770,000.

Essentially, this means the timeline of television is no longer sufficient. People all over the world, like me, didn't want to wait until MTV replayed the show. People are taking video matters into their own hands. The intriguing thing about YouTube is that it's completely user-run. It's a forum for people to upload, watch, share and discuss their own homemade videos. For the first time, individual people—not the network execs or the collective masses—are controlling video content, in every aspect—creation, production and distribution. People can watch clips of live video they missed, find videos and share information on their favorite interests, and simply be entertained, any time of day. Add to that the technological advances in wireless Internet access, and now, along with immediacy, YouTube has portability on its side too. That spells trouble for not only TV news, but for all of television in general.

There's just something so liberating about being able to watch Chewbacca play the drums any time I want, as many times as I want. It's infinitely more satisfying than being told what to watch on TV.

For those of you who don't know me, you probably should. I'm kind of a big deal.

Over the past four months, 3,572 people have watched my high school show, the Maize News Break, on YouTube. Doing some quick math, that leaves only 254,996,428 Americans who have not seen the Maize News Break bloopers.

With ratings like that, it's stunning that CBS would choose an aging dinosaur like Katie Couric to take the nightly news chair instead of an up-and-coming celebrity like myself.

Of course, shows will reflect their demographics, and Couric is the right person to deliver news to the crowd that still watches network news.

Network news isn't dying because of its lack of relevance or because of any truth-telling issues. It's dying because people aren't home at 5:30 p.m. anymore.

Americans are working longer than ever, but not harder than ever. Their evening time in front of the TV has been replaced with workday time surfing the internet. It's not good or bad, it just is. And it has certainly taught us a thing or two about our society.

You see, we're not the politics-loving Renaissance men that our forefathers assumed we would be. It turns out we'd rather vote for an American Idol than an American president.

That's why news coverage can't just move online. It's not that TV is doing a poor job covering the news, it's just that America would rather watch a cat on a wheel than a politician on a stump.

People have a powerful tool now: they can choose what they want to watch.

And if they want to watch me do a bad John Walsh impersonation…I'm going to let them.

The usual disappointment settled in when I first read about "Reutersgate."

"It was an honest mistake; I probably would have missed that, too," I thought. After I learned that the dark plumes of smoke hanging over Beirut were enhanced by Photoshop, I realized I was part of the problem, along with Reuters and the New York Times.

I haven't yet acquired enough technoknowledge to determine whether someone had doctored the photo. Sure, I know that Tom Cruise would die if he took the 20-foot plunge on a motorcycle like his character did in Mission Impossible. Anyone could tell that the film's producers used special effects. But the subtlety of the changes in the smoke photo required a trained eye.

Not to mention the blatant photo fabrications, which even casual readers pegged as fakes.

The problem goes deeper. The news media's excessive cost cutting has decreased the quality of journalism. How can these lapses in judgment occur when the industry boasts 20 percent profit margins? The news media certainly have the money to hire technologically savvy workers.

Tim Rutten writes that a year ago, Reuters decided to save money by consolidating all three of its operations into one photo desk in Singapore. Washington D.C.-based Reuters employees refused to relocate to the Southeast Asian country, where they would have earned a fraction of their former salaries.

Recently, the freelancer sent the sham photos from his laptop in Lebanon to a Reuters' photo desk in Singapore where employees reviewed them and added cutlines before they were sent to news organizations throughout the world. Shareholders may be receiving sizable dividends, but at the expense of quality journalism.

And whatever happened to employee background checks? Problem is, it's harder to manage freelancers.

Reuters could have avoided the embarrassment if it had doled out the dough for some decent, fulltime correspondents. But I guess I'll have to deal with the news media's ineptitude until I'm willing to stare at photos in Singapore for $18,000 a year.

Every day I sit in journalism class and hear the professors tell us about how our professions are changing. I agree with them. I bet in my lifetime newspapers will not go to print, but will be only on the Internet. The public will constantly access the news through their cell phones or ipods. Journalists are going to have to change with these technologies. The question is…How is journalism changing?

The new news media, bloggers, are an important key to the changes that journalists are facing. Newspapers, TV stations, and magazines are starting to have writers produce blogs for their audiences to read online. Bloggers, can also be considered journalists, but a different type of journalist. The old media has traditionally presented objective news. The new news media is more opinionated.

While some argue that the new news media is bringing down the old media, I believe that both need to exist. Both the old news and new news media will be working together to appeal to the public and keep journalistic standards high.

While bloggers usually link to traditional news sites and use material that traditional reporters have found, bloggers play a vital role in making sure that journalists stay on track. In fact, it was bloggers who were the first to question Dan Rather's fabricated sources in the "Bush goes AWOL" story. Without bloggers acting as watchdogs, more fabricated news might be out there.

In this changing world , only a greater power can truly know what the news media will be like in a few years. I do know one thing, however. News is here to stay and traditional journalists, bloggers and citizen journalists are going to play key roles — together.

Bloggers would love nothing more than to take a seat at the table of mainstream media. If you ask some of them, they're already there.

I've got some bad news for them: not only are they not at the table, they can't even get a reservation.

For all the self-aggrandizement that goes on among bloggers, their main contribution to journalism at this point seems to be trashing journalism. That would be fine, if they offered an alternative.

Instead they want to be taken seriously when they offer nothing more than commentary, fact checking and poorly-researched speculation on stories being reported by the real media.

At Technorati, a website that classifies what's popular among bloggers, the hot topics on Sunday were the Reuters doctored photo controversy, the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, and the hit movie "Snakes on a Plane."

All three of these are mainstream media. Bloggers can't be taken seriously until they provide original content and research. So far the best they've done is Gawker Stalker, a map that let's you report where you've seen a celebrity.

Their claim that newspapers are dying is also greatly exaggerated. If every new media killed an old one, that wouldn't leave much room for radio or magazines, both of which found ways to survive in a changing society.

It's time for bloggers to quit puffing their chests and start working on something useful. Only then will people think of the internet as more than just a place to see reporting done by TV stations and newspapers.

When I arrived at graduate school last year, I found myself embroiled in a bitter debate: new media or old?

You'd think the decision would be an easy one. A former print journalist, I've grown up reading the newspaper and still have it delivered to my door. Quite frankly, there's nothing I enjoy more on a Sunday morning than a good cup of coffee and hearty dose of newsprint.

But there's something about traditional journalists that makes me embarrassed to admit I am one. The latest Reuters scandal is a case in point. A Lebanese freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj, digitally manipulated photos he'd shot in Lebanon, making the fighting there look worse than it actually was.

It didn't take long for a blogger to catch on to the controversy and out both Reuters and Hajj. And it's not the first time bloggers have lifted the veil of mainstream ignorance.

Time and time again, bloggers point out the foibles and faux pas of the traditional media. It's the bloggers now who check and recheck their facts, who read the mainstream media and the not-so mainstream, who scour their beats for news. They are what we traditional journalists used to be: passionate, accurate, confident, credible.

Somewhere along the way, the mainstream media lost its mojo. Now, we're just sore losers, hoping to discredit the new kids on the block. Instead of shoring up our own weakening credibility, we try to destroy theirs. Instead of listening to our audience, we try to lecture it. Instead of pulling ourselves up, we continue to give bloggers the ammunition they need to put us down: Dan Rather, El Nuevo Herald, and now, Adnan Hajj.

We in the traditional media spend a lot of time pointing fingers. What we should be doing is looking in the mirror.

So, until that happens, I choose new.