Post Journalism And The Attention Deficit

Michael Hedges April 5, 2012 Follow on Twitter

Theater and journalism generally keep their separate spaces. Both, though, are venues for a good story, which attracts viewers, listeners and readers. The values of journalism – objectivity and facts – seem passé in an attention-obsessed world. Welcome to post-journalism.

Simmering for months has been a news story about Apple’s Chinese supplier Foxconn, with allegations of labor abuse. Serious news program “This American Life,” produced by Chicago Public Radio WBEZ and distributed by US public radio network NPR, contracted social activist/performer Mike Daisey for a special program based on his stage presentation “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” WBEZ and NPR believed Mike Daisey had done original and truthful reporting.

After the devastating 40-minute segment aired in January, the New York Times and other news organizations beat the daylights out of Apple.  The NPR podcast was downloaded nearly 900,000 times. It was the kind of attention that NPR, largely funded by donations, certainly welcomed.

But a few weeks later, in mid-March, NPR and the producers were forced to “retract” the story.

Mike Daisey had, to be generous, misstated key elements of the story. Listening to “The American Life” host apologize was painful. “We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth,” he said. The fact-checking process broke down.

“What I do is not journalism,” wrote Daisey in a blog post. “The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed “This American Life” to air an excerpt from my monologue. “This American Life” is essentially a journalistic, not a theatrical, enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret.”

The term “post journalism” has been kicking around for several years, first in the United States where publishers and broadcasters have shed reporters and editors in droves. Post-journalism, offered as a radical theory by Queensborough Community College professor Alex Mawbrey in the New York Observer (February 2009), is another variation on citizen journalism; voluntary, un-paid work for ego gratification. Objective news reporting is – or has been – relegated to the free-market dustbin.

Much of the post-journalism meme centers around technology making obsolete traditional news media. More than thirty years ago CNN founder Ted Turner told a publishers convention that “newspapers as we know them today will be gone within the next ten years, or certainly...serving a very reduced role.... You're becoming very rapidly technologically obsolete.” Ted may have missed the deadline but the fundamental idea holds true. Since 1981 every link in the news media model has changed, beginning with news consumers, through business models and on to the reporters and editors who put it all together.

American “yellow” press publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst invented in the 1890’s high-minded journalism in the public service, noted media critic Jack Shafer in Slate (June 15, 2011), to deflect criticism “that their techniques and topics cheapened the press and endangered everyone's freedom by giving governments a pretext to regulate.” Many governments regulate the press, all regulate broadcasting but, so far, the Web remains mostly wild and crazy. In the wake – make that tsunami – of alleged illegal practices at tabloid newspapers in the UK calls for stiff press regulation are regular and pervasive.

UK publishers formed the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) to stave off more statutory regulations. Thanks in large measure to official investigations and inquiries centering on certain tabloid newspapers, the PCC is doomed, self-regulation a failure. Even the UK National Union of Journalists (NUJ), always a press freedom supporter, has thrown in the towel. “Whilst the NUJ is hugely disappointed that we have reached this point, despite more than twenty years of campaigning for reform of the Press Complaints Commission and press regulation, we now see it as inevitable that there should be some statutory provision for a new regulator,” said its statement (March 30).

But tabloid newspapers – and tabloid TV news shows, where allowed – are extremely popular. This has set up a divide between popular media and those professing to act in the public interest. Both need to survive economically for the breadth of journalism to remain viable. Post-journalism implies a far less vibrant media sphere.

Worth exploring, in this regard, is the divide between “knowledge worker” and “attention worker,” as described by Stanford University professor David Nordfors, founding director of its Center for Innovation and Communication. “Knowledge workers often find attention workers 'sensationalist' or 'hot air balloons', while attention workers find knowledge workers 'lost in space' or 'academic', he wrote in a monologue (2008). Management science’s eminent thinker Peter Drucker first used the term “knowledge worker” in 1959. An “attention worker,” according to Nordfors, includes “journalists in ad-based media and PR people.”  Scientists and engineers, he , a physicist by training, explains, are “knowledge workers.”

“Attention workers are key players in the attention economy,” he continued. “The modern economy is an innovation economy, and the innovation economy is an attention economy. The value of attention is going up, so there should be a good market for attention work.”

Twitter is the icon of the attention economy. Knowledge is neither created nor consumed. PR people, advertising people and, yes, some media workers have mastered it, borrowing widely from the tabloid headline writer’s skill set.

Other skills, those commonly associated with journalism, are left out in the hot and noisy world of this attention economy. It comes as no surprise that journalists jettisoned by newspapers and broadcasters look first to the PR agencies for work. The post-journalism era has, literally and figuratively, left its thumbprints everywhere.

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