Nieman Journalism Lab director Josh Benton says in the era of digital social networks, what may help newspapers survive is…love.
What he referred to was the habit of newspaper people to adopt a defensive crouch, holding their readers at a distance and (after a few too many abusive or ill-informed phone calls) even disliking readers. Yeah, those folks who pay the bill.
Benton illustrated this change by reading from the transcript of a 1995 newspaper conference on the internet, an exchange between online Esther Dyson and New York Times scion Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.
At that time, Sulzberger said he doubted journalists would be online or would daily answer dozens of emails from readers. Dyson, prescient as she often is, suggested that more and more of a journalists’ day would be consumed by direct contact from readers.
Benton shared the transcript not to make anyone look dumb, but merely to demonstrate how things have changed.
Benton then told stories from his own tenure at the Dallas Morning News, where the nature of his relationship to readers changed when he began writing a column…with a photo above it. Suddenly, he was more human to readers. Inviting conversation with readers, he said, changed another colleague, an education reporter, who started a blog. That reporter has begun sharing documents online to ask readers for advise and expertise. It works and as a result, the reporter’s work is better and his relationship to readers - once defined by his hard-boiled investigator’s pose - has changed.
Maybe love isn’t the exact word. But it’s no longer a relationship in which one party talks at the other. It’s a conversation.
Any reader of a small-town paper like the Post Register is giggling. That’s what the editorial page is for. And if you don’t write letters, you can always jump the Editor in the checkout line at Albertsons…
Which is not to suggest we’re miles ahead. But those of us from America’s outback surely recognize the truth of what Josh Benton said. We do better work when we have help from thoughtful readers.
Even an intimate community like eastern Idaho feels too pushed away by its newspaper and our experiments with reader-submitted photos, blogs, social networking and other new media are, we hope, going to involve eastern Idahoans more intimately in the job of serving the public’s need for information about its community.
As a side note, we have, at the Post Register, published our staff’s direct phone numbers and email addresses at the end of each story for almost a decade. Here’s hoping we move further toward the process of enlisting the public every day in the process of getting the facts right and getting the right facts.
Full disclosure: Josh Benton is a friend of mine, a fellow member of the Nieman Fellowship class of ‘08.
The malady Miller describes is by no means limited to “newspaper people.” I have known doctors who hated their patients, lawyers who hated their clients, teachers who hated their students, and priests who hated their parishioners. Sometimes there is cause and other times not, as in the cases, for example, of excessive timidity, paranoia, or sociopathology. So, the newspaper person who dislikes his or her readers probably also dislikes the priest’s parishioners, the doctor’s patients, the lawyer’s clients, and the teacher’s students. I have a natural tendency to distruct anything that has to do with learning love; I am reminded far too much of Ali McGraw’s line in LOVE STORY, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Those of us who have been there, done that, know better: love means ALWAYS having to say I am sorry–sorry for who I am, what I do and say, and what I didn’t do and say. Herbert Spencer said there is one principle that will keep us in everlasting ignorance–contempt prior to investigation. So if Miller the editor gets to know me, Hunt the reader, a little better, perhaps some of the mutual contempt will disappear. I still have no intention of jumping him in the line at Albertsons.