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The news from the world of journalism has been almost unrelievedly bad for as long as I have been a journalist. When I graduated from college in 1992 and tried to get a job, I was told it was the worst recession in newspaper history, and I was rejected by 91 out of 92 newspapers I applied to. Then things got worse.
But I would argue that maybe it’s not that bad, that maybe all the things that people have savaged the Internet for — speed, carelessness, chaos, the destruction of the daily newspaper — are actually creating a golden age for journalism.
To begin to understand why, let me take you back to the Paleolithic era of digital journalism. It was the year 2000. I was goofing off at the Slate office, reading some magazine that had absolutely nothing to do with my actual job, when I came across a mention of a man named William Shockley. William Shockley — the name rang bells in my head, in an ominous minor key. I suddenly flashed back 20 years earlier, to my childhood breakfast table. I remembered my father yelling at his Washington Post, calling William Shockley a Nazi. I remembered a bit more: My father had been outraged that Nobel Prize winner William Shockley — that’s right, a Nobel Prize winner — had gotten involved in a crazy sperm bank for geniuses, and that it was a sinister, racist, Hitler-style plot to breed superbabies. My 10-year-old self had no idea what a sperm bank was, but the episode lodged in a cranny of my brain: William Shockley! Nobel Prize! Sperm bank! Hitler!
This sighting of Shockley set me off. I started digging. Shockley, the creator of the transistor, the invention that launched the computer age, had indeed been involved in a weird sperm bank — the Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank. Starting in 1980, and for almost 20 years, the Repository for Germinal Choice had collected semen from Nobel Prize winners and other geniuses and offered it to women who belonged to the high IQ society Mensa, in an effort to breed a cadre of superchildren.
I was enthralled by this episode, especially when it turned out that practically nothing was known about how the strange eugenics experiment had turned out. It was ripe for investigation. I eventually tracked down 60 of the 200 or so kids born from the bank, located most of the donors and recreated in Slate a lost history of an amazing chapter in American history. All this unfolded at a languorous pace, over 13 weeks in Slate, and eventually became a book, The Genius Factory.
Why did this all happen? Because I had too much time on my hands at work: Enough spare time to be reading some random article, enough spare time to follow a strange lead and enough indulgence from a wonderful editor, Michael Kinsley, who was willing to risk the time of one of his very few staff writers on what could have been a wild goose chase.
Why I am recounting this story now? Because I think it begins to get at both the promise and dangers of digital journalism.
I have been an Internet journalist since the very dawn of Internet journalism. I joined Slate 18 years ago, in 1996, before it launched. At the time I was hired to work for a web magazine, I had literally never been on the web. Most people hadn’t been. No one took us seriously. Covering the 1996 presidential campaign, our chief political correspondent Jacob Weisberg, a journalist who grilled presidents and wrote bestsellers, was told by the Clinton campaign that when he flew on Air Force One, he should sit with the TV cameramen. They thought since Slate was on the web, he was like a computer technician. Even years later, Congress hesitated before giving press passes to Slate and other digital publications: You see, the rules said you had to mail copies of your magazine to the press office. Mail? And what, print copies?
The first time most people heard of Internet journalism was when Matt Drudge broke the story of Monica Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton. So the first rap on Internet journalism was: Look, they have no standards. They publish lies and don’t even care. Around 2000, blogs came along and flourished. The critique morphed, too. It became: There’s no journalism on the Internet, just bloviating and navel gazing by a bunch of guys in pajamas with bad breath and no friends. Four years later, Huffington Post came along, and the rap changed again: Internet journalism — it’s just a bunch of 23-year-olds stealing stories from The New York Times, and dumbing them down. And then Buzzfeed arrived, and the line became: Digital journalism is cat videos and quizzes, such as, “What supreme court justice would you hit on at a bar?”
Meanwhile, newspapers shed staff, print circulation declined and the lifeblood of newspaper — classified and local retail ads — dried up. Newspapers, some corpses, some gravely wounded, littered the journalism landscape. Buzzfeed acquired more than 80 million readers a month — twice as many as The New York Times — as Business Insider, a site that didn’t exist five years ago, grew bigger than The Wall Street Journal.
Today, of course, digital journalism has, for all intents and purposes, become journalism. Indeed, now there’s way too much of it. The New York Times now publishes 250 items per day online, which sounds like a lot until you realize Huffington Post publishes 500 per day. Fox News publishes 1,500 per day. Yahoo publishes 3,000 per day. That’s just stories. Digital journalism has metastasized, so that most journalists don’t even spend their time reporting and writing stories, what with the tweets, Facebook and Linkedin posts, vines, videos, podcasts and email blasts. Increasingly, it feels like everyone is publishing everything all the time, and no one actually has time to read any of it.
We’re drowning in tweets and quizzes. Are you surprised or shocked — or neither — to learn that the most popular item in Slate history by far was a tiny little widget we did just after John Travolta butchered Idina Menzel’s name at the Oscars in March, calling her Adele Dazeem? You type your name, and it spits out your Travoltified name, filled with z’s and e’s. This brought 10 million readers to Slate, more than we got in entire months during 2012.
Trivia, ephemera, ludicrous overpublishing, excessive tweeting … all while the newspaper, the foundation of great journalism, withers. It sounds bad. But there is good news.
Most handwringing about the state of journalism is done by journalists. They are worried about losing their jobs, so it’s not surprising that they tend to be fretful. But turn the issue upside down for a second, and think about the state of journalism from journalism’s audience. The real purpose of journalism, after all, is not to provide me a job, but to inform and entertain the public. And by that standard, it is clear we are living in a golden age. There has never been a better time to be a reader and watcher and listener of news. Never have you had so many choices, and so many that are excellent.
And it’s also still a pretty excellent time to be a journalist. A generation ago, you could read your local newspaper, and receive magazines in the mail, weeks after the articles in them were written. Today, every single magazine and newspaper in the world is available to anyone with an Internet connection, instantaneously. A generation ago, the only people who could produce news were those millionaires who owned presses and TV and radio licenses. Today, anyone in the world can publish and broadcast. There are no barriers to entry: As we saw in the Arab Spring, the combination of social media and cellphone cameras could turn any citizen into a journalist. The wiki — the self-organizing, reader-edited information source — has become universal in half a generation. Wikipedia has made up-to-date, accurate, comprehensive information about practically everything available to everyone in the world, instantly.
A generation ago, data was hidden and guarded in government files, difficult to gather, difficult to play with, difficult to share. Today, governments have opened their mines to all of us, allowing statisticians, journalists, web designers and average Joes to gather and manipulate data in ways unimagined before. One small example: Americans interested in politics used to be held hostage to a few cryptic pollsters: The open data era allowed Nate Silver to gather gigantic amounts of polling data, break it down, weight it, manipulate it and make predictions far more accurate and useful than anything that ever existed. Once a form of magic — a dark art husbanded by a few wizards — political prediction has become almost a science. This kind of mass availability of data has now enabled journalists and others to track and reveal crime trends, to expose medicare fraud, to track Netflix rentals. There is data where there once was only anecdote and speculation.
While the newspaper, the news magazine and network news have declined, the digital age has given birth to a flowering of new kinds of journalism. Digital journalism makes possible obsessional journalism that used to be confined to micro-circulation newsletters. For U.S. politics, Politico and National Journal are just two battling it out. Main Justice covers federal law. Scotusblog owns the U.S. Supreme Court. ReCode, Gizmodo, techcrunch and a hundred others cover technology news. Any animal lover could sate herself at the Dodo.
Explanatory journalism is another digital form that is thriving. Vox offers clear, fast, comprehensible explanations of public policy, and it’s got tons of excellent competitors. These explainers often work closely with data journalists, who have created sites for those who want their news wrapped in numbers. The Upshot, whose calculator helps you decide if you should rent or buy a house, is probably the most useful thing The New York Times has ever given its readers. Again, this form didn’t used to exist, because the raw material to make it wasn’t available.
A few years ago, audio journalism junkies were limited to public radio and terrible commercial radio news bulletins. The podcast has made audio perhaps the most exciting digital medium of all. In investigative journalism, too, we see digital rising. The intense advocacy journalism of Glenn Greenwald, and the ability to communicate anonymously online, made possible the most important investigative scoop of our age, the Snowden leaks. It also inspired Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar to spend $250-million on a new digital investigative journalism enterprise. ProPublica, also philanthropist funded, is winning Pulitzer prizes for its investigative reporting.
And what about longform? Again and again we have been told that the Internet — built for short attention spans — would destroy longform journalism. How wrong that has proved. The tablet — and even the smartphone — have made reading long a pleasure. There are new longform-only digital magazines, notably Byliner and The Atavist. Kindle Single has invented an entirely new kind of journalism — the minibook. Even outlets that traditionally measured success in page views have learned that great longform journalism breeds devotion from readers. At Slate, for example, every staffer is required to take a month a year to do a longform project.
It’s not all perfect. There are problems with this model. The one that bothers me most is ideological sorting. Political news no longer comes to us primarily from nonpartisan sources. Instead, media organizations on the left and right filter it for their consumers. We now read in enclaves. Show me your Google history and I’ll tell you who you voted for. One of the disappointing and scary things I have learned as an editor, is that one of the best ways to attract readers is to pander to one side or the other. As a journalist, this worries me. As a citizen, it terrifies me. This is the one change brought about by digital journalism that seems genuinely dangerous, and genuinely hard to undo.
But we shouldn’t be blind to all the good news for journalism. Things are changing, yes — but in most ways, they’re changing for the better.
National Post
David Plotz is the editor of Slate Magazine. The above text is adapted from a speech he is giving today at Brock University, during Congress. Organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Congress is the largest interdisciplinary conference in Canada and one of the largest in the world. For more information, go to Congress2014.ca.
This article by David Plotz, editor of Slate Magazine, was originally published at nationalpost.com
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