The Internet & News, Part 2: The Perils Of Free Lunch

Every industry, no matter what products it offers, succeeds or fails on the most elementary of market relationships: the marriage of suppliers and consumers. News is no different.
A great deal of attention, including the final Worldview column for 2007, has been given to the contradictory effects of the Internet, pro and con, on news suppliers. Far less critically examined is the role of those who consume news.

In the written press, this role is undergoing profound change in almost every respect, from the simple act of reading to the more complicated array of assumptions that readers bring to it. The picture is not yet complete, and it's possible that the pros of news technology may eventually outweigh its cons.

But it's difficult to imagine a technological solution to the fundamental human problem: the entrenched habits of the Internet news consumer.

HOW WE READ
The pre-Internet news experience, by default, was a wandering journey, a casual stroll through a newspaper's pages that often led to surprise discoveries. A dateline that rang no bells. An unexpected turn of events. An entire subject area that had never before engaged the reader's attention.

The design and ordering of those pages were, of course, deliberate – a calculated series of decisions by editors that rested on many factors, market-driven, political and personal. To a certain degree, the journey was guided by those decisions. But serendipity was unavoidable.

A reader who had never entertained a thought on Central Asia might, in the course of the daily news journey, pass an impulsive hour in a feature in Afghanistan. The wandering eye and the curious mind could be drawn to anything, and no editor, now matter how astute, ever anticipated their halting points perfectly.

Any contrast between that old, leisurely and serendipitous newspaper stroll, and its new high-speed incarnation online, confronts us squarely with the central paradox of the Internet: endless possibility and shrinking delivery. Or put another way, the reality of "less" hidden in the promise of "more."

Nowhere is that paradox more evident than in the rising importance of two Internet tools for readers: "news profiles" and "hyperlinks."

The theoretical appeal of the news profile is irresistible. In response to a self-description by the Internet reader, measured in "preferred" topics, datelines and news genres – business, technology, international affairs, politics, sports, travel – an Internet service such as Yahoo, Google, AOL or Earthlink delivers a packaged compendium of the day's events.

But the contents are limited to those events that fit, very snugly, into narrow preconceptions about what articles are worth reading. The rest never make it onto the home or office computer screen. Serendipity plays no part.

Profiling is especially favored by younger, highly-educated and well-employed news consumers, the elite of the Internet Age, for whom time and efficiency are paramount concerns. Quite a few of the self-profiled work in New York's Financial District, and were prominent among the victims of September 11, 2001. Like the befuddled U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials who might otherwise have foreseen the 9-11 attacks, they probably never wandered into an account of the country that hosted and trained their killers.

The danger of linking is more subtle, because its promise of "more" seems so unambiguous.

Unlike the old newspaper story, whose use of headlines and the occasional set of italics or quote marks offered little more than sign-posting, online articles are heavily peppered with color-highlighted words and phrases that "link" us to select background essays.

At their best, these links do fill in blanks in our knowledge. Yet they also instruct us in what we should find important, rather than allow independent judgments drawn from context. At their worst, hyperlinks are an exercise in spoon-feeding.

THE END OF THE STORY
It doesn't take a degree in cognitive psychology to recognize another, implicit habit of the Internet reader that is altering the news landscape. Internet news is tailor-made for the short attention span, the quick information snack on the run. Its bread and butter is not that mainstay of the old newspaper – the story – it is the brief, pared-down dispatch.

The story, in the hands of a good reporter, was not so far afield from what oral epics had been in the time of Homer. Its words – accompanied by a few very carefully selected photographs — did everything possible to pull the reader's imagination into the reality of a news event. A war story offered cogent descriptions of the weather on the morning of battle, the sound of shells screaming into a city and the cries of the wounded, the fierce heat and acrid smell of a tank bursting into flame. It was drama, with characters, plot, rising and falling action, all the narrative devices that compelled the engaged imagination of the public from Aeschylus and Shakespeare to Bergman and Spielberg.

There's no room for any of that in an Internet dispatch. The effect is more than an impoverishment of readerly experience. It is a depiction of reality that eliminates almost everything – the nuance, the feel, the complexity – that makes a distant event real to our imaginations.

This is a way of saying that the reader – yes, you – is as much responsible for the decline of news as is the industry itself, and perhaps more. You want your information to be rapidly served, concise, immediately relevant and without cost. The results speak for themselves.

The news business is like a restaurant. No matter how talented and ambitious the chef, a kitchen can only serve what its clients are willing to eat – and pay for. If Internet Age news consumers want cheap fast food, that's what they'll get.

However much lip service we give to the notion that there's no such thing as a free lunch, it is the prevailing assumption on the demand side of the Internet news economy, an assumption that is reducing supply to starvation levels.

THE COST OF AN ILLUSION
With few exceptions, mostly in the world of business information – which has an intrinsic, measurable dollar value – media enterprises have found it impossible to wean the public away from the illusion that news gathering and delivery can be cost-free to news consumers. Even the powerful New York Times, the last comprehensive source of foreign news in the United States, has dropped its payment system for full Internet access. There weren't enough takers.

And even at the New York Times, the consequences of supplier starvation are proliferating. Two recent examples, chosen precisely because they took place on the remote margins of the world arena where global crisis ferments, will serve to illustrate the point.

On January 8, the Times published an article on an attempted presidential assassination in the Republic of the Maldives, which it described as "an island nation in the Pacific Ocean." One week later, citing Reuters – one of the world's leading press agencies – the Times reported a bloody terrorist attack, by Tamil Tiger insurgents, near the town of Moneragala "in north-central Sri Lanka."

The Maldives, which is faced with a growing tide of Islamic extremism, actually lies between Somalia and Sri Lanka, six time zones and thousands of miles distant from where the Times article placed them. As for Moneragala, it is in southeastern Sri Lanka, on the very opposite end from the location identified by both Reuters and the Times.

Harmless errors? If the Maldives were
indeed in the Pacific Ocean, it would suggest that violent Islamic extremism is now extending itself to a part of the world where it has never been present before. As for Sri Lanka, the mistake implies that the Tigers are active only where they have always been active, in northern Sir Lanka's Tamil heartland. The reality, however, is that they are now striking all over the island, a major escalation of a religious and ethnic war that could eventually embroil India, Great Britain and the United States.

Neither error was corrected for nearly a full day, and in the end, the Maldives error was spotted by Times readers rather than editors.

Meanwhile, the gaffs were reproduced by thousands of online publications around the globe.

Government policy and worldwide public opinion are forged in the confusions bred by errors like this – and by the "free news" financial crisis that accounts for them. The staffing of overseas news bureaus has been cut to the bone under escalating budget pressures, as documented by World View in December. And home-office editorial teams, the final barriers against misinformation, are increasingly pressed beyond the limits of human capacity.

These are the costs that matter, the small errors that proliferate wildly and balloon into geopolitical miscalculations – circulated worldwide by a medium that worships speed but ignores standards, that borrows promiscuously from the conventional print and broadcast media while bankrupting them.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL
The terrible truth is that the entire structure underlying the gathering and reporting of news is crumbling. It will continue to do so, at great and perhaps fatal risk, until something is done to reinvent the media wheel – to renew the institutional structure that keeps journalism professional, and with it the consumer's recognition that quality is proportionate to cost.

The facile assertion today is that we have entered a brave new era of "open media " in which everyone is a journalist, there are no editors and all "reporting" carries the same weight. But the bones of the old structure — the rigorous editing, the constant questioning, the respect that key media institutions earned and protected, the commitment to an objective assessment of that slippery beast "truth," the value placed on open-eyed experience in the field — had concrete meaning.

Without that meaning, Democracy itself is at stake, because it is no more than an empty word without a vigilant and authoritative press and an informed public. For the moment, we are perilously close to having neither.

Part One of this article can be read here 

  – Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5