On Monday, my class had the pleasure of an insightful visit by Mike Fancher, the editor-at-large of The Seattle Times. Fancher, the grandfatherly former executive editor of The Times, recently stepped down from that post and his prolific "Inside the Times" column in order to spend more time outside the newsroom as a sort of roaming advocate for what he calls "media literacy."
As part of this semi-retired role, he has started a new blog, Press Here, that will deal with the many multi-faceted changes journalism will be facing in the next few years — something of great interest to myself and my peers in the UW’s journalism program.
Fancher made a number of observations during his talk with my classmates. The first and most important was that just because there’s a lot of places to get information out on the ‘Net, that doesn’t mean that traditional journalism is useless and therefore dead.
"There’s a lot more talk out there than actual journalism," he said, with a dearth of original, creative reporting in an age of a burgeoning blogosphere. Bloggers are commentators, and, as such, need the original work of professional journalists if they want to say anything about "the news" to begin with.
The proliferation of singular points of view (i.e. bloggers) and the decline of newspapers is thus a mixed blessing. Fancher said that technology has the nasty side-effect of ennobling both the noble-minded bloggers and thus who pretty much just hate the guts of the other side. And that’s not good for a democratic society that desperately needs a functioning marketplace of ideas.
If the marketplace is getting bombed by increasingly polarized and vitriol-driven factions, how can people shop for the right ideas?
Fancher said that reporters are often criticized for simply doing their jobs; among his biggest concerns is a trend toward selective news intake, or choosing what you want to hear as opposed to what you should hear (or read, for that matter).
Political campaigns attempt to cut out the middleman of the media and "go straight to the public" to get their message out, he said. That sounds like a good idea in practice, but the modern-day spin machines that candidates are forced to drive often but good, old-fashioned Truth (yes, with a capital "T") on the backburner.
It’s the job of journalist to act as the guardians or holders of the public trust, and watch out for their interests. While rather archaic-sounding, this ideal can and should survive beyond the first decade of this new century, he said. Journalists should embrace new technologies such as blogging and pod casting, and should become media guides, explorers and navigators for a public increasingly swallowed up in the faceless "chatter" of the Internet.
Journalism should also be about community and authenticity, he said. In his last column to Times readers, he wrote:
"To earn public trust, journalists must lead in developing the nascent concept of ‘news literacy,’ which aims to help people be better, more knowledgeable consumers of news. Journalists must articulate the standards that set their craft apart and create methods to assist the public in determining whether those standards are being met. Knowing their best efforts will always fall short, journalists must commit to introspection and transparency."
The old cliché about Web journalism runs something like this: journalists hoard information and bloggers give it away. Fancher said that journalists should emulate bloggers and become the "professional amateurs" they started out as, asking the right questions and getting access to people and stories that bloggers can’t get to.
"Print journalists still think of themselves as ‘the experts’ … but if the public doesn’t feel like they’re working on their behalf, they’ll look elsewhere," he said.
For my sake, I hope I can become the sort of trusted Web river guide that Fancher talked about.