Dan Froomkin, whose White House Watch column appears on washingtonpost.com, penned a thoughtful piece for the Nieman Journalism Lab expressing the need for more passion in American newspapers.
Passion seems like a funny word to bandy about in connection with newspapers. That is, it is a rather odd association unless your experience with newspapers has only consisted of consuming the news. For many, though not all, who have toiled in some aspect of creating the beast that sometimes the final news product can be passion is a driving force that produces conscious consideration much less than that of a paycheck.
The problem with newspapers today, says Froomkin, is newspapers “play it too safe.”
“We need to come to terms with the fact that one reason we’re having such a tough time is that we are still fundamentally failing to deliver the value of our newsroom to Internet users,” he said.
What journalists do and are, and what Internet readers desire, is no different now than it has been way before the Internet arrived — at least as core principles are concerned. As Froomkin points out papers are more hindered than helped by a format that had more value in days past — the notion of objectivity originally used to bring in a wider readership is a good example he uses.
Froomkin said that the Internet does not work on a daily schedule and “abhors the absence of voice.”
“If we were to start an online newspaper from scratch today, we’d recognize that toneless, small-bore news stories are not the way to build a large audience — not even with “interactive” bells and whistles cobbled on top,” Froomkin said. “One option might be to imitate cable TV, and engage in a furious volume of he-said/she-said reporting, voyeurism, contrarianism, gossip, triviality and gotcha journalism. But that would come at the cost of our souls. The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.”
Some of the above is already done, Froomkin said. However, too often the powers that be obscure great stories in what he calls a “pseudo-neutrality” as well as other perceived sins such as newspapers fleeing from tone like lawyers running from Dick Cheney with a shotgun.
Perhaps a more simplistic notion would be that newspapers have been cornered by their own successes now that the immediacy and so-called “all the news all the time” of the Internet and Cable TV has made news (almost — I don’t think it’s completely there yet) a 24/7 phenomenon.
It’s like I was telling a friend with whom I had lunch today if I could only find a way to make money with the Internet … The same goes for those newspapers left standing to deliver a news product for a new frontier. To be or not to be may be the question but money is the answer.