Talking to the wall

The flurry of discussion this week, and the post below, led me to ruminate:

There are no shortage of places to go online where you'll find journalists navel-gazing and hand-wringing over the state of Our Industry. My blogroll is full of 'em.

And that's a Good Thing. But, where are the Publishers, the VP's of Circulation, the Retail Advertising Managers and the like having their coffeeklatsch? Is Google broken? I can't find it.

I'm a journalist by raisin' and a publisher by economic necessity. I sure wish the two groups would get together so the disparate voices in my head would have somebody else to talk to.

Comments

[Jay Rosen]

"Navel-gazing and hand-wringing?" Are you serious, Mr. Peg?

Those are odd terms for the reflection you wish were happening in more places. After ten years of listening to journalists talk this way (you forgot "thumb-sucking," another newsroom fave) I have concluded that they're embarrassed by their own intellectual life, and so they adopt terms of contempt for it-- as you did. These, of course, fit right in with the anti-intellectualism in newsroom culture, which is a hilarious affectation (a kind of reverse conceit) considering how well-educated journalists as a profession have become.

If I understand your entire project here, it is a result of some "navel gazing" about what's wrong with news and some "hand wringing" about the future. I suggest a little maturity in the vocabulary is in order here. Find some terms that convey self-respect. These might have a chance of sounding persuasive.

After all, the self-canceling message of this here post is: "where's all the thumb-sucking from the business side people?" How enticing is that?

You're not going to get anywhere in your quest without realizing that contempt for serious reflection helped get journalism into this mess. I think you do realize that, which is why I find your language so strange.

[Publisher]

Jay:

Those terms are clearly much more charged for you than they are for me -- After all, I decreed them a "Good Thing." They came not out of contempt, but because, as you point out, our little enterprise came out of such exercises. For that reason, I'm as surprised by your rebuke as you must have been by my word choice.

This leaves me with a couple questions:
- Are these terms that charged for everyone else?
- Regular readers of this blog, and anything else I write, know that at my worst I tend to trip into a faux self-deprecation as a stylistic tic. Is that flowing over into the copy on Journalism 2.0 in a way that undermines our efforts?

In the end, my point is this: To make Pegasus "fly" as an open-source launch, we're going to need to engage the content community in the idea. I think we're well on the way to that. And although we're big believer's in "Content is King," we're realistic enought to know that someone has to fill the coffers. So we equally need to engage the business side of the house. And, with a few notable exceptions, they're not publicly engaging in the conversation. That's frustrating.

Here's a great example: For all that we have to say about content, few are really engaging us on what I think is the most revolutionary part of our model -- pay-for-performance advertising across all media streams. The only pushback I've gotten has been from a journalist, who (best as I can tell) has never been involved in the sale of advertising. That doesn't make his opinion invalid-- in fact, he's been very insightful. But, I'd like to hear from folks who live in the world of sales and distribution and marketing.

Otherwise, I fear that all of this could be the sound of one hand clapping.

[Barney Lerten]

Interesting discussion.

Perhaps the idea of a thoughtful tug-of-war between journalism of the past and 2.0 is something only journalists have time to ruminate over. The business side - I'm not from that side, but got a sense of it in nine years at Bend's daily paper - is probably too busy trying to protect its current bases from assault to spend a lot of time thinking about new ones.

It, from all I know and believe, doesn't want to expand into new fields, unless the Daily Blat remains the 800-lb. gorilla, calling the shots.

When their BIG investment - those high-tech, high-speed presses - get undermined fully, when Electronic paper or REALLY cheap surfing tools (www.datawind.com) come along - then the Boston Tea Party has REALLY hit, and it'll make current circulation drains look like Happy Days, IMHO.

We're not there yet - but we're getting there. And as a rare daily-reporter veteran of a hyper-local (yuck what a term) site, Bend.com - I know the market is there. Now it's a matter of hooking it up to the advertisers in convincing fashion.

Sometimes progress/megachange comes whether you're ready to roll it out or not, even in a "small" (but fast-growing) lil' town like Bend, Oregon;-)

[Jay Rosen]

Just because a term has become routine among your occupational group doesn't mean you should use it uncritically. And I don't know any good writers who are indifferent to the echo in their idiom, although plenty of bad ones are.

After all, I decreed them a "Good Thing."

Tell me, Sir Peg, what's "good" to you about navel-gazing? Why do journalists use it as a synonym for "serious reflection" and "thinking?"

I will tell you. They do so to express their contempt for intellectual activity that isn't "hard news" or "enterprise journalism," or "shoe leather" reporting. The navel gazer is, after all, clueless about the real world because he's not looking at the world; he's contemplating his navel! That it's not a "charged term" for you anymore is just a result of its devolving into a cliche of the journalistic mind.

"Hand-wringing"-- now what is that? The hand wringer is a pathetic figure, able to worry but not able to act, and likely to overstate any cause of alarm. Hand wringers are funny to the hard-bitten journalist, always wailing about problems.

"Thumb sucker," which is the same coinage as these terms-- what's that all about? Well, a thumber sucker, which usually refers to a piece of writing rather than a person, is an essentially infantile form of expression. To produce a thumb-sucker requires no real work, and says nothing important about the world.

These meanings are "there" still-- like echoes. They are the original reason the terms became popular in newsroom culture, which is so focused on production that it has little time to think. If thinking is an unmanly, infantile and self-involved activity, then it's not so bad to have little time for it. Right? And that's why these terms are so common in the newsroom dialect.

But can journalism afford that dialect and its attitudes anymore?

I'll admit: These terms are not "charged" to anyone but me. I notice them, and I think--given your very worthy project--that you should notice them. They are not what you're about.