Being cynical about professional media and the State of Journalism means I'm almost never impressed by the things that I love. I realized how bad it was a few weeks ago when I tried to put into words why I was so grumpy that my wife and begun a subscription to The New York Times. I realized that it was because I subconsciously want newspapers to die so the deadwood and barnacles stuck in the field would drift away to sell cars or whatever, while the people really interested in reporting and writing would have to start anew and get on with it.
These days I still read a lot, and almost exclusively online. There are old media outlets I follow now on computer screens, like the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, which I've kept an eye on since college. There are a few new media outlets I check everyday — The Awl is a favorite, and Grantland is an experiment I'm curious about. But I realize that all of them are alike in that they don't fundamentally challenge the same categories we've always had. They are all, basically, conservative. Text is text, images are images, videos are videos, audio is audio, and the idea of hyperlinking has been around long enough to have become perfectly conventional. But everywhere, the same tried and true cubbyholes are respected, kept a safe, respectable distance apart.
But does it need to be that way, and should it remain that way? I sort of had my mind blown a little the other day when I clicked on a link at Pitchfork to a feature about the new London-based poseur-core indie band Savages ("No Heroes," by Laura Snapes). At this point I have no opinion on the band at all, I'm not in awe of the quality of the writing, and the overall vibe of brooding intensity reeking off the band is perhaps a bit overmuch. In the details, it feels more like marketing or promotion material… but why? The piece is visually interesting, the different elements are seamlessly connected, it is clear that writers, editors, photographers, and designers all worked together on it. And I realized that on the web you can do things like this, so after all this, why doesn't anybody?
I've been endlessly amused at the way old media tries to adopt bits of new media. It never worked out the details in a creative way. I don't see much value in forcing already overworked reporters to tweet photos and create slideshows for the website of images they have to take themselves. I don't mean the big boys, who give a little space and funding for videographers to present different kinds of stories. And I don't mean the occasional fancy infographic with clickable data points to graft next to an enterprise story. I mean, why doesn't anybody try to put it all together? Reading this profile of Savages, at some point I stopped paying attention to the band, and began thinking how awesome it would be if someone gave this treatment to municipal water rates.
Each January I teach a course at Williams on long-form magazine reporting and writing. One of the recurring themes that comes up is that it is very hard to do this kind of stuff anymore, certainly not in the great age of the postwar magazines, larded with ads for cigarettes and booze and read by upwardly mobile folks. I got to thinking that I wanted to try to think about something else, and last winter hatched the idea of bugging a good friend who is an outstanding computer scientist into co-teaching a course about marrying old and new media. I figured we could create one big project about something related to the college — about the breakdown of admissions applications, or the college's investment portfolio. Something that would blend old fashioned reporting and writing with all the graphic wonders out there that no one thinks are relevant. I wanted to do this for myself as much as anything else.
Maybe someday.
These days I still read a lot, and almost exclusively online. There are old media outlets I follow now on computer screens, like the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, which I've kept an eye on since college. There are a few new media outlets I check everyday — The Awl is a favorite, and Grantland is an experiment I'm curious about. But I realize that all of them are alike in that they don't fundamentally challenge the same categories we've always had. They are all, basically, conservative. Text is text, images are images, videos are videos, audio is audio, and the idea of hyperlinking has been around long enough to have become perfectly conventional. But everywhere, the same tried and true cubbyholes are respected, kept a safe, respectable distance apart.
But does it need to be that way, and should it remain that way? I sort of had my mind blown a little the other day when I clicked on a link at Pitchfork to a feature about the new London-based poseur-core indie band Savages ("No Heroes," by Laura Snapes). At this point I have no opinion on the band at all, I'm not in awe of the quality of the writing, and the overall vibe of brooding intensity reeking off the band is perhaps a bit overmuch. In the details, it feels more like marketing or promotion material… but why? The piece is visually interesting, the different elements are seamlessly connected, it is clear that writers, editors, photographers, and designers all worked together on it. And I realized that on the web you can do things like this, so after all this, why doesn't anybody?
I've been endlessly amused at the way old media tries to adopt bits of new media. It never worked out the details in a creative way. I don't see much value in forcing already overworked reporters to tweet photos and create slideshows for the website of images they have to take themselves. I don't mean the big boys, who give a little space and funding for videographers to present different kinds of stories. And I don't mean the occasional fancy infographic with clickable data points to graft next to an enterprise story. I mean, why doesn't anybody try to put it all together? Reading this profile of Savages, at some point I stopped paying attention to the band, and began thinking how awesome it would be if someone gave this treatment to municipal water rates.
Each January I teach a course at Williams on long-form magazine reporting and writing. One of the recurring themes that comes up is that it is very hard to do this kind of stuff anymore, certainly not in the great age of the postwar magazines, larded with ads for cigarettes and booze and read by upwardly mobile folks. I got to thinking that I wanted to try to think about something else, and last winter hatched the idea of bugging a good friend who is an outstanding computer scientist into co-teaching a course about marrying old and new media. I figured we could create one big project about something related to the college — about the breakdown of admissions applications, or the college's investment portfolio. Something that would blend old fashioned reporting and writing with all the graphic wonders out there that no one thinks are relevant. I wanted to do this for myself as much as anything else.
Maybe someday.
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