NB link on Corante front page links to earlier version of Vin Crosbie's post. More on the debate about the mass-media editor's role in an increasingly diverse information environment. Is there analogy between the relationship between a consumer and an editor, and between a consumer and a mechanic? Do you trust your mechanic to choose the best parts for your car? Does anyone trust mechanics? If everybody had full access to information to choose which sparkplugs to buy, would the choices actually homogenise rather than diversify?
(From Corante)
Saturday, August 20, 2005
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3 comments:
Luke:
I don't think the editor:reader analogy parallels a mechanic:consumer analogy. Nor parallels doctor:patient or haberdasher:shopper analogies, for that matter.
A mechanic fixes an individual's car, a doctor cures an individual, and a haberdasher dresses an individual.
However, a mass media newspaper editor tries to match a set of stories to every individual in the community. It's like the mechanic deciding that every engine in town should be tuned the same way, or the doctor issuing the same prescription for everyone in town, or the haberdasher dressing each individual in the community identically.
I think a major problem for media nowadays isn't lack of content -- there are stories being written for every interest -- but in distribution. Many, if not most, of the stories that match each individual's interest aren't being distributed to the individual. He's instead receiving a largely generic product. (Ah, but that's a subject for other posts. Or for me buying you a pint when I'm next on your side of the Atlantic, in London. Cheers!)
Vin
I’m not persuaded by the mechanic:consumer analogy either (or those others!).
This is probably going over terribly old ground — for which I apologise. But I’d be interested to know your views (perhaps over a pint I should be buying you!) about the role of the editor in a changing relationship between information provider and information consumer. Call me patrician, but I remain nervous that as the balance of power shifts from “editor” to “reader” there is a danger, not of “losing our homogeneity”, but of the opposite.
Of course, the vastly greater diversity of content means that overall there’s a broader agenda. And you rightly say that people’s interests are not common or generic. However, an average consumer (perhaps an unfair concept in itself) doesn’t spend their whole day sifting and assessing the options, and becoming expert in newsgathering, except perhaps within a limited field of stuff that, for the most part, they already know about. So I fear that, given complete control over what information to consume, Mr Average could make sometimes depressingly predictable choices when operating outside their specific interests. I hope I’m wrong but I suspect that as the bell curve gets wider it may also be getting steeper. The extent to which this occurs depends (I think you may agree) on the ways in which information is provided to that consumer.
A benefit of a mass media distribution device such as a big newspaper is it can allow space for niche or unpredictable content. I’m not pretending that this happens often enough. But take the “basement piece” that often appears on a broadsheet front page. Such stories can be miles off the current news agenda. I think the good ones perform in one of two ways. Either they get read by a lot of people and end up introducing something new to the church, or they get read by relatively few people, but are appreciated very much by those few. In both cases the story’s success is not so much that it catered to individual interests but that it presented the possibility of individuals becoming interested in something that formerly they weren’t. This is where I put my faith in good editors.
So I'm still stuck on the question of how to find the best ways to provide for individuals’ mixes of interests without denying them access to stuff that they don’t know they’d like to know.
Cheers
L
Luke:
I think that the role of newspaper editor should change from that of camp chef to the chief nutritionist at the provisioning company.
Rather than cooking up exactly the same courses for all diners, he should let each diner choose from a selection of appetizers, entrees, side courses, and deserts which interest them, but all the while making sure that every diner gets a balanced diet of information.
Remember that customization of content in the editorial package needn't be total.
The consumer should be able to customized much of their feed, but need not be able to customize all of it. The editor need to be able to send some stories (the truly major ones) to all consumers, plus to provide all consumers with some serendipitous other stories. This way the editor can still shape community interests, while not preventing the satisfaction of more individuals' diverse interests.
The idea here is that control should shift a bit more out of the editor's hands and into the hands of the consumers, but not all the way.
Here's an example. I subscribe to The New York Times. I want its editors to continue providing me with the truly major stories. However, I'd like to be able to customize the rest of the newspaper's content packaging. I'm a football (my fellow Americans call it soccer) and Formula One fan. But the sport section of NYT, hardly ever publishes any stories about those two sports, even though I know the NYTreceives dozens of football and F1 stories daily because I was the Reuters executive who sold it those sports feeds.
Football and F1 stories don't appear in print because the majority of Americans don't care about those sports. So, because the NYT publishes the same edition daily for all readers; its editors fill the sport section with baseball stories because that's the sport the majority of American care about. So, if there are 50,000 footie fans in New York but 950,000 baseball fans, then all million NYT readers get baseball stories.
I think that the 50,000 instead should get their football stories. If there's a truly extraordinary baseball story, then the editor should include that, too.
Quite a bit of the problem of declining newspaper readership is due to such story distribution problems, not due to lack of pertinent stories themselves.
Vin
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