Page One - Inside the New York Times documentary. Is print dead?

While on a 12-hour flight last night, I watched, surprisingly, a documentary. Page One - Inside the New York Times is by Andrew Rossi, who also filmed other popular contemporary docos like Food Inc.

This is certainly not a film review - if it was it would be a terribly bad one, because all I'm going to say is, if you're even slightly interested in media as an institution, industry, machine or social good, see it.

Initially the film appear to be a big "is print dead?" doco, but in fact it goes a lot broader. It's filmed over one year, 2010, and in this year there's the rise of Wikileaks, the iPad, media companies going bankrupt (Tribune) and the NYT winning the Pulitzer Prize. But it also looks in the history of the Times, and the societal role of investigative journalism and longform media.

The most powerful sequence in this documentary was when David Carr, a no-bullsh*t type media reporter, was on an Intelligence Squared debate and held up a page on Newser, the news aggregator. The founder of Newser was of course the opposition. He's filmed to say print is obsolete because there's better technology now, and that media is all about technology. Then, David Carr holds up a front page of Newser (printed out) and cuts out all the news that came from newspapers practicing longform journalism. The page looks like a fishnet - holes everywhere.

The point in simple. Without content producers, there is no news to aggregate.

It's fair to say, and this is made clear in the movie, that very little investigative journalism is done by "new media" like HuffPo. Most new media simply spins off what traditional outlets produce. Without traditional media, there’s nothing to spin off.

However, perhaps what people want are précis. In the documentary, someone (sorry I've forgotten who) says that one of the things online media does is give it a catchier title. Is that mere journalistic elitism, that it ‘sounds’ cheap? I mean, I’m being the devil’s advocate here, but if a sexier headline will get people more interested in the news, then who’s to say it’s a bad thing?

Now that nytimes.com charges for online content (unless shared via social media, if I’m not mistaken), who’s going to pay? The aggregators will need to pay in order to harvest content and refurbish it, and everyone in favour of sensationalist headlines and summarised news will simply go to the harvesters, not the source. In the end, the only people paying for news are new media (well, them and the few people who want to read unloaded, proper English).

Is that the future?

But investigative journalism can be reported on whatever platform, online or in print. The problem here is not the technology used to publish it, it’s the money that goes behind the reporting. Reporting takes time. Well, proper reporting anyway. I knew that and yet it still surprised me to hear David Carr say that he’d need two more weeks to research the Tribune article and one week to write it. We outsiders tend to think that news is daily, but this just goes to show that behind every story is days, weeks, even months or years of research.

Which brings me to my point. Artists spend days, weeks, months or years to produce their work. While they’re producing it, they pay their rent, get fed and clothed by funds from patrons, and assuming they’re producing consistently stellar work, the funds keep coming. So why can’t journalists and newspapers have patrons?

The film mentions a non-profit institution for investigative journalism called ProPublica. Can, and should media be run like a non-profit? Some argue that accurate news is a public good, after all.

Either way, either by patronage or non-profit models, I'm inclined to believe the contemporary old wive's tale that people won't pay for good journalism anymore. Instead of a conventional, profit-making business model, how about we start looking at sustainable alternatives instead?

I feel that Monocle magazine is trying out a new(ish) model where detailed, investigative reports are funded by not only straightforward display advertising, but copywriting. The Monocle (or perhaps, Winkreative - Brule's advertising/creative arm) branding has been so successful that they've taken on the business of governments like that of Singapore, that want to desirably brand their nations. Monocle created a "National Survey" insert for them probably a year or so back. Their lifestyle section, I believe also takes a lot of product placement deals. Unfortunately, it was the lifestyle section that makes me think the model doesn't work. The Hong Kong survey/guide they did probably a year ago too, was appallingly lazy. I shan't elaborate, but basically they flew in, called one or two "cool" people, copied their choices, didn't bother to verify, (or whoever did doesn't know how to do "lifestyle" very well) and just filed a "report".

A truly great publication should excel in every section that it chooses to publish. Compromising the integrity of one section in order to facilitate the brilliance of another seems incredibly silly. Because of the sloppy "soft" news, I've lost interest in the "hard" stuff. I feel like double standards have been applied to the different departments, as if "it's okay for lifestyle to be bought, biased and under-researched, but no, that's blasphemous for serious news". Maybe it's my background in lifestyle that makes me biased and overly passionate about the integrity of the soft stuff, but lifestyle, relative to hard news, is oftentimes much easier to research. It's open to opinion, and as long as you justify it, you can always say "each to their own" and call it a day. So why skimp on it?

I realise I've totally gone off track. Anyway, we've got to start looking at alternative models. Investigative journalism is the kind of stuff very little people know they need, but without it, media, not just print, is dead.