How much is the truth worth?

I was not trained to be a journalist. I have hardly ever had to pound the pavement, sneak incriminating questions into interviews or go undercover for groundbreaking scoop.

I am a food writer. I write about food, the stories, people and culture behind that food, and maybe the odd 'newsy' story on organics or food prices, but I've never done anything as amazing as warzone reporting or as important as business or political commentary.

But the reporting the truth in media matters to me, just like, I think, it would matter to any other regular human being, or to modern society. Even if it's as trivial as whether the food at a particular restaurant was fresh, well-cooked and good value. (Perhaps that is too much to assume, in which case we are doomed and the world might as well end this year).

What is the point of reporting if it were not reported as seen?

The media model as we know it is rife with conflicts of interest. Between the financial reports on TV are advertisements of companies listed on the stock exchange, and between cartoons are junk food ads. You may have other examples, but the media business as it stands today seems the most incestuous of all industries. For a long time, media practitioners stood by ethical guidelines that meant that they would provide what is essentially the public service of reporting, and for the eyeballs interested in those reports, advertisers would pay. Note that they are just paying for the eyeballs, not the pens.

But times have changed. There are obvious things like advertorials, but they are usually ethically labelled "sponsored" or the like, but as media companies have grown, the importance of the business component of publications have too. And business involves financial transactions - both immediate and potential. It's the potential exchanges of money that is changing things. The networking, the ass-kissing, the handshaking. It's not like someone has paid you to advertise something now, but you'd better write about their businesses in a favourable light, else they won't come to you for advertising space.

Money is important in our world. I don't want to be all naive and flowerchild about it and say it's not. Even organisations originally set up do public good, such as reporting, have costs, and someone, somehow needs to cover them. Advertising has been our source since the day one, but like I said, the system is disgustingly flawed.


It's not helped by the fact that there is simply too great a supply of media in the world nowadays. Most blame the internet - stabbing bloggers is still the thing to do, seriously let's get over it - but to be honest, who invented this technology? Us, humans. Do writers Google things? Do they read blogs by "citizen journalists" or "amateurs"? You bet we do. So why are we blaming what we now rely on and take for granted? It's not going away any time soon, so we need to work out how to embrace this "new" world (that has been new for so long that it's now old to say it's new).

It's time to rethink the media model. Remember, proper reporting is a skill and a talent, just like being a carpenter or a chef - and there are differences in quality that correlate directly to the skills and talent of the person/people producing the media. But the question is, how much are people willing to pay for it? Only a fool would buy a newspaper if they could read an identical piece of news for free on the internet, but what if it was a much more informative report? Perhaps much better written? Or with a core promise to serve the reader and not the advertiser? 


How many of you are interested in "old fashioned", honest, unbiased, deep reporting, and how much are you willing to pay for it? 


If we continue down this path of ass-kissing reporting, in the end, it's the readers who lose. Never again will you have good, clean information. Never again will your stock purchase be the result of your analysis of good data, because data with integrity can no longer be reported to you.


I'm going to propose a radical idea. Pay for good reporting and ditch the sh*tty versions. In a capitalist society (thank goodness we still have one in Hong Kong), consumer demand dictates everything. If you keep reading dumb news, that's what you'll get. We all suffer from information overload nowadays, but how much of that is rubbish?

Publishers rely on your eyeballs for income. Sure, the paper price, or cable TV subscription, but your eyeballs also secure good advertising dollars, which funds good reporting. When you read rubbish instead of the good stuff, the good stuff loses eyeballs, readership lowers, advertisers pay less. The good stuff gets hidden behind paywalls because that's how publishers think they need to recoup revenue. And so you resort to reading more rubbish. Bad cycle.

My solutions:
1. Read/watch/listen only to quality media.
2. Treat media with the same respect you do art.

Point 2 might sound a bit scary, but like artists, writers and perhaps whole publications, need patrons. People who believe in the skills, talent and craft of the media makers and are willing to fund them just for that, in order to provide the world with all the news and commentary that is worthy and fit to print.

I don't think we need to live in an ideal world for that to happen, but then again, maybe I'm being idealistic.

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.