A consultant's lament

TV series The Wire wrapped up a great fifth season a while back. A big part of the story revolves around a fictionalized Baltimore Sun that has just suffered heavy cutbacks. A scene that stuck with me is the one where the managing editor tells his staff just a tad bit too glibly that they’ll simply have to “do more with less”. If you’ve watched the episode, you probably wanted to give that guy a smack in the head just as badly as I did. Here’s this guy who doesn’t know the first thing about journalism, telling seasoned journalists to do better and “be creative”.

It’s been a recurring theme during the Mozilla-Knight lectures as well: journalists have zero tech skills and even less motivation to learn, how can we help those poor, poor souls? Shazna Nessa and Mohamed Nanabhay and the other lecturers don’t mean it like that, I’m sure, but that’s probably how it sounds anyway.

I sometimes wonder if my work is perceived like that. I mean, I know it is, sometimes at least: an earlier post about how there are two cultures in how people think about the media got me branded as a “complete fucknozzle” over at the FleetStreetBlues blog and a guest post I did at the Online Journalism Blog had pretty much the same effect. And I certainly remember some of the strange looks I got from my colleagues two years ago when I went off on a tangent about this whole information business thing.

And it’s not that I really mind. That’d be rich — considering my posts are often so harsh on others.

But it does worry me.

Because, like most people who advise journalists and newspapers about how to survive the early 21st century, it’s been a while since I’ve written any stories myself. I follow lots of techies and media bozos on twitter and through RSS feeds, but hardly any reporters. My blog has a solid readership, but I don’t know if many of my readers think of themselves as journalists.

So we say that the future is in semantically annotated news, that stories are not the atom of news, or talk about disintermediation, engagement, curation and cross-platform repurposing. Mind you, I agree with all of that stuff and heartily encourage you to read it, but they’re all terms I never hear journalists use.

I don’t think I was very far off when I talked about those two cultures eleven months ago.

Every once in a while I read a New Yorker, and I have a print subscription to WIRED magazine. I’ll probably renew my New Scientist subscription next year, too. And when I read a story in any of those, I can’t help but think that I wouldn’t change a thing, that all this future-of-journalism stuff is nonsense, snake oil.

Of course, five minutes later I see Jay Rosen tweet “Market capitalization of McClatchy newspapers, 2006: $3.5 billion. Today: $200 million. Ya think a rethink might be due?” And I’m reminded of the fierce discussions I’ve had with journalists who want nothing to do with their readers, because readers should just read and shut up… and then I think: my God, these people, these journalists, they’d rather die than help this industry survive.

At some point in my career, maybe soon, maybe ten years from now, I want to go back to reporting. For a year or so, to see the other side of that coin again.

I’ve got the confirmation bias blues.