Category: complexity

The Future of Journalism

The other day, listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR, I heard a featured guest, Gustavo Arellano, deride his chosen profession, journalism, to a caller whose son wanted to pursue a writing career. To study writing or journalism, he said, would be a waste of a college education.

Sad.

(A little background: This comment came from a guy who’d just published a piece in the LA Times about how his Mexican immigrant father, a truck driver and jack of all trades, is in some ways better off than he, a writer with a master’s degree.)

Then I took a look at the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s “State of the News Media” annual report for 2009.

Its introduction begins: “Some of the numbers are chilling.”

Subscriptions down. Ads plummeting. Staffs cut down to bare bones. Newspapers folding, or going online-only. It reminded me of another recent radio story about papers ceasing delivery some days of the week.

What is the future of journalism? And what’s to become of any kind of investigative, thoughtful or complex writing?

Will it be relegated to academia, where it’s not read or even understood by non-experts?

Will everyone get their news from cable TV or TV-related news websites or blogs?

If you think that this kind of coverage will be just as good, you ought to think again. The truth is, many, many news outlets get their story ideas from newspaper reporting. They sit around newsprint-strewn offices, poring over morning editions of local and national papers with inky hands, trying to come up with something new to say, some unique trend in business or law, or an unknown, up-and-coming leader, or a disease no one’s heard of yet. That’s where news is born most often—and then it moves up the “news food chain” from there to TV, magazines, other websites, blogs.

In another NPR Talk of the Nation episode, I heard veteran ABC newscaster Sam Donaldson admit that his TV news ideas came largely from reading the newspaper. He, like everyone, complained about the downward spiral of newspapers today.

It’s the same thing with today’s blogs—that is, the ones that aren’t just pure rumor or opinion. Most of them are commenting on other people’s reporting. (Like this post!)

In other words, it’s not the newsprint paper itself that we’d be missing if newspapers all died. It’s that quality reporting that a good newspaper fosters and supports.

So now what?

There’s begun to be more talk of a new model for funding news reporting. We need to do some serious thinking about that. One of the most interesting recent proposals is to create some sort of public trust for journalism, some non-market funding for writing hard-hitting, investigative pieces that give insights into our political, financial, and social worlds. This model makes the argument that journalism does matter, because it offers a look behind the curtain and the PR façade—a means of testing that people really mean what they say, and that politicians or CEOs or anyone in leadership roles are not pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.

And that’s definitely a public service. Certainly, more heavy, critical reporting could have done a lot to uncover the weaknesses in our financial markets and the risks that large banks were taking with money they didn’t have. And that’s just one (very big) problem that really good reporting could reveal.

Even though many charitable institutions are suffering today, there will always be a thirst for supporting ways to keep our country a vital, well-informed, and honest place. And just as listeners give money to NPR, which is also government-funded, a similar combination of private and public funds could sustain news reporting.

Perhaps a new foundation for journalism as public trust could be the next big way to give back? And perhaps a new stimulus plan could find a little room for supporting the fourth estate?

The Pitfalls of Complexity: The U.S. Financial Crisis

We are embroiled in a very serious financial crisis. Banks are failing left and right, loans have dried up, and confidence in the economy is sinking fast.

Now it turns out that many of the problems at established firms were caused by complexity–driven by the use of complicated derivatives and schemes involving credit-default swaps that even many executives of financial firms didn’t really understand.

An article by Nelson D. Schwartz in the International Herald Tribune put it this way: “unlike the financiers 100 years ago, the people in the room did not fully understand what the institutions they run actually owned and were trading back and forth – at immense profit. Neither did they fully grasp the speed at which their world had changed since the last financial crisis a decade ago…”

Schwartz’s sources suggest that some company directors did not know what their companies were doing, nor did they understand the sophisticated financial tools their employees were using to trade credit. These execs signed off on schemes that they did not comprehend.

Which leads again to the importance of understanding complex ideas. It’s not enough to hear a short briefing or read an executive summary. If the math whizzes and finance gurus behind these schemes can’t explain them clearly, we need someone who can.

And above all, we need much more transparency in all realms of business. Today, we’re paying the price for not asking enough questions—or understanding the answers.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s three-page plan to “rescue” the economy—a document that asked for as much as $700 billion but contained no details on oversight of its spending—is now getting the pushback it deserves. The American people want more clarity, explanation, and accountability. And that’s the way it should be—and the way it should have been all along.