JUNE 3, 2008

Howard Kurtz’s Sandbox Moment

While you were out grilling this past Memorial Day, The Washington Post published media critic Howard Kurtz’s regular column. Kurtz, who offers occasionally insightful views on news coverage and politics, wrote about the recent round of buyouts at the Post. The company’s newspaper division, like so many others in the country, has fallen on hard times, and offered a buyout to employees over 50 years old in order to trim payroll. Most of the column is a justified paean to the lost expertise of his soon-to-be former colleagues, and a lament of the changing and diminishing capabilities of the Post’s staff, now nearly 25% smaller than it was eight years ago.

Even as a 23 year-old working in the social media world, I recognize the breadth and depth of this loss, and understand that the Post and other papers are less able to embark on serious investigative journalism than they once were. But I also happen to believe that this lost capability has been more than compensated for by the kind of work coming out of the blogosphere.

Kurtz can’t just leave it at that - he has to take a few potshots at the media and mentalities that are slowly replacing the traditional press. Here’s Kurtz on the difference between blogs and newspapers:

There isn’t a Web site around that can produce the probing work, such as the exposé of shoddy conditions at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center, that won The Post six Pulitzer Prizes this year. The economics of the Web, for now, won’t support a staff that can hold public officials accountable across the region and still cover every Nationals game.

Kurtz, however respected he may be in the world of newspapers, has little idea of the “economics of the Web”. The point of a blog is not to offer wide-ranging coverage on every conceivable topic - it’s to offer in-depth coverage, coverage beyond the depth possible in traditional media, of a few specific topics. So if I want to read about DC sports, I don’t have to read the Post - I can read one of the excellent Caps blogs, like Japers’ Rink, or Nats320, a Nationals blog. If I want to see public officials held accountable, I can read Raising Kaine, a blog on Virginia politics, or Glenn Greenwald, who writes on constitutional issues, or Daily Kos, a community devoted to all things progressive.

And guess what? Each of these outlets provides remarkably more in-depth coverage on these topics than the Post can possibly provide - there are no such thing as column inches on the internet. They continually scoop the traditional press on all sorts of serious stories, like Sen. George Allen’s infamous “macaca” moment, the controversy over the FISA bill currently before Congress, and other stories the newspapers initially deem unworthy of newsprint. And Kurtz is kidding himself if he thinks that newspapers are the only medium that can possibly cover stories requiring high-level access; when the newspapers die — and die they will — the news has to go somewhere. Already we’re seeing corporate and political opinions change when it comes to blogs - we counsel our corporate clients regularly to include bloggers on their media lists, and both major political party conventions will have exclusive blogger programs this year.

At the end of the column, I learned that Kurtz’s concern about the future of news is not based in reality, but in mere petulance:

The ticking time bomb here is the wholesale abandonment of newspapers by younger people who grew up with a point-and-click mentality. When I was speaking at Harvard recently, a smug graduate student said, “I get everything I need from YouTube. What are you going to do about it?”

“What are you going to do about it?” I shot back. If people want to tune out the news, no one can compel them to change their habits. We can be smarter, faster and jazzier in providing information, but we can’t force-feed the stuff. If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of XBox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.

Never mind that Kurtz’s apparently serious response to the “smug” graduate student resembles a joke my coworkers and I mutter to each other over cubicle walls (no, you’re a joke), the ridiculous, false-on-its-face conclusion that the death of traditional media is coming at the hands of spurious entertainment like video games and movies is frankly insulting.

No, Howard, what we’ve asked papers like the Post to do is provide us with exactly the news we want, exactly when we want it, and without the kind of fluff and ephemera that is endemic to today’s newspapers. Due to the economics of the newspaper business, papers like yours have found that impossible, so we’ve turned to the world of blogs to gain multiple, in-depth perspectives on what’s important to us. You’re catching up, albeit slowly - the Post’s Going Out Gurus blog is a regular stop of mine for events in Washington - but don’t insult or blame us for the newspaper industry’s inability to put out a compelling product.