Breaking Down (Then Rebuilding) the Media Industry, One Atom Of Content At A Time

Patrick LaForge is the City Room editor of The New York Times. An avid Twitter user, the paper’s public editor reached out to him to determine if Twitter is “a boon or a waste of time.” Which is like asking Cal Ripken if kids should go see a ballgame. LaForge posted his full reply to the request – a nuanced and savvy assessment of the value of the tool.

The Public Editor’s responding column arrives at the following point: “It’s not clear, either, whether Twitter’s marketing power is as good for The Times as it is for individual staffers.” Actually, it’s quite clear: the Times, even on Twitter, is only as good as its reporters. LaForge says as much by analogizing Twitter to a cocktail party. As content is atomized, it’s tied more closely to individuals. The Times is becoming a collection of bloggers (who actually print their stuff out).

It’s a job title that many at the paper would hate. This weekend at South by Southwest, NYU’s Jay Rosen gave a lecture titled, “Bloggers vs. Journalists: It’s a Psychological Thing. It’s a good taxonomy of both sides’ feelings and frustrations, but among Rosen’s points is that the perceived dichotomy is less about a difference in approach than it is about the insecurity of institutional journalism.

As if on cue, Sunday’s Times Magazine, ran Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s now-famous attack on The Huffington Post and aggregation. And it sounded exactly like a record company executive from 2001.

Remember: the people who downloaded MP3s from Napster (read: you and me) weren’t simply ushering in a new model – we were pirates, thieves. Keller, undoubtedly sensitive to the legal implications of doing so, doesn’t apply those terms to Huffington (though he does say that, in Somalia, it would be deemed piracy). But his point is clear. “This blogger,” you can imagine him snarling. “This content repurposer. Who is she to take pieces of our reporting and share them with the world?” Keller’s problem isn’t that the Huffington Post is an aggregator, it’s that it’s an atomizer. It’s the breaking apart that he takes issue with, not the gathering together. It’s the breaking apart that’s undermining the Times.

History repeats itself. If my business model is under threat, the institutions think, then clearly someone, somewhere, is behaving immorally – even if how that morality is defined is fluid. Keller’s editorial falls prey to a familiar trap, and so it will likely have the same long-term impact on the atomization of the news that the music industry’s lamentations had on music downloads. None.

(Yesterday afternoon, Keller released a clarification. The nut of it is that he only takes issue with specific kinds of aggregation; namely, the ones he doesn’t like. Also, he likes Arianna, but she can’t take a joke.)

For the first time, more people are getting their news online than from newspapers. Happily for the newspapers, their own staff are helping to create new models. There’s no news iTunes, but there are some green shoots.

>>>Next – How journalists are reinventing journalism via the tools of atomization (i.e. Twitter)