BY: TYLER FYFE

I sit at my desk, strained eyes broiled by the white light of my laptop screen, mouses constantly clicking like an insolent metronome. I’m thinking about all the stories that are being left untold—the important stories just out of reach of a short leash tied to the urgency of digital publication. Journalism is going through an identity crisis. Is quality measured by page-views or Pulitzers? Is its current purpose to educate and inspire or to fill the gaps between advertising blocks? As Rob Orchard puts it, today’s new school media is more concerned with being first than being right.

Churnalism is the integrity-poor practice of using pre-packaged press releases as the meat of articles and then branding them as journalism. It’s the use of news wire stories and secondary sources and spreading information to massive amounts of people before it’s been verified.

Rob Orchard is the editor and co-founder of Delayed Gratification, a quarterly print magazine that measures its reporting in months spent in the field.

As he sits at the magazine’s headquarters in central London, the street sounds of blaring horns and squealing rubber cut through an open window and into the phone receiver. Even at his office he is well aware that he is surrounded by impatience on all sides.

Journalism is taking on characteristics of the fast-food industry.

Delayed Gratification is focused on revisiting major news stories when editors have turned their ever-hungry eyes to the new flavour of the day. Orchard knows that the most important stories don’t stop developing when the media flock elsewhere.

Often the story changes completely. It’s called the slow journalism movement and it’s a countermovement brewing against the nutrition-less clickbait that drives the majority of New Media traffic. It’s not an entirely new concept. In 1986 Carlo Petrini founded the slow food movement, an international boycott against the unethical means of production of fast food chains who were bypassing local farmers and promoting poor eating habits in the name of profit-seeking. Those same principles of fast-food have leaked their way from greasy McDonald’s fryers into the crevices of journalists’ keyboards across the globe.

“Virality and clickability make perfect commercial sense, but they don’t build into a journalism that informs and inspires,” says Orchard.

 

The Daily Mail is viewed over 174 million times per month. By standards of popularity, it’s the largest digital news outlet on the Internet. In 2011, as Orchard points out in his TED talk, The Daily Mail published a story with the completely wrong verdict of the high-profile Amanda Knox trial. The story was seen by millions and picked up by other Pulitzer Prize-winning media organizations, including The Guardian. Why is this a big deal? The Daily Mail prepared two versions of the story ahead of time. They falsified quotes. They fictionalized details. They ditched ethics for the dangling carrot stick of virality. And they are far from alone. In 2013, The Washington Post, the same publication responsible for blowing open The Watergate Scandal just decades earlier, published an article stating that Sarah Palin was joining Al Jazeera. It was information pulled from a satirical news site. Just this year CNN misreported that Queen Elizabeth II had died. It was information sourced from a mistaken tweet by BBC reporter Ahmen Khawaja after reading a pre-emptive obituary.

Where as journalists of the past were the first to break stories, the digital journalists of today are expected to react to them.

But before readers justify a mass stoning of digital journalists, we should understand why the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle have dripped from blue bins to carry an entirely different meaning in the world of New Media. Social media didn’t just change how readers access news, it fundamentally changed how news stories were sourced by outlets themselves. Where as journalists of the past were the first to break stories, the digital journalists of today are expected to react to them.

Orchard remembers the wave of editorial budget cutbacks back when print is dead wasn’t a cliché, but a sombre diagnosis for hemorrhaging publications. He was in Dubai working for Timeout magazine, and the conversations he had with five other editors would eventually lead to to the birth of Delayed Gratification nearly a decade later. While jobs were being lost, the ones who managed a spot on the significantly shrunken life-preserver of free content models were stripped of a journalist’s most valued currency—time. The need to make that content profitable and keep news outlets afloat resulted downwards pressure on journalists to write more stories with less depth— to adapt to a wafer cracker version of journalism.

“Journalists are being forced to have an opinion on something they learned about 30 seconds before. The result is bebop-style improvisation, where really the journalist doesn’t know what’s going on anymore than the viewer,” Orchard says.

In 2013, following the Boston Bombing, a subreddit emerged with the purpose of investigating the act of domestic terrorism. Speculation from a girl who went to high school years earlier with Sunil Tripathi resulted in a social media witch-hunt. It spurred a professional media feeding frenzy garnering tweets that have since been deleted from notable journalists with considerable reach at BuzzFeed and Politico. Even though Tripathi’s innocence was established quickly, the temporary shitstorm of misinformation allegedly resulted in his suicide—for obvious reasons the cause of his suicide cannot be verified, but the timeframe would suggest a connection. When his body was fished out of the Brown University River, it reminded the world of the unintentional consequences when major media outlets drag a net in hopes of catching a scoop.

“If major news websites see readers as just another pair of eyes, responsibility before hitting print becomes significantly less important,” Orchard tells me.

When the simple act of refusing to compromise ethics becomes a powerful act of rebellion there is something deeply wrong with the industry of information.

“Death Of Journalism” by Ruben Ubiera

Many publications are turning robojournalism—stories written using algorithms instead of people. Programs like Wordsmith and Quakebot use standardized data to generate news stories in a matter of seconds. While the stories lack human traits like empathy, insight and an original voice, as algorithms improve so too will journalists lose jobs. And when journalists lose jobs to technology that puts principles of McDonaldization above creativity, so too will readers lose, subjected to the psychic equivalent of a McDouble.

Last year Orchard offered two distinct visions of the future:

1.)  Quality decreases as access increases and no one loses a wink of sleep except the journalists losing jobs and those whose stories are miswritten or completely ignored.

2.) True journalism becomes a niche product with a luxury price tag instead of a public service and the mainstream holds their appetite for hair-trigger analysis and slightly tainted information.

Now, as he rushes to prepare the latest edition for publishing in six weeks time, Orchard is more hopeful.

“The pendulum always swings back,” he says.

Digital publishers are beginning to favour attention metrics such as time spent engaging with quality content instead of click throughs that result in quick exits. It’s a revelation that could push back against paid-per-click economic models and allow ideas to fully ripen before being served. Even BuzzFeed, the patron saint of fast-food information has begun pushing quality long-form journalism.

The belief is that so long as humans remain curious, surface-dwelling cannot become universal.

This story is coming up on 1200 words, and statistics tell me I should have probably stopped typing 500 words ago.

Image sourcing: mshcdn.com,  epiloguemagazine.com