Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

CNN is running an article describing how a number of US Congress members used Twitter to deliver a kind of running commentary on President Obama's first State of the Union address.

It might be tempting to read this article and proclaim that if the US Congress - the single un-hippest joint in the whole of our great republic - has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, then surely, this whole social media thing has truly arrived. But if you season this with just a tiny bit of healthy cynicism, I don't think it's too hard to see the thinking here. We just learned how young voters can turn an election your way, and that the Internet can play a big role. I don't think we should really be all that surprised that we now have Congresspeople twittering during the SOTU.

If you think about it, it's not hard to imagine that a lot of the of tweets coming out of the chamber last night were pre-scripted (scripted to sound spontaneous), and mostly written by staffers. For each Congressperson-twitterer, there was almost surely a debate-like preparation - a strategy on how to react to things they were certain the President would talk about.

The story here is not that this body of predominantly old white dudes has found their inner nerd and embraced the technology of this decade ("Tubes!" indeed). Rather, this is one of those sublime instances where the story is the story. The interesting thing isn't  that folks who are usually well-known as techno-luddites used Twitter en masse, it's that their twitterings made the front page of CNN. If there actually were any Congresspeople who were using their mobiles to twitter a genuinely spontaneous dialog during the speech last night, you can rest assured that this was the last time that will ever happen.

On Saturday, I attended a Board of Advisors meeting for the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We got routine updates on various programs. But a subtext for almost every part of the discussion was the future of mainstream journalism.  
 
It seems like every day we get notice of newspapers and TV news operations retrenching in the face of falling advertising revenues.  Heck, we even saw a rumor surface last week that the most venerable broadcast news organization in history – CBS News – was considering outsourcing its news gathering to CNN.  It’s funny how rumors get started, and CBS News was quick to knock it down, but I suggest that it was a notion that did more than just cross someone’s mind.
 
There is no shortage of stuff to read if a reader wants to go online.  About 120,000 new blogs launch every single day.  A few are insightful but most are woefully uninformed and lacking journalistic standards of accuracy.
 
There’s a part of me that is unsympathetic to journalism’s plight.  News organizations are getting their comeuppance for profound arrogance.  Some newsrooms verge on the immoral and corrupt in allowing personal bias to seep into their copy.  As a former journalist, I write this with sorrow
 
I really don’t know how we’re going to get the information we need to govern ourselves if all of mainstream journalism goes belly up.  
 
We have to find a business model in which consumers are willing to pay for professionally produced content.  Today it’s clear that consumers will go to the Web for news, even to traditional sources – MSNBC, NYtimes.com, USAtoday.com.  But we have yet to find a business model that would allow those news organizations to survive financially online.
 
For the good of our democracy, someone needs to figure this out.

Charles McGrath, in his Feb 17 New York Times article, points out that while National Public Radio's listenership is growing, PBS television, he believes, has seen it's best days, and may perhaps be no longer relevant or necessary.

I couldn't disagree more.

We now live in a climate where local printed newspapers are in sharp decline, and where the cynical irony in Fox News Channel's name and slogan goes unchallenged. Even my parent's nightly network news broadcasts have devolved into 15 minutes of entertainment interspersed between 15 minutes of drug company commercials. In this climate where journalistic integrity and high standards are the exception rather than the rule, it seems to me that shows like the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NC Now, and Frontline are now more important than ever - certainly not less.

Despite years of siege by politicians who seem to prefer the tractibility and journalistic abdication prevalent on Britney-obsessed cable news outlets - and make no mistake, their issue with PBS is the news - PBS television remains one of the only places to get trustworthy news on television.

As McGrath points out in his article (the title is sharper than the content of the piece itself), the answer to whatever woes PBS television may be facing is more public funding, not less. It seems miraculous to me that PBS can, on pennies, continue to do what Big Corporate Media seems unable to do with all it's billions of dollars. In truth, perhaps the absence of billions is the secret of PBS' success. But while we wait for more public funding for PBS television, that miracle has an earthly foundation.