5 Myths About New Media

The news about the news is better than you think; enough of the doom-and-gloom myths.

There are times I can’t help but feel I live on a different planet from many who talk about the media. So often, the debate is characterized by a reactive, negative view on the part of the mainstream media supporters. To them, threats are everywhere. The future is bleak, and everything, especially democratic institutions and civilization itself, teeters on the edge. Meanwhile, social media advocates such as myself are characterized as delusional techno-utopians.

Frankly, I tire of this doom and gloom. It drives one want to give up on engaging mainstream media (like many, many, many people under 30 have). But we can't. We have to save these guys from themselves – the institutions and the brands matter. So, in that pursuit, let's tackle the beast head on (yet again) and debunk the myths that surround this debate.

Myth 1: The average blog is not very good, so we can’t rely on blogs for media.

Many traditional media advocates keep talking about the average blog or average Twitterer (which of course, no one follows; we all follow big names, like Clay Shirky and Tim O'Reilly). But you know what? Those same people keep comparing the average blog to the best newspapers. The fact is, even the average newspaper isn’t that great. The Globe represents the apex of the newspaper industry in Canada, not the average, so stop using it as an example. To get the average, go into any mid-sized town and grab a newspaper. It won't be interesting. Especially to you – an outsider. It will have stories that appeal to a narrow audience, and even then, many of these will not be particularly well written. Indeed, even in my home town of Vancouver, a large city, it is frightening how many times press releases get marginally touched up and then released as "a story." This is the system that we’re afraid of losing?

Myth 2: People won’t be able to sort good- from low-quality news.

I always love this myth. In short, it presumes that the one thing the internet has been fantastic at developing – filters – simply won't evolve in a part of the media ecosystem (news) where people desperately want them. At best, this is naive. At worse, it is insulting. Filters will develop. They already have. Twitter is my favourite news filter – I probably get more news via Twitter than any other source. Google is another. Nothing gets you to a post or article about a subject you are interested in like a good (old-fashioned?) Google search. And yes, there is also going to be a market for branded content – people will look for that as a shortcut for figuring out what to read. But please, people are smarter than you think at finding news sources.

Myth 3: People lack the media savvy to know good- from low-quality news.

I love the elitist contempt the media industry sometimes has towards its readers. But, okay, let's say this is true. Then the newspapers and mainstream media have only themselves to blame. If people don't know what good news is, it is because they've never seen it (and by and large, they haven't). The most devastating critique of this myth is actually delivered by one of my favourite newspaper men, Maclean's editor in chief Kenneth Whyte, in his must-listen-to 2009 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism. In it, Whyte talks about how, in the late 19th and early 20th century, New York City had dozens of newspapers fighting for readership and people were media savvy, shifting from paper to paper depending on quality and perspective. That all changed when newspapers started relying on advertising for the bulk of their revenue. Advertisers want staid, plain, boring newspapers with big audiences. This meant newspapers began playing to the lowest common denominator and became market-oriented to be boring. It also leaves them beholden to corporate interests (when was the last time the Vancouver Sun really did a critical analysis of the housing industry – its biggest advertisement source?). If people are not media savvy it is, in part, because the media ecosystem demands so little of them.

Myth 4: There will be no good (and certainly no investigative) journalism with social media.

Possible. I think the investigative journalism concern is legitimate. That said, I'm not convinced there is a ton of investigative journalism going on in newspapers as it is. There may also be more going on in the blogs than we know. It could be that a) these stories don't get prominence, and b) even when they do, newspapers often don't cite blogs, so a story first broken by a blog may not be attributed. But investigative journalism comes in different shapes and sizes. As I wrote in one of my more viewed blog posts, “the death of journalism?”:

I suspect the ideal of good journalism will shift from being what the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell calls puzzle solving to mystery solving. In the former, you must find a critical piece of the puzzle – one that is hidden from you – in order to explain an event. This is the Woodward and Bernstein model of journalism – the current ideal. But in a transparent landscape where huge amounts of information about most organizations are being generated and shared, the critical role of the journalist will be that of mystery solving – figuring out how to analyze, synthesize, and discover the mystery within the vast quantity of information. As Gladwell recounts, this was ironically the very type of journalism that brought down Enron (an organization that was open, albeit deeply flawed). All of the pieces that led to the story that "exposed" Enron were freely, voluntarily, and happily provided in reports by Enron. It's just a pity it didn't happen much, much sooner.

And finally, Myth 5: People read only stories that confirm their biases.

This problem, sometimes referred to as the “echo chamber" effect, is often cited as a reason online media is "bad." I'd love to know where this idea is coming from because I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Indeed, Maclean's columnist Andrew Potter recently sent me a link to "Ideological Segregation Online and Offline", a peer-reviewed study that found no evidence that the internet is becoming more ideologically segregated. And the comparison is itself deeply flawed. How many conservatives read the Globe? How many liberals read the National Post? I love the idea that somehow the mainstream media doesn't ideologically segregate an audience. Hasn't anybody looked at Fox or MSNBC recently? Ultimately, it’s hard to watch shows on these networks without attributing all sorts of motivations to those involved.

Yes, the new world will have problems, but they will be new problems, and there may yet be solutions to them. What I do know is that there aren't solutions to the old problems in the old system, and frankly, I'm tired of those old problems.

So let's get on with it. Be critical, but please, stop spreading myths and fearmongering.