David Carr, Pay walls and "innovation"

David Carr checked-in with another solid take on the New York Times new pay wall, and the technorati response.  His best point, regarding the value of real journalism:

When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable television ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan.

It's also worth noting that one detractor he quotes drops the term "innovation" in his critique.  This is a favorite term of the tech crowd.  In tech, "innovative" and "good" are nearly synonymous.  Not necessarily so with journalism.  The process of journalism - especially the beat system at most major newspapers, embedding reporters in key areas where they can get to know the players, learn how things work and be on the lookout for stories which deserve the attention of the public at large - that is not an innovation.  But it continues to yield great journalism.

The tech side of news agencies should be looking for innovative ways to deliver the news, and yes they've dropped the ball in the past.  But the interface is not the content, and don't we seek out news for the content?

As I mentioned in some thoughts on the new doc Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times, Carr is one of the few effectively making the case that journalism and technology are not the same thing.  Let me again recommend that film for a more in-depth look at how real journalism works and why it achieves something the aggregators never will.

Page One: Journalism vs. Technology

A key moment in Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times comes subtly, in footage from one of many panels on "the death of newspapers."  Someone from the news aggregator Newser makes the blanket claim that media companies are in the technology business.

It's hardly new to kick newspapers around for being slow or inept at embracing new technologies.  But Page One makes a much needed counterargument - these technology companies are also in the journalism business.  Or at least they should be.

Times Reporter David Carr - the real star of the film - responds by showing the Newser front page with every piece of content gathered from a traditional news agency cut-out, leaving just a page full of holes.  In another clip, David Simon points out he's never seen a reporter from the Huffington Post at a Baltimore Zoning Board meeting.

But the real argument for the relevance of the journalist comes from watching the entire machine of the New York Times.  Editors stay long into the night debating the relevance of a story, is the angle right, is it even a story at all?  These are conversations I recognize from my days in newspaper, but it's a side of the job not often seen.

Contrasting this is the office of aggregator Gawker, where writers gather around the "big board" - a screen which constantly updates with the top ten stories readers are viewing.  The implication is to serve the audience by scrambling to give them what they want, to grab clicks with headlines that play into common search terms, etc.

In a Q&A after the screening at True/False, David Carr said that the Times is becoming more like Gawker, and Gawker is becoming more like the Times.  Perhaps modern news reporting is one part journalism and one part technology.  But the technology side has taken a lot of credit in recent years, and reveled in kicking the journalists while they're down.  Score this one for the journalists.