Multimedia malaise

We still need to focus on the telling, not the selling, of the news

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I’ve lost track of the days and nights. They are a blur of TV smoke and dust, recurring images of an inferno I still cannot believe, of Peter Jennings holding back tears, interspersed with happy Thomas The Tank Engine so our 3-year-old son thinks the world is OK.

He knows it’s not. He knows there’s something odd about smoke and flames shooting from a skyscraper. We’re expecting another baby boy this fall. In what kind of a world will he live?

I’m trying to keep my thoughts straight, to focus on what’s important.

The news industry is helping, with reporting and courage I cannot fathom.

But even in this the most horrific domestic story of a generation, the business of news gets in the way of the news itself. That’s a shame.

Spies like us
The other night, on our way home from a friend’s house, we passed a dozen taxis parked on our street.

Many of the taxis in Northern Virginia are driven by Arabs, so I immediately began to wonder: Are they a terrorist cell, planning their next move? Was it a celebration, a toast to the dead and to the volume of dead? Or were they in tears and mourning – had a friend been killed? Or was it just a group of friends who came together because it was a week when friends did that – just to be together, just to look into each other’s eyes, to be alive with one another?

Should I have called the cops, urged them to investigate the suspicious gathering of maybe Arabs?

I thought these things.

When the news broke, I was at work, planning for a seminar on journalism credibility in the information age. I saw it first on TV, then returned to my desk to read more online, but most of the Web sites I checked first were down. I walked back to the TV.

I watched for a while, called my wife at home, left messages for my mom on Staten Island, looked up my sister’s number in Connecticut, and then I needed to get home, to retrieve my son from daycare and bring him home to my wife, so we could be together, a family, at home, safe, together.

I was grateful I wasn’t a reporter who needed to head to the Pentagon, or to lower Manhattan, to cover the news of a lifetime. I wanted no part of it. I wanted to be home, with my family.

I wondered: What kind of a journalist am I?

The drumbeat of war had already begun, and I heard colleagues speculate about the likelihood of rounding up and deporting foreigners. I heard on National Public Radio a sound bite of some quick-to-the-microphone politician declaring that in times of war civil liberties are not the same.

Should I have reported those taxis?

And I wondered: Would America quickly turn into another East Germany, everyone a spy or a suspect of some sort?

My son goes to daycare with a little girl whose parents are of Arab descent – at least, I think so. We’ve never discussed it and I don’t know where they’re from. They are lovely, every one of them. Do they know terrorists? Are they afraid, or ashamed?

Do they want to kill me?

Do they hate me because I am an American, a global oppressor?

Do they hate, or do they tremble in fear like me? Do they need a hug?

Home
I grew up on Staten Island, the “forgotten” borough across New York harbor from the financial district, a bedroom community for Wall Street worker bees with thick New York accents. I went to high school in lower Manhattan, then to Dartmouth, a college well known for churning out ambitious Wall Street types with Boston accents.

I’m certain some of my classmates were killed last week. I just don’t know who.

I just don’t know. I’m waiting for the news.

My childhood friend Bruce Kramer worked for an import-export business at the World Trade Center when we first got out of college, 13 years ago. Did he still work there? Is he dead? What kind of death? Out the window, decapitated, burned, crushed, suffocated?

My mom still lives on Staten Island. Monday night she said she could still see smoke in the air, and smell it. She said it was a metallic smell. I wondered: was it the smell of incinerated humans?

My thoughts drifted to Auschwitz.

Convergence
For a little more than a year now I’ve been working for a non-profit institute that provides training and guidance to news companies. We’re a graduate school of sorts for working journalists and news industry managers and executives. We provide information and knowledge to help them do better work. I focus on the operations and strategies of online and multiple media news companies – that is, companies focused on combining print, broadcast and online into multiplatform news operations. The buzzword for this is convergence.

In ordinary times it’s rewarding to study and advise on best practices, technical issues, management challenges and big-picture questions about how and why news companies do what they do. I still think of myself as a writer first, but my day job keeps me fresh with ideas from journalists and business executives who care deeply about the telling and selling of news.

Telling and selling. In ordinary times, I don’t mind thinking about both.

So I’ve given a few speeches and pretended to be an expert for fellow reporters who turned to me as a source. I’ve also done a lot of networking in the last year to get the word out that the center I direct can help news companies improve their online and multimedia products, strategies and operations.

Telling and selling. In ordinary times, I don’t mind thinking about both.

But these are extraordinary times.

The media story
The media play-by-play on last week’s terrorist blasts began almost immediately, and there’s already a growing collection of stories about how the media – and the media business - has handled the terror story. TV jumped on it, Web sites crashed, newspapers published special editions and editorials, advertisers worried, and as we entered Week 2 of the nightmare, with stock markets reopened, we could read about cable ratings, media losses and plans for covering the U.S. retaliation.

The relentlessly bad news suggested trouble for media stock values - but atfer Monday's huge losses, some bounced back.

Enough already
Yesterday on National Public Radio I heard calls for TV networks to stop showing the unbelievable scenes of the Twin Towers as they exploded in flames and then came crashing down.

I don’t know whether I’ve seen the video enough times to believe it, so I don’t know that I want TV to give me a break from the horror. Not yet. I can turn it off if I want, and I have. The story needs to be told.

And that, of course, should be the point. The story of what happened, of why, to whom, and how, is what we should value. The story of the story – the media angle, the platform perspectives, the marketing and cross-promotion opportunities, the profits and losses – is secondary. And I want a break from it. I want a break from the business of news, from ratings, sales slumps, newsprint costs and server loads. It’s the sort of stuff I’m supposed to know about, the insider detail and know-how that I’m supposed to keep up with and share with the people who turn to me for knowledge and guidance.

This week, I want none of it. I want to focus on the telling, not the selling, of the news.

And I want to know that Bruce is safe.

anachison@americanpressinstitute.org