Jon Franklin in a recent post on WriterL:
"It has been my observation, over the years, that journalists for some reason are impervious to outside critique of their craft. As long as I've been a journalist I've heard readers' pleas for more "good news" get pooh-poohed away by journalists who always have a ready answer -- an answer that always implies that our readers are soft-headed idiots who want nothing so much as to kill the messenger.
"In fact what readers mean by "good news" is not at all what the journalist thinks they mean. The journalist thinks of 'good news' as fluff, PR stuff. If that's what the public wants then yeah, I agree with my brethren. But over the years I've come to understand that plea for good news rather differently.
"In the first place, our readers ARE inarticulate. It's our job to be articulate; that's what they pay us for (such as it is). Readers spend most of their life doing real work, which is to say work that produces some product or service, and this brings them to some broad judgments about the nature of the world and the human condition. This is not always the world they see in the newspaper.
It's not really a question of good or bad news but rather a question of percentages. There is plenty of bad news in the world, and we by golly gather it up and put ink all over it. I don't think the reader really minds this except that it's ALL we see there ... that, and the PR stuff we're using more and more of.
"The reader sees a complex world full of yes, bad news, but also full of human struggle that is sometimes heroic and sometimes not, sometimes tragic and sometimes not, but always recognizably human. They look at newspapers and don't see the human, which is the most valuable and "true" dimension of the news. Not seeing that, they judge that we're lying to them.
"The newsguy will say, yeah, where? Show me where on this page there's a lie! And the reader walks off rolling his eyes, thoroughly disgusted once again. The lie being talked about here is not a lie of commission, it's a lie of omission. It's what's not there that is the lie.
"When I was a cub reporter it was said that the journalist's job was to tell the news and mirror the community. Literary journalism (and for that matter good feature writing) functions as a mirror on the community. Over the last few decades, as the hard news people and the accountants have conspired to run us out of the newsrooms, readership has dropped and people have started complaining that it's all bad news.
"In other words, yes, part of it is the front office. But part of it is also the attitude that the mission of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. This paradigm, which is about all that's left of journalism, has a place in the life of the newsroom but when it stands alone it's just mindless and mean. In the world our reader lives in, the comfortable are sometimes right, and the afflicted are often so cursed because of their own willful ignorance -- and the self-righteous are the last people to be making the judgment.
"Journalism that ignores the reader, and so misinterprets what the world is about, is going to seem to readers to produce nothing more than a pack of lies. They don't recognize the world we show them, and so they don't trust us. Why should they?"
What do you guys think? Is he right?
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