In his piece, Sessions says that he used to be an optimist about the internet, that he rarely read the printed paper or magazines and always felt more at home with digital media because of its “immediacy” and freedom, and a willingness to evolve. But the promise of the web has turned sour, he argues, and the forces unleashed by the rise of Google and Facebook have turned a once-innovative marketplace into what the former writer (now doing his doctorate in modern European history) calls an undifferentiated mass of clickbait and me-too journalism:
Where once the internet media landscape was populated with publications that all had unique visual styles, traffic models, and editorial voices, each one has mission-creeped its way into a version of the same thing: everybody has to cover everything, regardless of whether not they can add any value to the story, and has to scream at you to stand out in the avalanche of “content” gushing out of your feeds.
The internet didn’t invent clickbait.
Sessions’ piece has been tweeted approvingly by many online journalists, who seem to share his feeling that they are “actively making the world a dumber place” (or perhaps they just feel that everyone else is doing that). The internet is bad for writers, Sessions argues later in his essay, because it turns “qualities that should be valued — effort, reflection, revision, editing — into hindrances, and makes the resulting product worth little, both qualitatively and financially.” Good writing is difficult, takes time, and is expensive, he says.
I’m not saying the Patrol magazine co-founder or his fellow critics are wrong. Is there a lot of noise and low-quality writing on the internet? Definitely. Does much of it come from sites that claim to be doing journalism? You bet. Is any of this unique to the internet age? Not even close. Pick any time period within recent human history — especially the ones that were supposed to be a golden age for journalism — and you will find similar complaints.
Newspapers in particular have always been filled with huge quantities of “cynical, unnecessary, mind-numbing, time-wasting content.” As Annalee Nevitz of Gawker’s io9 recently described, newspapers at the turn of the century routinely indulged in shameless clickbait of the highest order, including front-page stories about violent gangs of thieves stealing people’s genitals. Headlines were salacious and in many cases flat-out wrong. Newspapers competed to see who would be the first to print a rumor or some bit of innuendo, especially if it involved a celebrity.
Technology is always seen as negative
Just as Twitter has been criticized by almost everyone (including Sessions) for encouraging a rush of speculation during events like the Boston bombing, and for overwhelming rational thought and reflection, the advent of the telegraph was also seen as a negative force for human understanding, because it transmitted the news too quickly, without giving people time to take the news in. You could quite easily read the excerpt below from an article in the New York Times from 1858 and replace the word “telegraph” with the word “internet.”
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William Randolph Hearst, a giant in the modern media business, was a shameless publicity hound whose newspapers routinely printed half-baked theories and even outright falsehoods in an attempt to attract readers. As BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti is fond of pointing out — for obvious reasons — Henry Booth Luce’s burgeoning empire at Time Inc. started by aggregating the news posted by competitors in order to steal some of their traffic and posted every salacious bit of celebrity gossip or rumor it could get its hands on.
It’s not the worst of times
Even at the time when the Washington Post was producing what many see as the apotheosis of golden-age journalism — the Watergate investigation series by Woodward and Bernstein — it and other newspapers just like it were printing thousands of pages a day filled with trivia and ephemeral nonsense. I haven’t been able to find any, but I have no doubt that newspapers were being criticized for printing nothing but poorly-argued invective and cheap traffic-driving features when Benjamin Franklin was running the Pennsylvania Gazette in the 1700s.
Criticizing BuzzFeed because it does listicles — or VICE News because it covers pop culture, or Gawker because it runs the occasional celebrity-bashing post, or Vox because it did an explainer on Gwyneth Paltrow — is like looking at a newspaper and complaining about the horoscopes, advice columns and comic strips. Where’s all the great journalism? The reality is that for most newspapers, those investigative stories and scoops everyone remembers are a fraction of a percent of the total output, and always have been.
Is this the best of times for journalism? No. But it’s hardly the worst of times either. The fact is that there was no “golden age of journalism.” Journalism has always been a messy and chaotic and venal undertaking in many ways — the internet didn’t invent that. All the web has done is provide us with more ways to produce and distribute both ephemeral nonsense and serious journalism in greater quantities. The good part is that it has also made it easier to find the things we care about. What we choose to do with that power, as always, is up to us.
The web's effect on news reporting is considered the most clear evidence that this is a revolutionary technology: news editors – and in some cases, the governments that they observe – are no longer the gatekeepers to information because costs of distribution have almost completely disappeared. If knowledge is power, the web is the greatest tool in the history of the world.
The process that happens before a story is published has also been transformed. The web has become the go-to point for the globe when it comes to getting information; it's the same for reporters. Online, they find a multiplicity of perspectives and a library of available knowledge that provides the context for stories. Increasingly, the stories are coming from the web.
Emily Bell, director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former editor of Guardian.co.uk, identifies coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 as the incident that foreshadowed how events are covered today. "Linear TV just could not deliver," she says. "People used the web to connect to the experience by watching it in real time on TV and then posting on message boards and forums. They posted bits of information they knew themselves and aggregated it with links from elsewhere. For most, the delivery was crude, but the reporting, linking and sharing nature of news coverage emerged at that moment."
For reporters in Egypt, however, their greatest frustration was not that they were disconnected from the context provided by the network, but that they struggled to get their stories out. In fact, Beaumont found the silence a relief. "The way [Egypt] was reported didn't have all the ifs and buts coming from looking over your shoulder to try to figure out what the world is doing at the moment or who's saying what. You just had the news and the news was happening right in front of you."
More generally, technology has improved the processes of identifying stories that are newsworthy. Feeds from social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter provide a snapshot of events happening around the world from the viewpoint of first-hand witnesses, and blogs and citizen news sources offer analytical perspectives from the ground faster than print or television can provide. Paul Mason, economics editor on BBC2's Newsnight, uses these tools to get an angle on what's happening and what's important. "If you are following 10 key economists on Twitter and some very intelligent blogs," he says, "you can quickly get to where you need to be: the stomach-churning question, 'OK, what do I do to move this story on?'"
None the less, such tools are still only one element of the news-gathering process. This may mean that large organisations appear to break stories days after they've appeared on Twitter. "First-hand witnesses cannot see the big picture," says Yves Eudes, a reporter with French broadsheet Le Monde. "They're not trained to understand whether what they're seeing is relevant to the big picture or to see what really happens. They're trained to see what they want to see. If you only rely on Twitter or Facebook, you might end up howling with the wolves."
Indeed, in 2009, American TV networks found themselves in a very public mess when they reported the "Twitter line" on the story of a killing spree by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood US army base – that the killer had terrorist links. The details turned out to be false.
Eudes's caution does not mean he discounts the value of the tools the web offers its army of citizen journalists; Le Monde was one of the organisations, along with the Guardian, that worked with Julian Assange to publish the WikiLeaks cables last year. "Suddenly, we have all these new competitors that, if they're bold and well-organised, can change the course of news worldwide in a way that was completely unthinkable before the internet," he says. And loose organisations such as Global Voices, a network of international citizen journalists reporting on a global platform about local stories, offer windows on events around the world that are increasingly ignored by local papers.
Ultimately, however, Eudes believes the fundamentals of news-gathering have not been transformed by the web. "I need to know how to write or take a photo and I need to be good at analysis," he says. "Learning how to use tools is different from saying everyone is a reporter. Anyone can make bread, but it's lousy bread. You need to spend time like a true, professional baker to learn to make good bread."
Part of that learning process for newshounds, it seems, involves leaving the web and pounding the pavement for stories. For Beaumont, working from Tahrir Square without web access was a reminder of a purer form of journalism. "You forget that the internet, for all its advantages, is a distraction: you're always wondering whether what you're reading by others matches what you're witnessing yourself. If you don't have to worry about that, you can concentrate on pure observational reporting. Which," he says, "is a pleasure."
A pleasure that can only come from going offline.
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