Closer to the Source

I just realized why I tend to stiffen when I hear someone who has been a professional journalist for decades talk about the web as a media platform. It's odd, because I have a great respect for journalists and their profession. I seem to find myself quoting Clay Shirky at every turn these days, but I agree with him. He says we don't need newspapers any longer, but we have an urgent need for journalism.

I was raised on Time magazine and the CBS Evening News more than the daily newspaper. Walter Cronkite told us what happened, and Time followed up a few days later with a much more thorough report. We've been subscribing to the Wall Street Journal for many years now, and I read it nearly every morning, 24 hours late (we don't visit the mailbox before breakfast). I read the Los Angeles Times online edition often. But I get 100% of my news from Google News these days. I scan those headlines 10 times a day.

Through Google News, I am directed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, sometimes CNN and others. That's how I read my news--I don't know how others do it these days.

Have you ever noticed that the news is comprehensive and authoritative only to the degree that you don't know what they're talking about? I lived near Santa Monica Airport as a kid, and we saw a lot of light plane crashes. The TV news usually got some details wrong. I worked for the actor John Carradine's son, Chris, and when his father died, every news story seemed to think he had a different number of surviving children.

So, back to getting the news. When Mr. Ghanem was blown up in Beirut, I read the New York Times account and was glad that they got every detail, every nuance, exactly right. But during the time I covered the news in little Los Gatos, I watched the other media screw up details large and small. The Bay City News Service, which supplies many outlets in the area, is virtually unknown by locals. They have a source at the county fire department, because they put every call on the wire quickly. But they had no one on the scene--they were talking to a desk jockey who wasn't on the scene, either.

One story was an overturned truck just off Highway 17, in which the driver died. Every media source in the area was telling you that this accident was slowing traffic on Highway 17 because on the map it looked close. In fact, the accident occurred at a construction site 400' above the highway. I was there. Drivers had no idea it had happened; they could not glimpse so much as a Highway Patrol vehicle. Traffic was slow because it was a summer Saturday and people were heading to the beach.

This is a long-winded way to say that I like my news from people close to the source. If it's Beirut, the New York Times is close enough. But if I want to know about a crash at Santa Monica airport, now that I live 400 miles away, I'll look for a local Santa Monica news site before I'll visit the Los Angeles Times. If I can find an Ocean Park or a Mar Vista news site or blog, that will tell me more because they are adjacent to the airport, and Santa Monica is a big city, comparatively.

So, if there was a journalist who was covering the heck out of Ocean Park and Mar Vista, that would be ideal. I enjoy Steve Lopez' columns in the LA Times, but he's too big and far-ranging for a plane crash (and now he's an author and a movie character, too). When some journalists talk about the future of the news, they seem to see themselves as Steve Lopez one day. That's what bugs me.

I think the future of news will bring us closer to the source. There is no reason to pull back and let gods-gift-to-writing explain it from media central. The location-independent web lets us zoom in and find out from someone who was right there. Sometimes that might be too close--the person might not write well, or might assume more local knowledge than we have. That's when we zoom out a level--read about Ocean Park in the LA Times, for example. But we will want the capability of zooming in really, really close.

Re-reading my explanation of why a report might be too close, I realize why I respect journalists. I said we might zoom out if the on-the-scene report was poorly written or didn't know its audience. What I'm saying is that I want more journalism so that "even" local news will be reported well.