In case you missed it, there was a huge journalism-related throwdown between Jason Pontin and Bora Zivkovic yesterday on Twitter. In short, Pontin, publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, wrote what he called a manifesto about the future of the news business in which he calls out media pundits and new-media proponents Clay Shirky and Dave Winer:

Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media.

If you follow the online discussion about the future of journalism at all, you can imagine the backlash that followed, including the Twitter war between Pontin and Zivkovic, who runs A Blog Around the Clock. When the cyber-dust settled, it brought to mind item No. 16 on my Don’ts list for blogging about journalism online:

Don’t try to change other people’s minds in online debates — it’s an exercise in futility

Actually, there are probably quite a few things on those lists that would apply to this little dust-up, and I probably should make a few additions to those lists, including “Don’t forget to invoke the strawman rejoinder”. How much poorer would our online discourse be without strawman arguments and accusations of “You are making a strawman argument”?

Thoughts on Pontin’s Manifesto

The bruhaha over Pontin’s piece was basically over his attack on Shirky and Winer. But here’s the thing: Take away that attack, or even just that one sentence I quoted above, and there’s a lot of good analysis in his piece to mull that actually advance the discussion about the future of journalism. Here’s a piece that offers a much more thorough analysis of Pontin’s analysis than anything I can come up with on the subject.

Unfortunately, the polarizing effect of Pontin’s taking on two of the big names in the discussion overshadows the good parts of his article. I think he could have made the same analytical points without even mentioning the likes of Shirky or Winer. If his goal for the manifesto was to put forth the analysis that make up the second half of his piece, then the broad, hyperbolic critcism he lays on Shirky and Winer in the first half predictably foiled that aim. It is unfortunate because the analysis does not even depend on calling those two guys out.

As far as the criticism of the two pundits, I think Pontin focused on the wrong part of Shirky’s long essay. While Shirky does write that society needs journalism, not newspapers, the main point he was trying to make in the essay, I think, was that no one can say with any real certainty or knowledge what media model will replace the current one and that it is entirely possible for the current model to collapse before its eventual replacement has formed. Personally, I think Shirky’s piece, while it makes some good points, is not nearly as insightful as many have made it to seem. He was hardly the first to arrive at the conclusion that we don’t yet know what the future model will look like and therefore we need experimentation. Moreover, the piece comes off sounding primarily like 2,740 words by someone who was tired of being asked, “What will replace the current model?”, written for the specific goal of relieving himself of any further need or responsibility to answer that question. It’s not that I disagree with his view about not knowing what will replace the current model (I agree with that). However, he loses me when he writes:

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

To me, that patronizing passage seemed like the nutgraf for the entire piece, better summarized as “STOP ASKING ME THIS QUESTION, FOOL!!” Of course, perhaps that also partly explains the piece’s popularity, as it not only relieves Shirky, but also any new-media pundit, from having to answer that question ever again. If you get asked this question, just point to Shirky’s piece and ridicule the questioner. That’s something I take issue with.

As for Pontin’s criticism of Winer, I would say that, from reading Winer’s blog and following his podcasts with Jay Rosen, I feel like Pontin captures Winer’s stance pretty accurately. Winer seems to see professional journalists serving as mere conduits between sources/experts and the public, adding little value to what comes out of the sources’ mouths. And he feels that reporters don’t do a good job delivering what comes out of sources’ mouths. Therefore, now that technology has enabled any source/expert to go direct to the public, professional journalists are obsolete. I disagree with that.

In any case, regardless of whether you actually believe that Shirky and Winer literally know nothing about the business of media, writing that in a piece virtually guarantees this will not end well. If the point of your piece is to call them out, then mission accomplished. But if you actually are writing to put forth useful ideas, then writing it just ensures your readers will get sidetracked, and whether they agree or disagree with your ideas gets invariably handcuffed to whether they agree or disagree with your assessment of Shirky and Winer.

Speaking of pro journalists

At one point during the Twitter fight between Zivkovic and Pontin, Zivkovic wrote:

I understand the words “pro” and “biz” are important when one fears for a job. It’s hard to detach and watch the revolution.

I’ve seen similiar arguments made in future-of-journalism discussions. This point bothers me. To me, asking someone whose job is being put in jeopardy by a sequence of events to detach themselves from that and embrace that same sequence of events is unrealistic and insensitive. A lot of the punditry in the future-of-journalism arena come from people who have no real stake in how this turns out. I’m not talking about vague, “good journalism = good democracy” stakes. I’m talking about being-able-to-pay-your-mortgage stakes.

If an existing media institution, like the newspaper industry, goes under, or if a new startup goes bust, it has no real-life impact on these pundits. There will always be some sort of media around for them to study and critique. If their ideas turn out to be wrong, the pundits who put them out there can just shrug their shoulders — the more gracious ones might even offer a mea culpa — and then get on with life pretty much uninterrupted. Of course, it’s not quite the same for the people who are staking their careers and paychecks on trying to take these ideas and put them into practice. The success or failure of these ideas have a direct impact on their livelihood. So yes, it’s only natural that they take a more skeptical eye toward each idea. What really bugs me is that some of those pundits recognize this, and yet pretty much just shrug and say, “So what? Get over it.”

So please, don’t tell people to detach themselves from their fears about their jobs and watch the revolution unless you are certain you can do the same when the revolution comes for your job, renders your previous decades of training and experience irrelevant, turns your craft and passion into something you can no longer make a living at, and threatens to take away your livelihood in the blink of an eye. Besides, regardless of whether an individual embraces the revolution or not, it will come. Some will survive, and some won’t. The fear is just human nature and very understandable. Why be a jerk about it?

“An insurrection”

At one point in his manifesto, Pontin writes:

But Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection.

The insurrection idea is an interesting one, and one I’ve given some thought to. I’m going to go off on a tangent briefly to explain my thoughts on this.

Anyone who grew up in China is familiar with Romance of the Three Kingdoms by the time they are in elementary school. The novel, one of the great works of Chinese literature, provides a semi-fictional account of the period of division from 184 to 280 A.D. that brought about and followed the end of the Han dynasty. During this period, the Han dynasty, which had reigned for about 400 years, had grown weak and lost control of its empire. Men of great ambition sprang up left and right, and many vied to expand their territory and influence and to eventually take control of all of China. As the poem at the end of the novel says:

And brigands swarmed like ants through all the land.
Then rose the valiant and deployed their might.

So, back to journalism. I see a lot of parallels between the political situation in Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the current situation in the media landscape. I see the established institution weakening, and that gives a signal to the masses that the time is ripe for an uprising. Moreover, this uprising isn’t one big organized insurrection. Rather, it’s many people, many groups, all with their own perspectives and agendas, taking advantage of the chaos and newly reshuffled playing field to try to push their particular vision of the future. That’s not meant in a negative way; it’s just an observation.

So what lessons can we draw from Romance of the Three Kingdoms? Well, for one thing, it took a century for the chaos to subside (and even then, the new unification lasted only a couple decades). Many of those who played major roles in the beginning of the chaos did not survive to even see the chaos settle into three distinct kingdoms. Even after the three kingdoms had formed, it took another 60 years for them to unite, and none of the major characters that dominated much of the saga came out winners, even though at various points some of them looked invincible and destined to succeed.

Or, as Bob Dylan so eloquently put it almost 50 years ago:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Just some food for thought as you sit down to write your next post.