Closing the Post and straying from storytelling
As mentioned in my questionably useful tribute to Twitter
earlier today, I received a cell phone "tweet" this afternoon of a story
by Joe Strupp about the Cincinnati Post's impending year end closing.
The story is published at: editorandpublisher.com.
Among the interesting points in his story for me was this:
Future plans for many of the staff are telling about
the bleak journalism prospects. Shelly Whitehead, a police reporter, is
going to work in internal communications at a hospital, while former
Managing Editor Mark Neikirk, a 28-year Post veteran, has signed on to
run a project at Northern Kentucky University.
"There is life after journalism," Neikirk says, but admits, "I liked going to battle everyday in the newsroom." He says he has still not let himself think about the paper's eventual end: "It is bad, there have always been two voices in Cincinnati."
Whitehead, who spoke via cell phone while working her beat at a local police station, said she is glad to get out of news because the industry has strayed from storytelling into "quick, constant updating."
"There is life after journalism," Neikirk says, but admits, "I liked going to battle everyday in the newsroom." He says he has still not let himself think about the paper's eventual end: "It is bad, there have always been two voices in Cincinnati."
Whitehead, who spoke via cell phone while working her beat at a local police station, said she is glad to get out of news because the industry has strayed from storytelling into "quick, constant updating."
The part about straying from storytelling into "quick, constant updating" is a thought that strikes me as important.
Quick, constant updating is a data stream, a pulse... it might even be critical and helpful stuff, but it's just data. It's the ticker at the bottom of a TV screen. It's the quick snippets of "Stay tuned for an update on whether that healthy lunch you're eating might just make you sick... but first the weather".
There is little room for reflection in the news model of quick, constant updating. There is little space created to consider what is important or why something matters in that world of streaming story updates.
That's not really story, and story is important, in spite of its reputation of being the slow sibling in the family of modern communication.
Storytelling used to be more common than it is today.
Fact finding was hard work and most information was stored in books, news archives, libraries or corporate and institutional databases.
Today, facts are almost as common as words themselves; as common as pens imprinted with the names of the drugs we're all supposed to be asking our doctors about... Facts are accessible at every moment -- at the speed of an internet connection -- and as easily repackaged and republished as they are collected, from Google and other dispensers.
The ubiquity of data and information of all kinds affects us in interesting ways. Like anything that becomes more and more abundant, each fact or detail to which we all have such ready access becomes somehow less important, less valuable than when information was scarce.
Attention is far more scarce than information today, and attention requires more than a steady flow of facts to stay activated. In fact, attention is numbed and flattened by a steady stream of anything.
If they are to matter to me, facts and data need context and emotional connections. They need a little space, or at least I need a little space to process them. The presentation of facts is reporting. Storytelling, though, includes an emotional energy and leaves a space that calls for our reflection. It is quite different from reporting.
Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, offers this simple insight about the difference:
"To paraphrase E.M. Forster's famous observation, a fact is 'The queen died and the king died.' A story is 'The queen died and the king died of a broken heart.' "
I want more stories, less "quick, constant updating".
Some 13 years ago, back in the days before the word blog (or most other e-vocabulary) appeared, when our choices for Internet access were AOL, Compuserve and iac.net here in Cincy, I wrote a journal entry while on a business trip to Shell Island, about getting to watch a kid collect a story for himself on the beach one day. It struck me then, as now, that having a story is better than having facts. A story leaves room for questions, too, and questions are always more useful in the long run than answers, however messy and occasionally cumbersome questions can be.
I have questions about what the many good people at the Post are going to be doing. I enjoyed reading about a few of their plans. I thought about our friend Joe Wessels, who is among those journalists at the Post, and who is working to create a new place for his words and creativity at cincy.com, City Beat and other local publishing ventures.
I'd be happy to hear from others who want to keep on writing, whether or not they are doing it as a full time job. One way to reach me is email to: rbw AT cincy DOT com
I've read and heard a number of people concerned about the fact that, without the Post, Cincinnati is left with one News voice, and that we need more than that.
I think I agree, but does the voice have to come from a news organization? I can't help but wonder about that. Newspapers are a product of a world in which information was hard to find and just as hard to broadcast and deliver.
In a world in which information is so common, and the tools for communicating accessible to nearly anyone interested, isn't it at least conceivable that the other voice our city needs is its own -- our own?
That's what I keep wondering about, as a non-journalist -- What stories do we want told -- or want to tell -- about ourselves, our city and each other?
There are talented people all over the Tristate. I'm more impressed on many days by local bloggers than I am by what is sold as news.
I imagine a city made more aware of its own rich heritage, interesting neighborhoods, its myriad stories and connections... a city that thrives because it is awake to itself and because it isn't looking for anyone else to tell it how it's doing or whom it should blame for whatever it's been told is wrong with it.
I imagine a city willing to tell its own stories, so I'm telling myself to stop waiting on the sidelines for someone else to do it, and start telling some of my own.
Let's see how well I listen.
-RBW
CincyPost.com masthead from 1996
P.S. I was part of the team that created the first online edition of the Cincinnati Post, back in 1996. I just checked the Wayback Machine for CincyPost.com and found some of the old issues, including our now very dated mast head. Yes, I think we should find our own voices in this new communication saturated world, but I will surely miss this particular voice...