A couple of weeks ago, in the Media Literacy series, I used the word, "paperazzi." That was not a spelling error. "Paparazzi" use cameras. "Paperazzi" use words. In the spring of 2008, Mayhill Fowler became the first paperazzo in digital media history.
Fowler was functioning at the time as an unpaid macramé journalist (another unfortunate, if not so dangerous, category of digital new-age journalism) for the online publication The Huffington Post.
The Post, exploring the potential for this new macramé journalism, had created a feature called "Off the Bus," in which volunteer "citizen journalists," performing essentially as bloggers, fanned out to write about the 2008 presidential campaign. Under its "Off the Bus Masthead" page, HuffPost describes the operation: "Off the Bus is a citizen-powered and –produced presidential campaign news site sponsored by The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net . . . The project depends, in large part, on its on-the-ground citizen reporters and on cutting-edge distributed reporting techniques." No professional journalism experience was required.
It was not an original idea. Traditional print organizations, mainly newspapers, were already experimenting with "citizen journalism" as a trendy, attractive, feel-good (and very inexpensive) feature of their online operations. But by summer, 2008, Huffington Post was easily the largest citizen journalism venue, with 7,500 contributors on the rolls. Boston journalist Mike Barnicle likened citizen journalism to "300 million columnists with access to a computer." Someone else said it was like "a huge letters to the editor page."
As a veteran journalist and recipient of who knows how many letters to the editor, I read this "citizen journalism" news with sadness. It reminded me of the old town squares. Town squares, at the center of the small rural towns across America, achieved a place of heartfelt distinction in American 20th-century lore. By the 1950s, and the arrival of better highways and more comfortable cars, residents of those towns had started to drive to larger regional cities to shop, eat, and see a movie. Around the town square, businesses closed, leaving darkened brick shells through which dry goods, sundries, hardware, groceries, insurance, movie stars, blue-plate specials and fountain Cokes had flowed.
In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: "Macramé." It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts hobbyists learning to knot yarn in a certain trendy way.
The business of journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now journalism is being gutted by backdrafts of stockholder economics and technology, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a fourth world that will not be easily explored or understood.
Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism on the rise, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. Mayhill Fowler became one of these. She is a pretty good writer, though long-winded and totally chronological, as most non-journalists are, and she has said some things that chill me. To Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post she said she "refuses to read her postings online, in part because she doesn't like the way editors sometimes change her lead sentence 'because they want people to click on it.' "
In the history of journalism, reporters have spent cumulatively thousands of years wracking their brains over a lead sentence (we call it a "lede" in the trade) that would click with people. People in journalism share a common living nightmare. We spend hours trying to think of a great lede, and, with sufficient experience, 75 percent of the time we succeed. But sometimes deadline arrives and we have to send the story off, a single chance gone forever, a bullet that has been fired, with a lede that is just functional. At 3 a.m., we wake up and there, in the darkness, is the lede we wanted to write, glowing, gloating, screaming at us.
But that's not it. All writing is hard work, and Fowler's writing shows that she works hard, even if she does not know a good lede from a bad clam. What is troubling is her indifference to readers who want to be clicked with, want a good lede, and the media illiteracy that reveals. Macramé journalists don't understand, because they have never been taught, that people are the authors of the media code, and thus the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, journalist Jeff Greenfield laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."
Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Journalists, educated in these realities and principles, write to it, write to the people, as if through a window which no power, natural or man-made, can close. Mayhill Fowler, unaware of the principles, writes to a mirror, in which only one person appears.
Escorting her through the looking glass would not be difficult. It is only the same screen, between the public and media literacy, that could so easily be removed by one semester in the public's education. In one of probably millions of comments posted online on the citizen journalist topic, journalist Patrick Salem hit the nail almost on the head when he said: "A good grammar book and a couple of hours with an old city editor is about all the training anyone needs to be a journalist." I might give the old city editor a couple of weeks, but otherwise I agree completely. The same result would be achieved if Mayhill Fowler read this Media Literacy series every Monday. As a citizen journalist, she is the subject of a purpose of this blog: If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to "open up" newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101.
The code is the subject – and I am trying to keep it the sole subject – of this blog, but once a media literacy project is under way, it is almost impossible to keep its subject from expanding. For example, not until now did I suppose I would have to address the common good sense of journalists identifying themselves to people they want to question. Now that Mayhill Fowler has introduced the word "paperazzo" into the media glossary, it is important to take a couple of paragraphs to look at journalism ethics and strategy.
It's probably not necessary to go into too much detail about the original paparazzi. That famed, or infamous, industry, seeks to record with cameras the unguarded moments of well-known people. Celebrities employ laborious, often degrading, and sometimes devastating defenses against the paparazzi, but the best defense – the ability to disappear on command – is not available to them.
Not so with the paperazzi. Twice, as of this writing, Mayhill Fowler has succeeded in publishing unguarded quotes from famous people – then-Senator Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton – who didn't know she was a paperazzo. They do now. And now that the threat is known, they have an effortless, foolproof paperazzi defense to employ. They can simply shut up. Thus is journalism's access to "the widest possible range of information" crimped, in a way that may be difficult to undo.
“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Newsweek political journalist Jonathan Alter told The New York Times.
“In the interest of full disclosure, it would have been better if she said, ‘Mr. President, I’m a blogger from Off the Bus and I have a question,’ ” said Jay Rosen, a journalism educator and the co-creator, with the Huff Post, of Off the Bus. “We didn’t anticipate exact circumstances like this. We didn’t think up guidelines for what to tell her in a situation like this.”
What a strange thing for a New York University journalism professor to say. His explanation begs a question. Well, several questions. What guidelines were there to think up? Wouldn't the old ones do? They have worked well enough for more than 200 years. Is media literacy relative in the fourth world? Does one standard apply to professionals like Jay Rosen, and another standard to media-illiterate macramé journalists who Mayhill Fowler represents so well? If so, won't that crimp the people's access to the widest possible range of information? Won't that abridge the freedom of the press? Could macramé journalism and roving bands of paperazzi ("Guidelines? We don't need no stinking guidelines") torch the First Amendment, and make the gutting of the old journalism complete? Will people, who gave the press its power, be the ones finally to take it away?
Are there answers to these questions? Yes. Two weeks with an old city editor should do it. Or you can read this blog, and go to the media literacy sites it links to. It's only education.
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