Daily Show visits the New York Times
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The Daily Show's segment on the decline of the New York Times ("reporting the news, making stuff up, getting us into war") is fantastic - and reaches its peak when Jason Jones asks an editor to describe the appeal of "aged news," and when the editor asks him to explain, he challenges the editor to find a single thing in the paper that happened that day.
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I'd call it mean-spirited if it wasn't all true. :P
They oughta rename that guy Jason Pwns.
Jeez. They're starting to hit below the belt now, eh? I really enjoy reading the NYT and I think it's legacy should endow it with more love than it's getting from fellow newsmen, even if fake. Stephen Colbert recently stepped out of character for a moment, both in print as well as content, to seriously regard issues surrounding the Iraq War. Are Stewart et al. in character when they jeer the supposed slow death of Print Media through the NYT's changing fortunes? Go easy on the old folks--they're old because they've seen a lot. Have a little respect for the living.
Awwww, burn!
Although when you burn a giant newspaper company, you run the risk of the greatest bon fire of all time.
zachrd99,
Your link can go on your profile page, thanks.
what would I do if owned a print newspaper and wanted it to live?.... Hire and pay good staff. Do actual analysis of what everyone already heard on the web yesterday. Entertain, revive the ancient serialized story, Be the real source of local news that actually impacts local life. Cultivate and create a community of subscribers by actually giving a shit about what they are telling you. THEN worry about getting the advertisers. And bring back the real funny papers: a full section of full sized GOOD strips. And if it can't make a buck doing that, then maybe it is time to let it go.
ok, dat dere was HARSH. But wtf? NYT execs can't defend their existence in sound bites? I loved that part about nothing in the paper being from today but that ain't the point, right? It's supposed to be about depth of coverage. Not freshness...
This guy Jason is danjaroo!
oh that was just pure genius!
@ HOBOMIKE
Thats an interesting point, it should indeed be about depth of coverage (and a little freshness).. but that's actually one of my main problems with mainstream print journalism - a lot of the time the depth is very poor.
Sometimes i see stories that are so poorly informed it alarms me. It really happens when a journalist tries to cover a specialist topic - maybe a particular area of science. You can often find more informed opinions on the web that come from people related to the topic.
maybe i'm reading the wrong papers though :)
@Kidro1 #10
The depth and analysis are gone because the depth of reporters are long gone, and the ones left are overworked, thinly stretched and so demoralized about everybody losing their job, they don't have the energy or time to go to great lengths.
Look at what Takuan recommends and do the exact opposite and you have the newspapers of today.
Well, newspapers do have a long-established Unique Selling Proposition.
You can wipe your arse with them when the toilet paper runs out.
At the end, Jason screwed up. No matter how unprofitable a business is, it doesn't have "red ink" on its balance sheet.
"Red ink" shows up on the income statement, which shows profits and losses. The Times guy could have slammed Jason on this if he wasn't so stunned.
Why journalists deserve low pay:
In other words, 99.9% of journalists are not of the Woodward and Bernstein investigative variety, and they never have been.
(AFAIK, Jeremy Scahill is an independent investigative journalist. However he does it seems like a viable business model for others to attempt.)
The piece would be funnier and more accurate if the NYT didn't have a huge website that was updated constantly throughout the day. Sure, the paper contains some of yesterday's news, but that's just an accident of history. The big problem is that the online ads don't pull in the same revenue as the paper ads.
Be sure to read the New York Times' take on the segment (along with their own interview with Jason Jones): http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/the-daily-show-meets-the-new-york-times-times-survives/
It makes me nervous when people cheer the demise of newspapers. Even if newspapers did a shitty job keeping the Bush administration in check, I think they're still the best chance we have at holding our government accountable. I don't see blogs or whatever the alternative is coming close. And remember that during the Bush terror years, blogs were mostly cowed into obedience just as much as newspapers were.
I think there's a reason the Republicans are constantly belittling the Times, even wearing pins that say "I don't believe the New York Times" at the RNC: its because they're threatened by it, which is of course a sign that the Times is doing something right...
Call me old fashioned, but I think its intensely sad to see the newspaper industry going under. And very frightening too.
* We the Media by Dan Gillmor
* Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Hurry up and die already, newspapers!
Make room for real journalism, not just propaganda.
I dont care...the New York Times is the greatest newspaper in the country (I have read a lot of newspapers). Its international coverage is unsurpassed and it blows all of the other NYC papers out of the water. I will forever read it.
i guess you have to have lived in a country which never had decent independent media (turkey, in my case) to value critical and responsible journalism shit like watergate happens each and every week in turkey, and none of the newspapers have the balls to report it (although the landscape is changing a bit, with one new pretty tough newspaper giving it a go), most of them belong to one particular guy anyway, and depth in reporting is just a funny joke. a decent democracy needs good investigate journalism with courage and persistency, and i don't see much of that coming from anything other than print media with a tradition yet. just think of the long seymour hersh articles in the new yorker.
in the end the question is going to be "who is going to replace a media company such as the NYT?" ... judging by the amount of links to NYT news coverage by blogs I just don't see blogs to be able to replace media companies.
its easy to make fun of the company, but then its easy to be a monday morning quarterback. if news is important to us there is no reason we shouldn't pay for it. afterall, i am quite aware that i am paying for the information on boingboing through a multitude of ads that cover the page.
You don't have Adblock installed? Are you from the past?
(Junkbuster has been around since about 1996.)
Ha! The moment I saw this segment yesterday, I just knew that Cory would jump on it. :)
This post contrasts well with the previous one. There seem to be some benefit to presenting old news, doing research and fact-checking.
Sometimes it's like the whole national conversation has been reduced to "I hate you, Dad! I hate you!"
#16 "Even if newspapers did a shitty job keeping the Bush administration in check, I think they're still the best chance we have at holding our government accountable."
Frankly, the Daily show does more to hold the government accountable then all the newspapers in America at the moment. Which is sort of a sad state of affairs.
I actually feel the need to stick up for Times here: whatever you might say about the print edition, the online version is extremely Net-savvy, much of it now devoted to blogs with live, up-to-the-minute reporting, user commentary, video feeds, etc. etc. The print version is still relevant to provide thoughtful news analysis and feature editorial that the online version can't offer as well. The Jason Jones bit pretended like none of this was true and took a lot of disingenuous hit-and-run shots. At one point, he actually asserts the Huffington Post is making more money than the Times, which is a highly debatable point, especially because a) HuffPo recycles a lot of content from legacy media outfits like the Times, and is thus dependent on them, b) Huffpo has doesn't, you know, PAY ITS WRITERS.
#13 - He did not say "red ink" he said "red all over" - you know, like the old joke: A newspaper is "read" all over? A balance sheet can be "red all over" because it is symbolically "in the red" - the common reference phrase for any financial loss. Nice try though.
@14 zuzu
GREAT article. It's not hyperventilating. It correctly places the cause of the problem on the ability of USERS to easily do what journalists have done (not on the relative value of new distributors).
And it actually suggests a way out of the hole: don't try to be a 'me-too' version of something somebody else does better. Instead--be local, be specialized, be unique.
In other words, newspapers are like the information version of Sears.
It's sad but it's true. I mean, I get current news from twitter. Really newspapers are only good for editorials and I get that on the blogosphere.
I love a good Clueless-Old-Media bloodletting as much as the next bOINGER, but after I wipe the smirk off my face, a few things keep puzzling me.
1. Okay, so Stewart was shooting fish in a barrel, leaving out the inconvenient truths that would have killed the buzz of the segment's extended riff. THE DAILY SHOW was lucky enough to train its sights on an editor who was clueless about his own paper's Web side, which is where all the energy, buzz, and institutional focus is, at the Times, is these days. As Au points out, the Times online is often current up to the second, takes the 24/7 news cycle seriously, and is notably Websmart, rich in links and multimedia. Short version: Where is news in the NYT that ISN'T "aged"? All over the paper's Web portal.
2. The HuffPo is notoriously a sweatshop, so exploitative of interns and recent grads it would make Jacob Riis swoon in disbelief. If Keller had been quick off the mark---maybe he was, and maybe his riposte ended up on the cutting-room floor---he could have sawed the interviewer off at the knees. More to the point, HuffPo is a big mass of incandescent gas, long on commentary, lean (VERY lean) on original reporting, with NO original Scahill-style investigative journalism to speak of.
3. @ZUZU: Scahill seems to support himself through his books---whups, another moribund industry, so let's not crowd into that paper lifeboat---and the largesse of the NATION Institute. Bully for him, but hardly a model for the mass of investigative reporters, whose work needs to live in daily publications. Does it bear pointing out that no news is more "aged" than investigative reportage in BOOK form?
4. @ZUZU again:
"Hurry up and die already, newspapers!
Make room for real journalism, not just propaganda."
I know the Chomsky argument by heart, and can quote it from memory. What Chomsky and Herman never tell us is: who will fund the Real Journalism that will replace that Hated Heap of Falsehoods About American Empire that is the NYT? Every time I read the criminally clueless Jeff Jarvis---Self-Appointed He-Ra, Master of the Mediaverse---I comb his screed for an answer to that question, but answer comes there none. Ever. Show me the beef. Where's the revenue stream, the funding mechanism that's going to support the Real Journalism of the Future?
5. Another, thumpingly obvious question, so obvious it seems to be hidden in plain sight from those who insist we've already read the morning's news online, on a jillion blogs, by the time Old Media get around to covering it: Where in Cthulu's name do you think 99% of all blogs, including HuffPo, are getting their facts? In virtually every instance, they're linking to reported stories on some newspaper website. Unless you're talking Malkin and other frothing heads, who are linking to yak about yak about yak. What happens when the few remaining overseas bureaus and the few remaining national bureaus close? You like hyperlocal? Awesome, because that's all you're going to have. Man does not live by Little Leagues scores alone.
Look, much about mainstream corporate journalism is rotten to the core. I've slept with MANUFACTURING CONSENT under my pillow for years, and argued its righteous theology in my writing. But waving HuffPo as some sort of exemplar of the New, New Cluefulness brings out the Marxist economic determinist in me, as do Overestimated Prophets like Jarvis, none of whom can tell us who's going to pay for the news of the future. Of course we'd all love to see Scahill-style reporting calling power to account. But who's going to do that reporting in a world where all the people who used to pay, like the NYT, have gone to the boneyard?
The devil is in the details. Always. If I'm sounding all Captain Earnest, here, well, I love the snark monkey as much as you do, but the filthy monkey, it snarks and moves on. You and I have to live here.
Sometimes I think the boingers are too ready and willing and overjoyed to dance on the apparent grave of "the old media." Certainly the NYT is hardly perfect, but I always think "be careful what you ask for"-- the death of newspapers may not bring any great improvements in news reporting, just faster errors and more bias. Think of what an innovation CNN was when it first came out, and that lead to . . . FoxNews, who (to paraphrase Krauthamer) went from presenting alternate opinions to presenting an alternate reality (or more accurately, an alternative TO reality). The death of newspapers and rise of internet news sources means that a biased person in middle America who used to get his news from the mostly moderate local paper now can just get online and read "the TRUTH" as presented by NewsMax or Democratic Underground, and never have to consider any alternate opinions. Cities with only one major newspaper had to stay relatively moderate to keep readership, now you can search out the source that best fits your preconceived notions and never have to step out of your intellectual comfort zone.
Remind me again, what's the Huffington Post's position on Alternate Medicine? on MMR? on vaccination in general?
I know where I'd want to be getting my news updates from, and it ain't them, nor Oprah for that matter...
ju2tin, actually a balance sheet can have red if the value of the assets is less than the value of the liabilities. It should, of course, balance in the end so that liabilities and equity is equal to assets, but it does that by showing a negative income or retained earnings amount. If showing a negative income isn't red, I don't know what is!
When people talk about why newspapers are great and why they should survive they always bring out the NYTimes. When my university started giving out free copies I read them and I can't figure out what is so great about it. People talk about investigative journalism and such but is that every day? I doubt it. People also talk about the depth you get in the paper vs. tv news. Maybe I'm just shallow. Maybe I'm just have too short of an attention span but it is a very rare story that I want much more detail than the headline and perhaps the first couple paragraphs.
Also, all the great things people talk about are in the first section. So what about the rest of the paper? Why does the NYTimes even bother to cover sports? Is anyone buying it for their sports coverage? Also, I understand that the Times is in New York and such but I'm in Indiana. Why are they giving me this travel section talking about weekends in Vermont or something? I ain't going to fly to Vermont for a weekend any time soon.
Why does my edition of the paper have coverage of an art exhibit that isn't a traveling exhibit and not a permanent exhibit so that I could make a trip to NYC to see it even if I wanted to? I know the true answer to most of these questions is that they are filler for ads but that's not a good reason for me to spend my money or time on it.
JCCalhoun - If you can't be bothered to read about anything in depth, then you are correct that newspapers are not for you.
There are three classes of journalists.
At the top of the pyramid, you have a small sliver of brilliant investigative journalists.
In a smaller section just below the apex, you have a bunch of people who are pretty mediocre and fungible, trying to be part of the sliver and failing. They work for national papers, are overpaid, and don't produce anything that can't be had in a dozen other sources. These are the ones most people are thinking of when they talk about "journalists" being redundant.
The vast majority of journalists fall into the bottom base. We don't do anything anyone else couldn't do, it's just that nobody else is doing it. I don't mind being low-paid because my job isn't hard, but if you are a fan of western North Dakota 9-man football, I'm your one and only source.
@JCCalhoun: So in-depth coverage has no value because you personally aren't interested in it, and newspapers shouldn't feature any local content for places where you personally don't live? Is that the gist of what you're saying?
i think papers would have a fighting chance if they were equally scathing in their criticism of all policies and politicians. why give the g.o.p. something to gripe about? why ignore or gloss over stories because it's a conflict of interest? i haven't seen hard-nosed journalism in a while, and i think everyone could agree, that though not up to the second in delivering the message, people would still buy a paper that was a thorough analysis of the previous days or week's events, not just some blogger breaking the story "ZOMG, GM epic fail lolol1zzz"
Hey, it's Bill Keller! He came to speak at a media studies event at my school a couple years back. Contrary to what someone else said, he does understand the value of the NYTimes website and has been pushing to get more and more of their content up there. And he understands that they're in a bind... I asked him why, if the value of the newspaper was the investigative journalism and international bureaus it provides, those very things are the first on the cutting room floor in bad times, and he just told me I should talk to his boss. There's quite a few people in the industry that get it, I think... but the bureaucracy is old and no one person has the latitude to make the changes that are necessary.
@30 JC
There's a reason you don't read past the first paragraphs: journalists intentionally encapsulate the whole story right at the beginning. It's called the lead. Papers assume the average reader is too busy to read the whole thing.
And, yes, you are shallow.
Technically, when you encapsulate the story, it's called the nut graf, which may or may not be the lead.
:)
From this viewer's eyes (no big fan of traditional media either) the piece looked like an infantile frat boy speaking to people who had the common courtesy not to tell him to f**k straight off.
Of course, frat boy got to edit the footage so he looks articulate & funny against the tired old horses at the NYT.
And he accuses the NYT of manipulating stories?
Why can't the papers adopt a non-profit model, like the News Hour on PBS?
We need to stop equating HOW we deliver the news with the actual news content. Print - in all forms - will soon be dead. But The New York Times will live on....online.
The segment was funny. Below the belt? C'mon. I've seen DS interviews that were far more brutal.
The amusing inherent irony of the aged news bit is the Daily Show is hardly a live telecast itself. Although it airs at 11, it films at 5 and much of the content is fixed in the morning.
@moriarty So in-depth coverage has no value because you personally aren't interested in it, and newspapers shouldn't feature any local content for places where you personally don't live? Is that the gist of what you're saying?
What I'm saying is that people say "oh newspapers have in depth coverage that you won't get anywhere else" as if it is a given that in depth coverage is always a good thing or a wanted thing.
And why does the national edition of the New York Times have local coverage? That's what I'm asking. It says "midwest edition" or "national edition" or somehting like that on the masthead of the NYTimes I get in the midwest to there has to be something different about it versus the version that is on the newstand in NYC. Why are they taking the time to publish something that doesn't and can't apply to anyone outside of the NYC area?
Or more importantly, why is a paper full of this local stuff something that people all across the country seem to think is good? That's like saying that people in New York should read the Indianapolis Star.
It just seems like the only section people ever talk about is section A. So why are they publishing anything else?
I"m a grad student in the humanities. I have a BA in English so it isn't like a don't read things in depth or that I don't like to read. I just don't see the appeal of newspapers or why they need to be saved.
"I have a BA in English so it isn't like a don't read things in depth or that I don't like to read. I just don't see the appeal of newspapers or why they need to be saved."
Funny, I'm starting to question the appeal of BAs in English.
It's funny, people STILL seem to think that if only they were in charge they could run a newspaper better. Even more hilarious, people still believe that "The News" is the product being sold or that if they were in charge they'd have real investigative reporting. ROFLOL.
Here in Minneapolis I witnessed exactly what happens when a paper gets too "uppity" and starts thinking they are permitted to do real journalism. Prior to the 2000's the Mnpls Star and Tribune was known as being very liberal but that all changed overnight. In I think the early 2000's the advertisers all got together and forced the paper to change it's political slant. They demanded the Strib hire certain rightwing columnists. Other columnists with decades long readers were eventually let go. I know all this because it was reported in the paper at the time.
The advertisers run the media show. They have a political agenda.
How many people actually want to listen to the shitstains on talk radio? Not many, probably just the 20% that still think Bush was a great president. But they aren't on the radio because YOU want them there.
I also think its funny that people think they'd be permitted to do real investigative reporting without the slightest idea of what the legal environment actually is. Their first investigative piece would get them sued into oblivion.
There is pus in your milk and the hormone that is used in cows is known to cause cancer. Yet you will never ever hear that on any traditional media. Why is that? Zuzu and other like minded libertarians wish for old media to die already so that fairy's and unicorns can sprout from the ground. It's a delusion based on an incorrect model of how media functions.
Media sell viewers to advertisers. They attract viewers by feeding their basest instincts for sex, gossip. However the advertisers will not tolerate anything not in their interest nor will they tolerate any political content they deem to far to the left.
None of this is going to change if print journalism were to go away. In fact it will be far worse. Does BoingBoing have a legal department? What do you suppose would happen if Xeni tried to do her reporting from somewhere other than a third world country?
Please don't think the Times is going anywhere. They will just change how they do things. Take a look at what they've got planned in future. Its very current and innovative:
http://creativity-online.com/work/view?seed=68771490
"What I'm saying is that people say "oh newspapers have in depth coverage that you won't get anywhere else" as if it is a given that in depth coverage is always a good thing or a wanted thing."
How is that different from what I said?
What's interesting is that blogs, etc. are able to "get away with" investigative reporting (even though they don't really have the the resources for it) precisely because nobody takes them seriously. Any newspaper would get sued for libel and/or abandoned by advertisers for half the stuff that appears on political blogs. The blogs don't get sued partly because they're too small to be worth it, but also because it's assumed among the general public that they don't bother with more the most cursory fact checking, are blatantly agenda driven, and are generally full of shit. And, really, that's not an inaccurate assessment. They can play a valuable role, but a (even moderately) trusted source of new information is not yet one of them. That's what we'll need if (well, when) the newspapers fall.
I for one prefer my news aged. I like to get it when there has been some time for data-gathering and reflection, instead of just "OMG!! Something just happened! Now it's happening again!"
When the Oklahoma City bombing happened Mike Ryoko put up a column decrying the horrible A-rab terrists that would do such a thing. He sure didn't look so good once they arrested McVeigh.
In-depth coverage of a topic or an issue is essential for actually understanding what's going on. Thinking understanding can grow from skimming two or three paragraphs is like thinking that a single reading of the cliff-notes will equal the experience of figuring out James Joyce by working your way through "Ulysses".
Honestly, 'in-depth coverage' is sometimes a euphemism for editorializing. Not that new media doesn't do the same thing, but the objectivity of old media has been romanticized.
@M. Dery
We'll experiment, and whatever works will support it. Anybody who claims that they can pick it out right now is either a fool or lying to you.
Shirky: "What will replace newspapers?" is a plea to not be living through a revolution
if you were to only report on today's news,
you would get what you see on your local tv news: whatever fire, accident, or disaster happens, very reactionary.
some news stories, take time to develop & research, and that style of reporting is what will be missed.
The interesting thing is that media training doesn't yet seem to include how to handle interviews by the comedy press. You could almost see the gears turning in Kristin Mason's brain as she struggled to figure out a response to the Woodward-Bernstein bearclaw comment. The associate editor was completely out of his element. Keller was great on the advantages and importance of traditional journalism, but he still got caught flat-footed on the paper boat comment. No apparent interview strategies, no indication that they studied Daily Show "game tapes," little ability to think on their feet, no anticipation of the questions they were likely to get--the rude Q&A, how to stay on track when thrown curve balls, and how to make fun of yourself and act like you enjoy the joke. A lost opportunity.
@53:
"We'll experiment, and whatever works will support it. Anybody who claims that they can pick it out right now is either a fool or lying to you."
Experiment fast, 53. Print news is a cone of ash, broadcast news is hemorrhaging ad revenue, the phrase "investigative reporting" is fast becoming a phrase only historians use, newsroom chiefs are chainsawing their experienced reporters and hiring pink-eared grads to fill their shoes, and foreign bureaus are going the way of the dodo at the very moment that Glenn Beck and Michael Savage are filling the heads of America's rapidly multiplying nativist no-nothings with TURNER DIARIES fantasies of exterminating the immigrant mud people.
Tempus fugit, and all that.
"We'll experiment, and whatever works will support it. Anybody who claims that they can pick it out right now is either a fool or lying to you."
The implicit assumption in this statement is that something will work. I don't know if that's true.
@40/Inkstain:
Technically, its called the lede.
:)
And @53: what if these experiments don't produce something better than the newspapers that we have now? What if these experiments produce more of what right-wing talk radio has produced?
Wow, some people are getting really worked-up about this. It's comedy. Fairly poignant and topical, but comedy, nonetheless. And it's funny.
Of course they edit it for effect. And of course the NYT knew what they were getting into. Everyone's playing along. It's good fun.
I especially dug the Woodward and Bernstein joke. He played that one really well. Great timing. And the 'red all over' - man, classic! Totally caught me (and the editor) off-guard. Very entertaining.
But... I would tend to agree with Antinous that the objectivity of 'aged news' is overstated.
The death of newspapers isn't a problem.
The fact that a genocidal pogrom could run in africa for two years without making more than a token impact on the media, while Britney Spears can't turn around without ending up on the front page... that's a problem.
Well, Africa just needs to shave its head and lip synch onstage to its latest album. Extra media credit for going commando in low-slung limos.
Link for canadians.
The piece in question starts at about 4:20.
New business plan for the NYT:
- realize old vehicle for news is out of style. Dump it.
- realize your greatest assets are your people
Sell their services.
-change your homepage to read: "Welcome to NYT Consulting. Where we bring the world to you. Our clients include Drudge report, Google News, etc etc etc"
That link for Canadians contains no link. Bah, this isn't worth the effort.