The media’s Dust Bowl

It’s human nature to compare things. We put things in context for better understanding. “This thing [business/weather/process/person/event] that is happening is like this other thing that happened, and that thing turned out [good/bad/different/better/worse].”

I’ve been doing a lot of that lately surrounding the media. Specifically, I’ve spent time contemplating how to reconcile how valuable journalism is to society compared to how much actual monetary value it generates. As I’ve written about before, no one knows what’s going to happen to this business: whether it will go the way of the steamship and the telegraph, reinvent itself a la Apple, or something in between.

I’m not the only observer who’s searching for an appropriate comparison from the past in order to predict the media’s future, but I do find that some insights are better than others; does anyone really think that the envelope business, of all things, is really a good model for the Random House-Penguin merger? (Does anyone think of “the envelope business” at all?)

Watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Dust Bowl recently, however, opened my eyes to a new analogy for the media of the present day: farming a century ago. (And why not — we did recently learn that there are far more software app engineers than farmers.) According to Burns, farmers in the Great Plains around 100 years ago sold their goods, wheat in particular, in enough volume and at a fair enough price, that they kept their families fed, happy and productive before the Great Depression. Prior to the big event, they faced periodic yet persistent droughts and occasional technological breakthroughs (gas-powered plowing, for example). But year after year, they found a way to keep going, even increasing volume to make up for the deficits caused by off years. That is, until the permanently landscape-altering Dust Bowl.

Compare this to journalists and media today. For decades we plied our trade, not making big money but making enough to support our families. We changed with the times, moving from copy boys and paste-ups to computers. But the past decade has seen such a huge acceleration of technology (and a hugely inverse deceleration of jobs) that our worth is now, to put it mildly, in question. Like the farmers, we’ve tried doing more: You’re now not only a reporter, you’re also a videographer, photographer and blogger — and you will hereafter be known as a “content creator.” You’re now responsible for not only reporting your usual one-story-by-deadline allotment, but you’re also going to write six additional posts a day (and you need to know how to produce them, tag them and upload them).

But as the farmers discovered, doing more not only didn’t help them, it actually created its own set of problems. In their case, they unknowingly caused the largest man-made ecological disaster to date (you’re well on your way, though, global climate change: hang in there). In ours, the huge volume of posts was churned through by disloyal consumers, the glut and pace belittled the value of the news, and the business changed from creating newsworthy, relevant content to attracting eyeballs and lowering bounce rates and counting click-throughs and measuring social engagement and Tweeting viral videos.

Other, larger factors were also at play, including the rapid pace of technological development. The ease of use of technology meant that anyone could be a creator of content — so the process of journalism was democratized, but it was also dumbed down and its worth devalued.

“But of all our losses, the most distressing is our loss of self-respect. How can we feel that our work has any dignity or importance when the world places so low a value on the products of our toil?”

Caroline Henderson, Oklahoma farmer during the 1932 drought during the Depression, just prior to the Dust Bowl’s worst

Now, I’m not saying it’s a perfect comparison. We haven’t had to put to pasture cattle that suffocated during “black blizzards” or bury children who caught “dust pneumonia.” But I think it’s a decent metaphor, because the media is going through its version of the Dust Bowl. Newspapers and magazines are closing up shop at an unprecedented pace; media businesses are losing money quarter after quarter and year after year, with no end in sight; those workers who are able (and I count myself among this number) are learning new skills and moving into new areas. (All of this can be said for other industries as well, by the way, particularly music.)

Somewhat brazenly, and I think disrespectfully, we’ve taken to calling tech and business shakeups, events and new models “disruptions.” Of course, since the beginning of time businesses have striven to disrupt other, existing businesses, but it seems much more ruthless to start your business with the sole intent of creating wreckage. I think it’s fair to cast our historical eye onto the Depression and the Dust Bowl and deem them disruptions, at the very least. And it’s easy to forget, but disruptions have a cost — a monetary one and a human one.

Years from now, I wondered while watching the documentary, how will journalism be perceived? Who will be the talking heads and what will they say? Which commentators will highlight which historical implications that, in retrospect, seem clear? How will the people generations from now — even one or two — talk about the media? Will we have adapted with the times and made a new reality for ourselves (and somehow have figured out a way to feed our families along the way)? Is journalism like the family farm in the Oklahoma panhandle of the 1930s, and are we farmers, continuing to plow the fields that we’ve yet to learn will never again yield crops? Is it like kerosene lighting, steam-powered train engines, millinery, fax machines, answering services, 8-tracks, the luncheonette, and the endless list of other businesses throughout history that litter the shoulders of the road toward the future? I want to believe that it’s not. I hope upon hope that it’s not.

“Hope kept them going, but hope also meant that they were being constantly disappointed.”

—Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Dust Bowl historian

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Nobody knows anything

Nobody knows anything.

I’ve suspected for a while that no one really knows what they’re doing, what’s next, what’s going on, what the plan is (“What’s the plan, Phil?” –Claire Dunphy). As I age and gain experience, I’m starting to realize the truth of it all: Everything is slapdash. Everything is last-minute. Everything is barely hanging on. Everyone is making it up as they go along and crossing their fingers.

At the highest levels of government, the military and business, it’s all perilously close to nonfunctional. (And often it is nonfunctional, not to mention dysfunctional — a distinction.) So why should the media — even the upper echelons of the media — be any different? It’s not.

Nobody knows anything.

This thought crystallized in my mind earlier this week when I attended a tech start-up job fair Monday, an all-day start-up conference Tuesday and a Meetup called “Content Conversations” Tuesday night.

The resulting emotion from this string of events was one of deep malaise. I’d gone in thinking I’d get some perspective and advice from job creators and also hear some inspiring start-up success stories. As it turns out, the companies who were hiring were seeking programmers and UX designers, not journalists (or even, as we’ve come to be known post-Internet, “content creators”). And the panelists the following day, those who were alleged successes, had very little practical advice for the attendees. Sure, there were platitudes expressed by these supposed luminaries: Stay true to yourself. Find your voice. Put the user first.

But nothing said was really actionable. Now, going in I expected tech start-up founders to speak variously in jargon and dude-speak; it’s their MO. However, I wanted more from the content-focused discussions and panelists. Unfortunately they, too, had only vague advice in terms of the future of content on the web, what’s next for those of us who create content, and how brands can use content to sell their products.

I left the conference to attend the Meetup, which was a Q&A with Noah Rosenberg, the founder and editor of Narrative.ly. He seems like a nice fella, and I agree with his thesis that the Internet’s short bursts of information are starting to zap our brains. He’s trying to remedy that with what he terms slow journalism — long-reads stuff focused on a weekly theme. But he’s paying his contributors for their many-thousands-of-words pieces not in dollars but in exposure, mostly. He regrets that he can’t pay them what they’re worth, and when I asked how he thought the Internet could help create high-quality content while providing a living wage for content creators, he said, “That’s the million-dollar question” and “There’s no magic bullet.” So no answers there, either.

I left feeling dejected and resigned. But I awoke the next morning with a realization: Nobody knows anything. No one was able to provide answers to the information I was seeking — all day long — because no one knows. Not high-ranking people, not low-ranking people. Not CEOs, CTOs, CMOs or interns. No one!

Nobody knows anything because we are in a time of extreme transition. That’s not a new or original thought, even for myself. But sometimes you have a moment when a mere notion is made real. You go from knowing it to knowing it. For me, that was this experience. I saw for myself, hands-on and up close, that in times of transition the story cannot be told, because no one knows how it turns out. You have to live it, day by endless day, until you’re on the other side. And even then, you don’t really know for sure that you’ve reached the other side until much later.

Just as you couldn’t tell that the disappearing shoals under your shoes fomented a destructive deluge that would make you question your survival, so too are you unsure, once you’ve grabbed onto a branch and tenderly climbed onto the opposite bank, that you’re truly safe.

That is the unfortunate state of the media today: We’re in the rapids, hanging on for dear life and praying. (Which I would not deem a strategy, exactly.) The media — news, advertising, marketing, TV, movies, print, online, creation, distribution — and those of us who practice it are evolving, and nobody knows what will happen. And I’m not upset about it; I’m ready to join in and try things, experiment and help in the effort of making it up as we go along.

And I don’t think anyone else has a better idea how to navigate these waters, because nobody knows anything.

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My Broadway debut

Well, my debut of sorts. I’ve recently had the pleasure of being “cast” as part of the Broadway.com Word of Mouth Panel for the 2012–13 theater season. The deal is, they send me to shows and afterward film my thoughts about the show I’ve just seen. Opinion forming isn’t a big problem for me, especially in the realm of Broadway, so it’s a pretty sweet deal! I’m noticing annoying little things about myself that I can improve on in the future, but overall it’s been a fun experience so far. Here are the first two videos in which I appear. Click on my face to play!

 

The “Meet the Panelists” video:

The Heiress video review:

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