What Is Journalism?

Manifesto(es)

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the weekly ‘Manifesto.’ This is a looser, more ruminative form of writing than ‘Commentator.’ Basically, it’s about identifying something vaguely irritating in the world - in this case the persistence of an ‘old school’ corporatized vision of journalism - and trying to push towards some different, better direction.

Just to be in the habit of saying it, I’ve turned on the ‘paid subscription’ feature. Please do consider upgrading if you read regularly.

Best,

Sam

WHAT IS JOURNALISM?

I started writing articles for my school newspaper in middle school and it quickly became a kind of addiction. For the personality construction I had, nothing, really, could be better than the role of a reporter - to be detached, observant, to be an integral part of an event through an independent curiosity rather than enthusiastic participation, and then to be able to write all the time, write about everything, the whole world opened up for inquiry. 

That thrill of journalism lasted until somewhere towards the middle of high school when, suddenly, the AP Stylebook came out, there were seminars from the faculty advisor about ledes and nut grafs and, within a couple of years of that, I was bored of the whole enterprise - I couldn’t quite figure out what the point was of writing if you couldn’t write as yourself, if you had to write exactly like every other hack who had ever opened the AP Stylebook, same structure, same crisp style, everything. 

In those dreary seminars, the faculty advisor explained the reasons for it succinctly. The point of having all the vital information in a nut graf - which contradicted everything else I was learning about writing at the time, all the literary gambits of payoffs and suspense - was to provide a concise version of the article for a reader who couldn’t be bothered to open up the newspaper and read the continuation. 

That was the real-talk of journalism - the need to subordinate oneself to the attention span of a subway rider - and, at some level, it drove me out of print journalism. For a long time, I assumed that that was my problem, there was something in journalism that I couldn’t quite adapt to, but, looking back, I’m convinced that at a very fundamental level I was right about what journalism should be and the faculty advisor wrong.

The loathed AP Stylebook

The principle that the faculty advisor was holding to was a particularly 20th century idea about what journalism represented. Journalism meant a profit-driven news enterprise whose first responsibility was the creation of a commodity - an easily-digestible daily newspaper that could hook a consistent readership. That arrangement was a grim kind of compromise - sacrificing writers’ voices, regimenting everything happening in the world into a can’t-look-away blotter of bad events - but it served the higher purpose of ‘speaking truth to power.’ My faculty advisor in particular was suffused with the romance of Watergate, the idea that journalism was basically meant to be on a war footing, to batten down all the hatches internally, and then duel with the powers-that-be and hold them accountable. 

That’s been a very powerful vision of what journalism is - and it still largely drives the profession - but take a quick scan of a newspaper, any newspaper, and it’s clear that that’s not really what’s going on. As Solzhenitsyn said in his 1978 Harvard Address, pouring cold water on the myth of journalism just when it was at its apex:

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

News outlets are really more of entertainment centers. They have several functions that are completely distinct from one another but are financially synergistic. There’s the blotter of bad things happening in the world, which pretends to be usefully informative but is really meant to be addictive - as codified in the apt recent phrase ‘doomscrolling.’ There’s reporting from around the world, the bureau model, which has fallen into abeyance - too expensive and too boring - and is based on a kind of quaint conception that a well-informed person knows what’s happening, at least in a surface way, in each of the world’s capitals. There’s opinion writing, which has been gradually driving out everything else in news publications - it follows absolutely none of the reportorial standards that are laid out in the AP guide but, in its presentation, is virtually indistinguishable from the reported pieces and is invariably the most popular component of the newspaper. And then there are the exposés, the investigative reporting, which is the flagship of the whole enterprise, its moral center, with everything else being understood as filler. This is where stories are ‘broken’ and truth is spoken to power. 

But a scan of the news reveals that these sorts of exposés are vanishingly rare. Most outlets, actually, don’t even bother with them. And for those that do, the ‘scoops’ tend to be leaks from those in political power attempting to sabotage their rivals. The journalism ecosystem is not conducive to actual scoops: breaking a real story means, almost invariably, losing access to pivotal sources; and, so, an elaborate dance results, those in power leaking just enough to the press to keep the press in business. In situations with a genuinely hostile actor in power, the press turns out to be virtually helpless - as in the incapacity of the press, with all of its firepower trained on Trump for six years, to find a genuinely indictable offense, to reveal an affair or to get ahold of an actual bank balance. And, meanwhile, the endless barrage of articles on Trump - a textbook instance of ‘speaking truth to power’ - has served on the whole to just inflame his supporters and to strengthen his case as an anti-establishment maverick. It’s always worth repeating Trump’s line to his advisors in 2013, long before he declared his candidacy, in which he laid out his entire strategy. “I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” he reportedly said. 

In other words, the entirety of the Trump phenomenon - this existential threat to democracy and the world - is basically a kind of judo-throw of the media. The media - for economic reasons but also for its self-image as ‘the fourth estate,’ as ‘speaking truth to power’ - can’t help but pick up on Trump’s every utterance, and Trump is a canny enough media operator that, on every single occasion, he can turn that to his political advantage. 

What the Trump debacle lays bare, I believe, is something fundamentally broken in journalism-as-we-think-of-it. And if there is a silver lining to all of this it will be, I hope, a gradual shift towards a slightly different, and older, model of thinking about journalism. 

At its heart journalism is basically just reporting, just curiosity about the world. In its modern manifestation it emerges out of a Renaissance surge of enthusiasm about the world-as-it-is, a new appetite for news on everyday life, coupled with the sudden ready availability of moveable type and of paper, an ability for writing to proliferate in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in the paper-scarce Middle Ages. An almost immediate corollary to the advent of the newspaper was the desire to be comprehensive - for a newspaper to contain everything vital about the town or city in its jurisdiction. And, from there, is an aggrandizing impulse to be even more comprehensive than that - as in The New York Times’ really lunatic assertion that it contains ‘all the news that’s fit to print.’ But this sort of earth-shattering comprehensiveness is clearly part of the DNA of journalism - charmingly enough, the very first newspaper titled itself (in German) “Account of all distinguished and commendable stories.”

The first newspaper - published in 1609

In this expansive mood at the dawn of journalism, there’s no particular impulse towards standardization and writing style drifts between forms, sometimes grandiloquent, sometimes more economical, sometimes abandoning prose altogether and veering into doggerel, etc. I find Daniel Defoe’s career to be altogether admirable in this respect - a great writer embracing the resources of the print revolution, churning out pamphlets on an array of topics but without losing track of an underlying literary taste.

Defoe (in the pillory) in the early days of libel law

The standardization of language and the consolidation of newspapers - the long journey towards the Fourth Estate, the vision of journalism as my faculty advisor would have articulated it, as a power center unto itself capable of challenging the powers-that-be - is a separate impulse from that initial journalistic proliferation. The ever-villainous Francis Bacon makes a surprising appearance here with his idea of ‘knowledge broken’ - a writer advancing the bare minimum of information for the reader to fill in all the gaps - and this became doctrine for the Royal Society in its heavy-handed attempts to standardize written English in the late 17th century as a process for making writing instrumental and as much as possible mimicking scientific exchange, with nothing excess, nothing personal, as terse and as efficient as two lab techs asking one another for needed equipment. And the consolidation of newspapers into ‘publishing empires’ completes that conception - various media conglomerates representing their own seat of power, with the staff writers doing their bidding and subordinating their personalities to the enterprise, and the publishing empires having the clout to nudge or sometimes even create political policy. 

These are potent impulses but they are, I’d contend, far removed from the real heart of journalism, which is, simply, a sort of running around and taking in everything that’s interesting about the world. The shift to digital space creates the opportunity for a revolution comparable to that of the 17th century - the whole domain is no longer kept captive by the subway rider with limited elbow room too lazy to read the continuation of a story and needing all the info as efficiently as possible. The absence of physical limits, of column inches, raises the possibility of a Defoe-like journalism, loose, expansive, endlessly inquisitive. It’s not as if this impulse doesn’t exist in contemporary journalism. It does. It was the driving sensibility of The New Yorker in the William Shawn, Joseph Mitchell era - a sense that journalistic writing did not have to be as hamstrung as the AP Stylebook or the news bureaus would dictate, and that all sorts of kooky stories, Joe Gould for instance, were as worth of documentation as diplomatic bromides or snippets from the Capitol. The ‘human-interest story’ is an effective label for what I’m talking about. And the subjective-yet-informed point of view of the op-ed writer is more or less in line with the Defoe version - and largely for that reason, I believe, has been gaining ground on the straight-jacketed standardized prose of reported news.

Joe Gould - a great story if not exactly ‘breaking news’

What I’m advocating is a slight shift in perspective. ‘Human interest story’ is, in the context of the newsroom, a sneer - it’s like ‘ladies’ journalism,’ filler for the back pages, while hard news, which is reports of power and of death, takes the headlines. ‘Op-Ed writer’ is very nearly a sneer as well - a belief that to write as oneself, ‘subjectively,’ is a perversion of the essence of journalism. 

But what the journalists of the old school think of as journalism - bureaus, ledes, nut grafs - is really just a manifestation of a particular phase of journalistic history, the phase of the mass-printed daily and the conglomerated news empires. The claims of those institutions - that they represented an independent democratic perspective - were always largely risible and now, in the Internet era, they really are far-fetched, and it’s apparent that the ‘press’ really just represents its own seat of power, its own peculiar business model. 

The way out, I believe, is a return to something that’s deeper in the inner heart of journalism, a curiosity about the world in all of its manifestations, which means a kind of decentralized perspective, a proliferation of writing and commentary about all kinds of things, a shift away from ambulance-chasing and of hanging-on-to-the-coattails of power. 

Much of what I’m describing is happening already - it’s part of the great outpouring of information in the era of blogs, podcasts, Substacks - but everybody, including the content creators, seemed to be sort of embarrassed about what they’re doing, have a conviction that it’s not ‘real journalism.’ My point is that there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Journalism is not actually, contra Francis Bacon, about ‘knowledge broken’ - a redemptive process of stitching together a fallen world into a unified, organized ‘press.’ At the deeper level, the enterprise is really, genuinely infinite. Some standards matter - accuracy matters, clarity matters, the prioritization of stories matters, libel law is an important constraint on the whole process - but, ultimately, it’s as democratic an activity as we could possibly have, people looking at the world with eyes open.