Spreading Our Ideas in the Era of Drug-Dealer Journalism
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Morning Jolt April 29, 2013 Spreading Our Ideas in the Era of Drug-Dealer Journalism Things I learned at the Heritage Foundation's Resource Bank and the Franklin Center's Future of Media discussions this past week in Orlando:
Here's an abbreviated version of the talk I gave on the panel, "Leading Voices in Conservative Journalism (Who Were Available)": Andrew Malcolm just observed that we're no longer in the "pharmacist era" of journalism — where an authority figure stands above you and gives you what experts have decided you need to know. Perhaps we're in the drug-dealer era — where you may not completely know or entirely trust the source who's giving you what you want to know, but it gives you a rush, and you'll probably be coming back for more later. Most of us in the world of conservative journalism are now aiming to reach that chunk of Web users that go onto Facebook and never come off. Predicting which pieces, visuals, and ideas go viral remains a crapshoot. My graphic on foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority being spared by the sequester was viewed 334,000 times. I've had other ones that I thought were just as good get 1,000 views or so. A good chunk of the Facebook-only audience is relatively apolitical, which is a way of saying we're trying to offer political news and arguments and ideas to people who fundamentally aren't that interested in policy and politics. We're facing the challenge of trying to reach a new audience while continuing to serve a very good, loyal audience that is interested in what we do. My favorite example of handling the loyal audience/new audience divide badly is when NBC decided they wanted to get more women to watch the Olympics, and thus large swaths of their prime-time Olympics coverage were devoted to documentary-style features about the hardships that the athletes had overcome. We got a seemingly endless cavalcade of relatives with cancer, or car accidents, or brutal injuries, or their dogs getting sick, or the Starbucks barista getting their drink orders wrong —suddenly, every athlete's life was like a country-western song. And the usual audience for the Olympics asked, with greater levels of irritation, "hey, weren't we supposed to be watching some actual athletic competitions? Wasn't some skier supposed to be falling down a mountain by now?" So while we need to be embracing social media and providing our news stories and arguments and ideas in ways that are more bite-sized, I have this nagging fear that we might lose, or perhaps slightly devalue, some of what we're here to do. There is no such thing as investigative tweeting. A Facebook graphic is two sentences at most, a picture, and perhaps a hashtag. Theoretically, you can use tweets and Facebook graphics as bait, designed to bring people to the long-form, meatier pieces, but I wonder how many people retweet a headline without actually clicking through to the story. I'm a writer. I like long-form journalism. I like a good fisking, where you dismantle a lousy argument by going through it line-by-line and exposing every falsehood or illogical conclusion. And I hope we can figure out a good balance that does all of the important work, the hard work, the work that takes time and resources — with the work that is fun and funny and quick and spreads quickly but that ultimately doesn't stick with you. Washington's 'Nerd Prom' Generates Its Own Class of Kids Too Cool to Go to the Prom Somewhere along the line, it became a lot cooler to announce you were not going to the White House Correspondents' Dinner than to announce you were. And by "cooler," I really mean a bit more pretentious. People used to announce they were going to the dinner to show everyone how important they are; now they announce that they're not going to the dinner to showcase how serious they are and how unimpressed they are by the presence of Hollywood celebrities. Dana Milbank, a few years ago: "As I began to do the RSVPs for a few of this year's parties, I thought about what our hard-bitten journalistic forebears would make of Cee Lo and SamRo and the Donald. Then I made other plans for the weekend." Tom Brokaw, an increasingly vocal critic of the event:
On Twitter and Facebook, Sarah Palin scoffed: "That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom." Hmm. I need a file photo of Sarah Palin to go with this news item, which one should I pick . . . hm . . . How about this one? PHOTO: Sarah Palin attends the Bloomberg & Vanity Fair cocktail reception following the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, April 30, 2011 in Washington, D.C. Or maybe this one? Wait, that's her daughter, Bristol at the MSNBC after party, in 2011, never mind. Either way, apparently sometime between 2011 and 2013, the White House Correspondents' Dinner became "pathetic," an occasion where the "permanent political class in DC dresses up and has a prom to make fun of themselves." Back in 2011, it was still cool. I'm somewhere in the middle of the Washington snob-meter; I've attended a bunch of the pre-dinner cocktail parties, but never the dinner itself. (As I hear it, the food itself at the dinner is terrible.) So my wife and I go, drink, see celebrities, I run into a lot of former co-workers, and then we go have a nice real meal somewhere else. The paparazzi are terrible, of course; they'll be trying to take a picture of you, and then some Hollywood starlet desperate for attention will jump in the way: One observation from going to a bunch of these cocktail hours: Big-name Hollywood folks are fascinated by big-name Washington folks, and vice versa. When the Hollywood folks meet cabinet members, White House staff, people who work in the national-security apparatus, they gasp and marvel; they often say some version of, "we only dress up and pretend, you guys do the real thing!" Meanwhile, cabinet members, White House staff, and people who work in the national-security apparatus gasp and marvel when they meet the Hollywood crowd. I suspect most of Washington's biggest egos fear that most people don't really know who they are and what they do. The Hollywood folks may only pretend, but they do it on the silver screen, looking heroic while doing it and while uttering memorable lines. The Hollywood crowd envies the Washington crowd's authentic power, while the Washington crowd envies the Hollywood crowd's glamour. Saturday night, as the cocktail hour wound up, I watched the tuxedo- and gown-clad folks trying to make their way to the dinner ballroom down a crowded hallway like a supremely clogged artery. I started feeling that I'm so past this. This is the sixth or seventh time I've gone, sometimes it's nice to meet famous faces you know from television or movies, and otherwise I would never use my tuxedo, but it seems more crowded every year, walking around and mingling is tougher in the post-Salahi era, the line for the open bar is long, I should just go out and have a nice evening with my wife, and — OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD ITSMORENABACCARIN Yes, Morena Baccarin of Firefly, V, Homeland, and the second-most good-looking woman on the planet next to my wife. Lesson: No matter who you are, no matter what you've done in life, there's probably some figure out there whose presence can turn you into a babbling fan boy. Even the president of the United States. Genuine Economic Stimulus: U.S. Gun Sales on Pace to Set New Record This Year Via Andy at Ace of Spades, the Wall Street Journal looks at the skyrocketing rate of gun sales, with a jaw-dropping chart: As the Journal summarizes, "the rush beginning in December has been high even by historic standards: the FBI conducted just under 2.8 million background checks on prospective gun buyers in December 2012, the highest number in any single month since records begin in November 1998. That's more than triple the number it was running in December 2002." ADDENDUM: At 7 p.m., Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch and Republican Mark Sanford will hold their lone debate, at Courvoisie Banquet Hall, The Citadel, in Charleston, S.C. Webcasts are being streamed live on charleston.patch.com, countontwo.com and scetv.org. A rebroadcast is set for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday on ETV World, and it will be archived at scetv.org. Sanford's been eager to get up on the same stage, having spent part of the past week "debating" a life-size poster of Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi.
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NRO Digest — April 29, 2013
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