En un análisis de recientes traspiés de los medios tradicionales en los EEUU —desde la omisión del escándalo sexual de John Edwards hasta los problemas de la red NBC para cancelar la transmisión de videos online en vivo de la ceremonia inaugural de los Juegos Olímpicos en Beijing— David Carr, del diario The New York Times, plantea que en la era actual, lo que califica como noticia está determinado en parte por “cada ser humano con acceso a un mouse, un control remoto o un teléfono celular”.
En vista a que algunos periódicos intentan guardar su contenido de alta calidad para la edición impresa y sólo después lo publican en sus sitios web, Carr cuestiona la estrategia. “Si el futuro de nuestro negocio es en línea, ¿por qué poner una barrera y retrasar el mejor contenido para proteger un producto añejado? Cada vez más reporteros hábiles están comenzando a darse cuenta de que la web no es sólo una manera de transmitir noticias, sino también una gran manera de reunirlas”.
Al respecto, Carr remarca que los medios noticiosos tradicionales pueden tomar ventaja del contenido creado por lectores en línea comprometidos. En sus palabras, “los medios tradicionales pueden tambalear y zigzaguear, pero seguro que saben que las cosas han cambiado y que el control remoto o el mouse convierte a los consumidores en editores y productores también”.
Aquí, el texto completo de la nota de Carr, publicada el 10 de agosto de 2008.
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All of Us, the Arbiters of NewsEarly on in any journalist’s career, the young reporter is besieged by advice from all sides. Flacks, sources and run-of-the-mill busybodies will pound on the phone about why the reporter isn’t covering this or that story. And then, a sage editor will appear and counsel the newbie: “We decide what the news is.”
That truism still attains; it’s just the meaning of the pronoun has changed. Yes, we decide what is news as long as “we” now includes every sentient human with access to a mouse, a remote or a cellphone.
On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.
Consumers have no issue with time-shifting content — in some younger demographics, at least half the programming is consumed on a time-shifted basis — they just want to be the ones doing the programming. Trying to stop foreign broadcasts and leaked clips from being posted on YouTube — NBC’s game of “whack-a-mole” as my colleague Brian Stelter described it — was doomed to failure because information not only wants to be free, its consumers are cunning, connected and will find a workaround on any defense that can be conceived.
You might assume, along with NBC executives, that the jail break of information damaged NBC’s precious choreographed broadcast. You would assume wrongly, by the way. According to Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, the four-hour opening ceremony attracted an average of 34.2 million viewers, the most ever for an opening ceremony not in the United States.
I was one of them, in part because as the day wore on, I saw all manner of oohing and ahhing on the Web from bloggers and friends who had peeked in and found themselves awe-struck. By the time the broadcast rolled around, my daughter and I had been nicely primed by the Web fanatics for what was, after all, a kind of epic movie made in real time that was best enjoyed on a big screen with good resolution.
Emerging technologies that threaten to destroy the current paradigm can have precisely the opposite effect. Remember when VCRs and then DVDs were going to lay waste to the movie industry and ended up saving it instead? The Web leaks of entertainment that NBC bought and paid for served as a kind of trailer for the real thing.
There is a lesson there for rest of the media, most specifically The Philadelphia Inquirer, where the managing editor, Michael Leary, issued a memo last week suggesting that all of the paper’s good stuff — “signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features and reviews” — would not appear online until they first appear in print.
“For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment,” Mr. Leary informed the staff. “Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor.”
Even to the eye of this reporter — to use a hack newspaper term — The Inquirer seems to be making a mistake. If the future of our business is online, then why set up a firewall, delaying the best content to protect a legacy product? And more adept reporters are beginning to realize that the Web is not just a way to broadcast news, it is a great way to assemble it as well.
On Saturday, Mr. Stelter’s wonderful article in The New York Times on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience.
How much more powerful is that networked intelligence than a reporter with a phone, a Rolodex and the space between his or her ears? As the former newspaperman and Web evangelist Jeff Jarvis (who has also consulted for The New York Times) has been saying since before broadband, the Web is not just a way to shout, it is a way to listen, one that can lead to deeper, more effective journalism. (His response to the Philly injunction against early Web publishing was predictably measured and careful: “It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”)
For the last few years, the locus of control has been shifting and consumers not only expect to customize their media experience, they demand it as a condition of engagement. The horizon line for when a newspaper on the street is serving as a kind of brochure of a rich online product does not seem far off.
At times, the consumer algorithm doesn’t just drive choice of time or platforms, it drives the news process itself. When The National Enquirer wrote that the former presidential candidate John Edwards had had an affair and had recently met with the woman and a child she recently bore, the mainstream media mostly passed on the story. But the public would not let go. Armed with different standards and megaphones of their own, nontraditional sources pushed on the story all over the Web until it broke, with Mr. Edwards finally sitting down with ABC News to say it was true. And when Elizabeth Edwards chose to speak up about the story, she did so first on the Daily Kos, a liberal Web site.
So the mainstream media may bob and weave but surely they know that things have changed and the remote or mouse turns consumers into editors and producers, as well. Even NBC, which had initially tried to put a chastity belt on its prize, is making the 2008 Olympics a watershed media event. On NBCOlympics.com, pump in your ZIP code and you are invited to assemble a personal schedule of viewing from 1,400 hours of television on all sorts of channels and 2,000 hours of online coverage.
It’s an impressive leap into the future, and network executives deserve a lot of credit — that is, if viewers can forgive them for opening night jitters.
(fin)
