April 26, 2005

Interactivity Is a Three-Way Street.

The Poynter Institute's Al Tompkins, in a lecture to a class of college journalism students today, had some good things to say about the future of journalism, though I thought he was quite dismissive of blogs.

"Interactivity is absolutely the future of news delivery," he said. He's right about that, but his vision of "interactive" journalism seemed a bit limited.

Tompkins is a fine journalist, and his four-year-old column on the Poynter website, Al's Morning Meeting, is often an excellent offering of story ideas. Last fall, Tompkins linked to my blog's archive of election-fraud stories as a resource for any news director or editor looking to cover that issue. But just because he linked to my blog doesn't mean Tompkins thinks blogs are an important part of journalism. Except for blogs produced by journalists. He likes those.

Tompkins praised newspapers that put their stories online and fill them with hyperlinks to supporting materials and related resources. He praised instances where reporters have conducted online Q&A sessions with readers.

Tompkins took students on a brief tour of the changes that the Internet is bringing to journalism, starting with the 1997 special report by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden detailing the 1993 battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, that led to the deaths of 18 American soldiers. Bowden's work eventually became a book and a movie, both titled Blackhawk Down.

But it first was a series of newspaper articles that the Inquirer also published online. And the way the Blackhawk Down articles appeared online was revolutionary. Instead of just static text on a web page, Bowden's articles were filled with hyperlinks to additional materials and resources, raw Pentagon video of the rescue raid, audio, photographs and much, much more. In addition, after publication of his reports Bowden participated in 20 online question-and-answer sessions, or web chats, and all of those are archived on the Inquirer's website.

"What struck me was not just how cool it was but how it allowed the journalist to interact with the public," said Tompkins. "Interactivity is absolutely the future of news delivery."

Blogs are the ultimate in interactivity - allowing readers of news to become commentators on the news, to "write back" at the newspapers and news broadcasts, to critique their work and to offer relevant information that the news media for whatever reason - bias, ineptitude, laziness or lack of space or time - failed to bring to its audience.

Blogs also allow experts in any field to share their expertise directly with the world, outside the reach of media filters and gatekeepers. Too few journalists have any training or experience in any field other than journalism, so that often means the blogosphere provides richer, deeper and more accurate information than journalists do.

And, finally, blogs allow readers and viewers to connect directly with other readers and viewers.

Truly interactive news media will enable journalists to interact with people, people to interact with the journalists, and people to interact with other people.

Tompkins' vision of interactivity is one that would still leave media filters in charge of deciding what information the readers or viewers should or should not see, which voices will be quoted and which will be ignored, which studies or documents will be linked to and which will not, which issues will be covered and which will not.

But while that gatekeeper/filter role was necessary when news was delivered via space-limited newsprint or time-limited broadcast, it no longer is given that web pixels are infinite and cheap.

Tompkins' vision of "interactive" news is one that you might expect from someone who works in the rarified air of the elite media. It's a turf-protecting vision that offers only a limited interactivity that would keep journalists in charge as the ultimate arbiters of what is to be news, and when and how readers and viewers can "interact" with it.

It's still top-down journalism.

It's also, in my estimation, a recipe for failure. The people who consume news are long tired of being talked at by the news media. They are tired of being told what to think by newspapers that won't even give them all of the relevant information. They are tired of reading The Daily Lecture. They are ready for news to be a conversation.