Processed News in its Purest Form

On a flight home the other day, I put down my book (Michael Connely's Scarecrow) about an investigative reporter losing his job to watch a movie (Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck in State of Play) about an investigative reporter being demoted before coming home to read an article about the death of investigative reporting(The Story Behind the Story by Mark Bowden in this month's Atlantic).

Where the individual was once left to form an opinion about well researched stories, the news outlets have seemed to leap past all that nuance and boring litany of facts and endless prose. Instead, the modern media just provide you with an opinion with minimal time spent investigating or actually reporting.

Well, I've lived on the coast long enough to know that it's easier to ride waves than fight them. So, if investigative journalism is dead, maybe it's time to just go with this trend and offer media 3.0: all opinion, no news.

The point would be to simply provide the reader with their reaction to the news events, without hassling them with all - or any, really - of the facts. Like processed food that skips the actual food to simply provide you with fats and sugars, this news would skip directly to opinions. It might work like this.

Obama's Health Care Plan: you're outraged. (And it's true, really. Whether you can't believe what he is proposing or the opposition he's facing, you're outraged.)

Asian typhoons and tsunami earthquakes: you are so saddened by this.

Iran's plutonium enrichment program: outraged.

Toyota's recall of 3.8 million cars: shocked!

Potential reversal of Jon and Kate's divorce: outraged

.

These would not be headlines that are followed by stories. These would be the stories.

You get the idea. The one real weakness, of course, is that people may begin to realize that they have a fifty percent chance of not needing the service if they simply choose to be outraged at all the news. But for those readers who want to spend 30 seconds finding out just what ought to outrage them today, it would be an invaluable service.

This might just be the future of journalism. [Oh, and for the record? You should be outraged.]

Anticipatory Journalism

Events are moving fast enough, we need journalism that reports the future.

Commentary is useful because it goes beyond what is happening to report on what should or could happen. Done well, it is more thoughtful than mere reporting. Before saying what could be, I'd like to point out what seems to be the problem with most commentary.

I've wearied of Keith Olbermann. He's become like Rush Limbaugh - rushing to point out all that is wrong about the right. Someone like Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek regular, shows himself more thoughtful, global, and insightful, but he's merely doing with less venom what Olbermann does - making judgments about policy and politicians.

What seems missing is a vision of the future. What if journalism transcended reporting on past events - looking in the rear view mirror - and instead projected news into the future? Better yet, what if it actually compared this with some vision of the future?

This would more firmly take us into the region of partisan journalism. But it would force journalism into a really valuable role. Two things are true of today's world: events are rapidly developing and the stakes for getting policy right or wrong are huge.

If we had different periodicals or TV stations or newspapers offer different coherent views of the future, they be more readily able to interpret events. Christian fundamentalist news outlets do this best, of course - judging events by end time prophecies and warnings of immorality. But it is time to do this for more secular views.

What if one periodical predicted a future of environmental sustainability with an emphasis on change in lifestyle? Local produce, use of alternative energy, and living close to work could be among the solutions seen as instrumental to a vibrant and healthy future and policies and events could be interpreted through this view of the future. Another periodical might predict a future of sustainability through technological solutions, another (the one Dick Cheney might edit) would predict a future of scarcity and the need for the haves to protect themselves from the clamoring have nots, etc.

Such an emphasis would do at least two things. One, it would give us a good filter through which to judge policy. We'd have a consistent basis for judgment. Two, it would force different communities to elaborate on and defend the desirability and reasonableness of their view of the future. Because in truth, if you don't have some sense of the future, you have no basis for judging current events.

For too long, journalism has pretended to be objective, as if the context for reporting and judging events doesn't determine everything from the tone in which it'll be reported to even deciding what should be reported.

But most importantly, we need to create a nationwide conversation about the future we're creating and the future we ought to create. As different news outlets compete for market share using this model, they would essentially be competing for visions of the future. The winner in this competition would not just win market share: it would gain influence over policy and vision and become the forum through which we define our future. Now that would be valuable journalism.