The Toronto Star's David Olive says the biggest problem facing newspapers (and he includes supper-hour newscasts in the mix) is that they are boring.

His solution? Apparently, book-length articles on major social problems of the day!

From the Star's Great Recession blog: (posted July 4)

I was confirmed in my mild despair on this point, now manifest, more than a decade ago, in a swan-song story by Maureen Dowd just before she took up column writing. In one of her last reported articles, Dowd describes how the legendary "boys on the bus" no longer drink, smoke or swear. How they now dress, identically, like middle managers at an insurance company. They no longer trade "war stories" after hours, but instead fuss over their laptops and other gadgetry. And their obsession isn't with work but with home. Home being not the newsroom, but literally their home. I've since sat patiently during a rare conversation with a boss, who in 20 minutes in his office allowed himself to be interrupted three times by cellphone calls from his daughter. "What dress should I wear for my playdate?" "You bought the wrong cereal." "I need you to pick me up at 4:30."

I believe that Olive is referring to a 1988 GQ article by Dowd and fellow NYT writer Alessandra Stanley entitled The Dweebs on the Bus -- a play on the title of Timothy Crouse's 1972 classic The Boys on the Bus about the rollicking political journalists on that U.S. presidential campaign, including the inimitable Hunter S. Thompson.

So if we went back to the days of bottles in the desks and tokes in the darkroom, the journalistic output would then be more interesting? And real journalists would never allow their children to intrude on their worklife? Okay, David.

The very next word written by Olive caught the eye of the j-twitterati:

Groupthink* rules. No editor or producer wants her media outlet to be the only one that ignores the Michael Jackson story for even a day.

* This got the attention of NYT j-prof Jay Rosen, who tweeted:

It's dying because its boring but there's a reason it's boring: groupthink. David Olive on newspaper journalism http://tr.im/qXb7

Followed by:

@johnrobinson @johnmcquaid The groupthink is one reason I called my blog PressThink: to name it. "Safety first" put the whole craft at risk.

I had a two-part response to Rosen:

@jayrosen_nyu The root of news media groupthink are risk-aversion and the imperative for audience share maximization. (1/2)

@jayrosen_nyu For NPs et al to be bolder, they might have to accept smaller but more passionate audiences as the tradeoff. (2/2)

There was nothing back from Rosen.

Well, no editor, publisher or producer wants to see the market share of his or her media outlet to drop because they missed a huge story such as the death of pop and tabloid legend Michael Jackson.

I would point to this July 1 tweet from the NYT's David Carr:

Pew sez 64 % of Americans think MJ's death got too much coverage. http://bit.ly/m6DXn And I bet 90 % of them lapped up all they could.

In the same Pew survey, 58 per cent of respondents said they followed the Jackson story either very or fairly closely. I would say if more than half the U.S. population is following a given story to that degree, it's a pretty big story.

Question for you, Mr. Olive: If you were the editor of an MSM newsroom, would you want to appeal to the 58 per cent or the 42 per cent?

But, back to his column:

Conformity borne of peer pressure is the rule, so we have assembly-line journalism. Speed is of the essence, so we have drive-by journalism. Formulaic producing, reporting and editing are so embedded that the roughly 1,100 dailies and hundreds of local newscasts across North America are almost indistinguishable.

I think that's a huge problem. Many organizations quash individual voice, whereas I think there should be room for those voices within the institutional style (or brand, if you prefer).

But let's also not forget that newspapers have been slowly shedding staff for decades as revenues eroded. There has been a constant imperative to do more with less in order to prop up operating profit margins. The bar for those margins was set in an era when newspapers held monopolies. However, the resultant thinning of staffing means there's a reduced ability to do creative, time-consumptive work -- and more of an assembly-line style. Not a lot of artistry goes into creating journalistic Big Macs.

Olive quotes Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod as saying things shifted from calling to business in the mid-1980s, but that's about the same time the revenue pond started drying up. Olive doesn't acknowledge that fact.

Olive seems to like what's going on in (U.S.) cyberspace:

Is it a coincidence that the only news medium with a growing audience, cyberspace, is the one where the responsible websites dealing with important issues offer reporting and commentary that is consistently lively, comprehensive and authoritative? Most of the folks drawn to working on those sites, for low or no pay, are veteran or aspiring journalists.

Can he name five independent news sites in Canada that are a must-read because they offer commentary that is more lively, comprehensive and authoritative than what the MSM offers? Once he does that, can he then tell me how they do in the rankings of most popular websites as measured by unique visitors per month?

Olive rightly highlights the successes of Talking Points Memo, which is one of the more interesting new sites in the U.S. (see this July 4, 2008 post -- The two 'i's of the new journalism? Iteration and intimacy).

But if he wants to bring up the NYT/Judith Miller/WMD saga (one of the worst judgment errors in that newspaper's history), why not cite the Washington Post's stellar reporting on the poor care that was being given Iraq War veterans at Walter Reed Army hospital?

For that matter, why is he spending so much time analyzing the problems of the U.S. news media when Olive -- along with the vast majority of his readers -- lives in Canada??? Or does he think the U.S. situation translates straight across to this country?

Olive asks the following in closing:

... Why has so much world-changing journalism occurred between hard covers and not on newsprint*

* For one thing, books -- especially in 1904 -- were a national medium and newspapers, for the most part, were not. Books have a long shelf life. Newspapers do not. But why didn't he mention a little something such as the Pentagon Papers?

He offers up examples such as Ida Tarbell's 1904 book  History of the Standard Oil Company and Rachel Carson's 1962 tome Silent Spring. For a contemporary title, he includes Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, about the Iraq war (Ricks had been a Washington Post reporter at that time). Of Ricks and one-time NYT reporter David Halberstam, who wrote The Best and the Brightest, Olive said:

Their newspapers could not or would not accommodate their longer stories that needed telling.*

* An alternative view is that the "long" stories were told in bits and pieces in the newspaper, and the whole package was woven into a narrative fit for a book.

Proprietors like Rupert Murdoch call long-form writing an indulgence. Which it would be if it was not responsibly edited. But that's not the issue for Murdoch and fellow proprietors who can't see past the newsprint bills, and so have been offering smaller and smaller newspapers with whatever hikes in cover prices they can get away with. In any other business, that would be seen as a formula for losing customers. And certaintly that's the effect it's having on newspapers.

Many editors and TV news directors regard in-depth, explanatory journalism as commercial folly, believing they will drive away an audience that suffers "time poverty," and won't sit still for even the most compelling account of events or conditions of the greatest interest and importance.

They're wrong, of course, and their formulaic output of trivia is killing their media "platforms."

Good journalism will (win? - BD) out. A shame so little of it appears in newspapers or on television. And with authors, documentarians and, increasingly, the better websites putting the lie to any notion that compelling, important journalism cannot find an audience and have its impact on the world.     

I quite like reading longer-form investigative and explanatory newspaper and magazine journalism. Heck, I even crack a book from time to time. More than that, I believe such works are critical components of a healthy media ecosystem -- and by extension, important to a society that purports to be self-governing. But for most people these days, asking them to spend 20 minutes to half an hour with an entire newspaper (or its online equivalent) is asking a lot, let alone that much time on a single story. Absorbing a book-length treatment requires hours and hours.

As Olive suggests, part of being successful as an editor in the news business is knowing how much time/space to devote to an individual story. You don't want to spend 2,000 words telling a story that could be handled just as effectively with 500 words. Assuming long journalism = compelling journalism is wrong.

But flip side of that -- selling your audience short on the big stories -- hurts you as well.

There's no formula to guide news decision-makers -- nor should there be. And with the rise of linking, not everything has to be in one single story. This July3 TPM story on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resigning was 191 words, but contained news conference video and links. Again, think iteration.

I'm sympathetic with Olive's cri de coeur in defence of journalism that matters, even if I don't think he made his case very well, but he might wish to consider how the audience absorbs news these days -- and how to serve them economically.

He could start here.

Addendum

The most-read stories on TheStar.com at noon today:

Some front-page stories that didn't make the five-most-read cut (which could be the result of how the most-read list is calculated):
  • Man arrested in Mississauga arson case
  • Simon Ibell: The making of a health-care crusader
  • What killed Michael Jackson?
  • Picketers cannot block pest control, judge rules
  • Right to banked sick days a waning trend in Ontario
  • One striking worker. One angry resident. Let's talk
  • Fix green bin mess, mayor told
And lastly, 'Wal-Mart has remedy for ailing health care' didn't make the most-read list. The writer? David Olive! :)

Addendum

The actual headline for Olive's posting was: "Is it journalism or 'gerbalism'?" Here are the origins of that:

And Doug Bates, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer at the Portland Oregonian, in his June commencement address at the University of Oregon:  

"I've decided 'gerbilism' is a pretty good word for what's been going on in the news media these days. Gerbilism is an apt term for something that's soft and warm and cuddly, safe and timid, with no sharp teeth and no bite whatsoever. Gerbilism, I've decided, is partly responsible for a lot of our nation's problems today.