Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

Bill Simmons is my favorite sports columnist, mainly for his funny writing style, but also for his feel for popular culture. He often mixes pop culture references into his sports columns or even writes entire columns on the subject. Here’s a recent quick interview with him, questions 3 & 5 were particularly illuminating: 5 Quick Questions with Bill Simmons

3. What’s the biggest story the media has missed this year?
The potential of Twitter. Old-school media doesn’t get Twitter at all. A lot of people still think it’s a fad and it’s totally not a fad. Cocaine was a fad. The Osbournes were a fad. Auto-asphyxiation was a fad…. well, unless you were David Carradine. If anything I think we are just scratching the surface of Twitter for better and worse: it started breaking stories last spring and over everything else, that’s why it won’t go away. Now reporters are posting scoops on Twitter before they send the finished stories into their employers. People are not seeing what is happening here. Facebook is a social network; Twitter is a media/marketing vehicle disguised as a social network.

5. Are you nervous or excited about the future of Journalism? Why?
I’m terrified. I think it’s going to hell in a hand basket. The emphasis is on quantity over quality and immediacy over accuracy; the newspapers have made it worse by trying to speed up their immediacy online over just kicking everyone’s asses with better writing and reporting. Newsmakers can control stories about themselves by selectively dispersing relevant information as well as who gets to talk to them (and for what reason). And too many writers are more interested in just saying what they have to say instead of crafting the way they are saying it. It’s a comedy of errors. I thought Season 5 of The Wire painted a bleak picture of where this is going, but even David Simon couldn’t have believed that it would get this bad this fast. I would say “nervous.”

That’s more or less the good and bad of Twitter, all in two paragraphs. Twitter’s ability of breaking and spreading news is considerable. However, I think this has had its drawbacks as well, putting and onus “on quantity over quality and immediacy over accuracy”, as Simmons so eloquently put it.

Some have already argued that Twitter will end up killing journalism, but I think this is a gross overstatement. The sad fact is that traditional news agencies have just been unable to carve up the right strategy against Twitter’s hypernovelty. The time of solely newspapers breaking stories is over; bloggers are now getting the kind of access to information traditionally reserved for the most prestigious news outlets. Grassroots journalism is doing a better job at breaking stories and faster, because they don’t have to work with the same constraints as, say, a New York Times (validity of source, brand image concerns, writing quality, legal issues). A New York Times can’t afford running many unconfirmed stories that end up blowing up in their faces. Tweeters (and blogs) by virtue of their sheer volume, on the other hand, can. The hits outweigh the misses.

Simmons hits it right on the money when he states that “newspapers have made it worse by trying to speed up their immediacy online over just kicking everyone’s asses with better writing and reporting.” The fact second opinion magazines like the Economist continue to see their subscriptions rise, not fall, is proof of this. Instead of focusing on WHAT has happened, it is time for traditional news outlets to return to reporting WHY something has happened.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.