Exhibit A: A Washington Post reporter accuses Gawker of ripping off his story in a blog post. Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder’s rebuttal says the Gawker post was better (and thus better read) because the original was boring, while Gawker’s post gave the subject (a so-called “generational guru”) the kind of snide, uncensored treatment newspapers are afraid to.
Exhibit B: After a much-criticized summer run, the Washington Post kills Mouthpiece Theater, a “humorous” commentary video series, starring two politics reporters, after one of them refers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a “mad bitch” in one clip. Apologies and regrets are offered all around.
There’s a connection here, and it doesn’t just have to do with the Washington Post.
The thing is, Gabriel Snyder is right, and the fact that the Post tried the Mouthpiece Theater experiment at all shows that, on some level, it knows he’s right. That is: these days, adhering too closely to a dispassionate, neutral, straitlaced viewpoint in journalism is dicey, if not simply bad business.
The reasons people like to read blogs are as diverse as the blogs themselves. But a big one is: they’re interesting. They have points of view. At their best, they dispense with official, evenhanded B.S. and let you know what the writer really thinks. Which is refreshing, entertaining, thought-provoking—and the polar opposite of what proper journalism is supposed to do. And people love it.
But as the Mouthpiece fiasco showed, for an old-line newspaper to simply try to be Gawker—or Bill Maher, or what have you—is not so simple. For starters, a lot of journalists are not funny, and Mouthpiece was just bad as entertainment.
For another thing, while newspapers may want to embrace new forms and loosen their ties a bit, they still have institutional limits. For instance—having political reporters actually express political opinions. That’s a no-no still for many mainstream outlets, and it can jeopardize a reporter’s access. So the humor of a Mouthpiece Theater is forced to be “nonpartisan”—which is to say, cynical, lacking conviction, superficial and reliant on stupid cliches. (Hillary’s a bitch! Ha ha!)
For yet another thing, it’s one thing to pick up a story about a consultant peddling a load of hoo-hah and scathingly lay out what a bunch of hoo-hah it is. It’s another to do that—and have a reputation for doing that—and report the story, which is to say, get people to agree to talk to you. That’s not to say it can’t be done; but it’s harder than what either the Post or Gawker did.
And finally, institutions like the Post are constrained by their readers’ and colleagues’ expectations of them. The mouthpiece segment may still have been crappy and offensive if an opinionated political blog did it. But it would not be as widely controversial, as the very existence of Mouthpiece Theater was.
The Daily Show is obscene constantly (but funnier); but colleagues notice if the Post is (and is sexist to boot). And a revered newspaper has a core of readers who value it for straight news, for serious information, for impartiality, and who are turned off by the same irreverence many blog readers seek out. Not to mention, some of these readers have, shall we say, tighter content guidelines than the Comedy Central Standards and Practices department. (If I were talking to you in person, I would not have used the term “hoo-hah” as I did above. But this is the website of Time magazine. Ahem!)
In other words, old-line media outlets are like broadcast networks in an HBO world. Their business and professional model depends on a certain affect designed to aggregate a big-tent audience. But in the real world, people are seeking out the passion, bawdiness and frankness of smaller tents.
Institutions like the Post have tried a few things to adapt to this situation, none of them satisfactory. The old-fashioned way of doing a feature story like the one on the consultant is to write it straight, while maybe giving the subject enough rope to hang him or herself, and laying any sarcasm between the lines. But nowadays, that just seems increasingly phony, one more reason to distrust so-called “objective” media.
As Snyder points out, the Post’s Ian Shapira in his feature seems to think the consultant is as full of it as Gawker did. So why not just tell us what you really think? I laid out the reasons he can’t above, but that’s not going to matter to a reader who justifiably would rather read the story on Gawker.
Meanwhile, if newspapers try to go “edgy” and humorous, they end up like NBC trying to make an HBO show: they’re handcuffed, out of their element and end up making a lame hash that satisfies no one. And, like Mouthpiece’s Dana Milbank and Chris Cilizza, they often turn out just not to have the goods.
What to do? Newspapers could forget the whole thing, focus on turning out high-quality straight news and pray there’s some kind of business model for it. Or they could embrace the tell-me-what-you-really-think era, but this time without fetters—i.e., free their staff to have substantive opinions, not just lame neutral snark—and figure out which of their people are actually good at it.
Either way, the process will be a—well, something you can’t say on the Washington Post’s website.