THE HIGHS
- Going to great session after great session. I learned about the "Rules That Aren't" and realized that yes, we have to do "All This and Ethics Too."
- Seeing old friends and making new ones, including readers of this blog. (Hi, Eileen!)
- Bridging the gap with page designers by talking honestly about how we work together. (Thanks, Josh!)
- Discussing the identity of the organization and considering widening the scope of "copy editor" beyond the newspaper tradition of ACES.
- Checking out Red Rocks with a friend who's a copy editor turned lawyer turning librarian.
- Drinking beer. It's better in Colorado.
- Lower attendance.
- Declining membership.
- Malaise about the business side of journalism — countered by our dedication to what we do. It's frustrating to see good journalists laid off and left out in the cold by hiring freezes.
The next conference is set for April 2009 in Minneapolis. As reflected by the state of the profession overall, ACES is in transition and has a lot of work to do. There's no time for fiddling. Luckily, the leadership and membership understand the challenges ahead and are committed to taking them on.
On the lighter side, there's also talk of an "editing smackdown" between Bill Walsh of The Washington Post and Merrill Perlman of The New York Times. This would be a marquee event, a clash of editing titans. I'm suggesting that my colleague Bill Cloud serve as referee.
Read more memories of the 2008 conference and check out the collection of handouts and exercises.
About the declining business (or, as I call it, death spiral) check this out, I think it explains a lot:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman/
I think a big force behind the reason that journalism as currently practiced is not meeting the needs of the public is the notion that
journalism is a "profession". A lot of journalists seem to be more impressed by credentials than by the quality of the work that is produced. Journalism was a monopoly for a long time. The barriers to entry were high, and so people with credentials could control the conversation. This resulted in sort of a self-amplifying circle, where people with "credentials" repeated each other, building a self-reinforcing storyline. Now, everything has changed. Anybody can publish. Anybody can say anything they want and make it accessible to anyone in the world. What is difficult is getting people to want to read what you write. For that, you need to meet the needs of the public. You need to make your work worthwhile in the eyes of the public, rather than in the eyes of journalists holding the (now more and more valueless) journalist "credential."
One serious problem that I think has led to the continuing and accelerating decline of your industry is how you react to criticism of your work and that of other journalists. The most cherished belief among "credentialed" journalists is that any criticism of journalists comes from people who are simply upset because journalists aren't reflecting the agenda the critics want reflected. Thus, in one of your posts, you address the criticism of Solomon for his various hit pieces as coming from his "critics on the left" without looking at whether the criticism is justified or not. You discount the criticism because Solomon, even if he's lying, has the "credential" and his critics don't. It's more important to you to defend someone with credentials against uncredentialed critics than to examine whether a member of your "profession" is lying to the public.
This is not the sort of attitude that is going to drag your industry out of its death spiral.
What about developing a real code of ethics? For example, how about this rule regarding confidentiality:
Never grant confidentiality to a source who is motivated primarily by the fact that the story would be less likely to be believed if the identity of the source were known.
As opposed to the way confidentiality is handled now, where it is basically a payment for a story.