Week 6 Discussion
As the space between real-world events and their distributed reporting to distant audiences shrank and the arms race of news immediacy began in the mid-nineteenth century, information overload starts to become a human problem motivated by the efficacy of technology. And with that information overload comes the need to not just report the news, but also make sense of it for a broader audience. This sense-making has traditionally been filled by the role of the journalist, both in their responsibility for the accuracy and immediacy of their reporting, but also their ability to make sense of what they see for those who werenβt there. Modern newsrooms, and more acutely cable news, are now a mixture of both news gathering and opinion.
1867βs innovation of the stock ticker provides an example of the difference between the pure information of whatβs happening with the price of a commodity, and the human problem it brings in understanding what those numbers mean. Itβs a difference between data and insight that motivates the value exchange between audience and mediator. There is value in what the audience understands from the information, but there is also economic value in the mediation of that information itself. This shows up strongly inside a cable network such as CNBC, which devotes itself to the immediacy of market behavior, but also to the interpretation and analysis of that behavior. For 23 hours a day across the global markets of the United States, Asia and Europe, CNBC doesnβt just display the information, it mediates it and seeks to provide the sense-making demanded by its audience. It attempts to answer the question for investors of βwhat does this mean for meβ. And where the 1867 telegraph shrank time from weeks to hours to minutes, the arms race continues today but in milliseconds. There is still a time difference between the movement of a stock price and its digital expression. It is never truly instantaneous, much as it may appear to be. And in those millisecond spaces are economic opportunity.
So we can proxy our understanding of a new technology for latest here. Stock tickers arenβt new, but they do offer the promise of latest. And in this context latest means financial opportunity. The chance to buy the dip. The means to be ahead of the market. And wrapped around this behavior is the always-on journalistic commentary which even social platforms and the creator economy now seek to fill. CNBCβs use of stock tickers usually breaks down two ways for its audience - tell me what to do, and show me what to do. Many of CNBCβs users turn to its insight for instruction on how and what to buy. Others turn to it as one of many inputs for their decision making as they compare across other similar media perspectives. But this is reflective of broader newsroom concerns about the erosion of editorial authority in a more fragmented media environment, the declining impartiality of the presentation of the news, and the adjacency of the editorialized opinion which accompanies it. The sense-making a Wall Street Journal editor or similar may draw from reported events is framed by not only their own experience, but also the experience of the reader, who will bring their own perspective of what they feel the platform should be giving them, and what they can expect. Many users are predisposed towards a platform and voice of choice, and any impartiality presented by a news organization may not matter if the user has already dismissed them. This is particularly apparent around political coverage, where users tend to gravitate towards outlets which already confirm and support existing biases.
Disclosure: From 2019-2022 I was an employee of CNBC and ran all of CNBCβs digital channels as Head of Product. I am writing this to you from the newsroom of the CNBC Campus in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. From 2023 my role still oversees CNBCβs digital products, but has now expanded to NBC News, MSNBC, The Today Show, E! Entertainment News, and Telemundo. Iβve included some screenshots and examples of the kinds of modern digital stock tickers and broadcast experiences several of my teams support.
Follow-Up Post
Listening back to the synchronous session discussion, I want to pull out two questions. The idea of βqualityβ journalism, and the merging of reporting and opinion into intentional entertainment. Both are problematic.
Our experience of the news is rarely unfiltered, even if we were at the event when it happened, because we are also co-authors of that news. Just as a journalist or publication may bring their own forms of mediation to a story, so do we as readers and viewers. It is not a one-way understanding of whatβs happening. So when we talk about bias, we have to also include our own bias as readers, which can often inform which outlets we turn to for our news, and which ones we are more willing to dismiss. βQualityβ is an assumption we make motivated by our own sense of cultural value and whatβs important to us. One person may view The New York Times as quality journalism. Many others see it as fake news. We will see this a lot in 2024. So while journalism attempts to encapsulate experiences and ideas, it also shapes them, especially as news reporting becomes more digitally fragmented and partisan.
The discussion around the delineation between broadcast news and opinion is an interesting one in the context of intent, where I donβt think the idea of βthe newsβ and βentertainment but on a news channelβ is nearly as clear or intentional as we might assume. Entertainment is a label which can cheapen whatβs happening. My colleagues at MSNBC do not think what they do is entertainment. We might proxy in words such as analysis or commentary, but its intent is not to entertain. It is to provide expertise and sense-making of the news from those who are more experienced on the topics of the day. We may find it entertaining, but it is not intended to entertain. Detailed analysis of whatβs happening in Ukraine or Gaza is not entertainment. But networks such as MSNBC donβt distinguish between an hour of objective news and analysis because those two things are not separable, they are highly blended. When live news breaks, it is still a mixture of news reporting and news analysis because itβs the sense-making which the audience comes back for (and therefore where the revenue comes from). Even something like the evening news across networks such as ABC (David Muir), NBC (Lester Holt) or CBS (Norah O'Donnell), still has a fair amount of editorializing associated with it, even if it holds the premise of βjust the factsβ. Local news as a lead-in to such broadcasts is more pronounced in its assumptions of good and bad, right and wrong.
One aspect to also wrap around both these points is the idea of even engaging with news itself as a means of understanding the world. A very common use case, especially with digital news consumers, is to scan headlines, either on homepages, in search results, or in social feeds, to get their news. Not clicking, reading or watching but still βcatching upβ is very, very common, and increasingly problematic for the economics of those who gather and publish the news. The role of aggregation strips out the economics of consumption, where enough value can be generated for users through a headline or subhead that the users feels they know whatβs going on. This, alas, is where clickbait comes in and more desperate attempts to game attention begin to surface. Many of the larger media institutions have vehemently rejected this approach as an attempt to sustain βqualityβ as others race to the bottom of the web, but the real shift is the move from the economics of advertising to the economics of attention.
Note: If anyoneβs interested in a great documentary about these shifting dynamics inside of media organizations, this filkm about a year at The New York Times, while old, is still worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLct9jNrFuo
Also, if anyone wants to chat about some of these internal dynamics and what they mean for media organizations, I am always happy to discuss anytime. I am currently a Product principal at NBC News Digital, and an alum of The New York Times. I was unfortunately unable to join this weekβs discussion as my team and I were shipping out our new MSNBC digital rebrand across all of our products last night.
