Puppies & Iraq

I just saw Page One, a documentary about the New York Times, which raised some interesting (if oft repeated) questions about journalism that come along with the financial instability of the industry: is there something about a traditional media outlet like the NYTimes that is superior to the various information disseminating alternatives (news aggregation sites, twitter, Facebook, Huffpo, Daily Kos, Gawker, etc.) and, if so, what is it? What is it about the New York Times (or the medium of newspapers in general) that would be missed if it was gone?

Bernard Berelson asked a similar question in a study of newspaper readers who were deprived of their daily newspaper due to a workers' strike in 1945. The reasons people liked (or perhaps even needed) the paper back then - social prestige, as an escape or diversion, as a welcome routine or ritual, to gather information about public affairs - are all met by various other websites and applications, some of which seem to be "better" - that is, more satisfying to the user - at one or all of these things than any newspaper is.

I want to pick apart this idea of that which is "more satisfying" to the user, or what it means to say that they "want" something. The mantra of producers in the free market, no matter what they're selling, is that they must give the people what they want. Nick Denton of Gawker has a cameo in Page One in which he talks about his "big board", the one that provides Gawker writers with instant feedback about how many hits (and thus, how many dollars) their stories are generating. Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune media company, voiced a similar opinion: those in the information dissemination business should give people what they want. Ideally, you make enough money to do "puppies and Iraq" - something that people want and something that people should want. To do anything else is, to use Zell's phrase, "journalistic arrogance".

Certainly, a large number of people are "satisfied" with the information they get from people like Denton and Zell. But Denton and Zell, like any businessmen, can only measure satisfaction in certain ways: money, or eyeballs on ads. There are other, often long-term social, costs paid when people get what they supposedly want. When news is market driven, the public interest suffers. So goes the argument of many cultural theorists. But who are they to say what the public interest is? Why do we need ivory tower theorists to save the masses from themselves?

Maybe that elitist - the one who would rather read a story about Iraq than look at puppies - is not in an ivory tower but inside of all of us, along with an inner hedonist (that's the one that would rather look at puppies all day). There are many ways to measure what people like, want, need, or prefer. I'm not talking about measuring happiness as opposed to money spent/earned. I'm considering what happens when we're asked to pay for certain things (bundled vs. individually sold goods) at certain times (in advance of the moment of consumption vs. immediately before the moment of consumption). There is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that those two variables, along with many others situational variables external to the individual, alter selection patterns of individuals. Want, or need, or preference does not merely emanate from individuals. When we take this into account, we recognize that a shift in the times at which individuals access options and the way those options are bundled together end up altering what we choose. We click on links to videos of adorable puppies instead of links to stories about Iraq because they're links (right in front of us, immediate) and because they've already been paid for (every internet site is bundled together, and usually bundled together with telephone and 200 channels of television). If it wasn't like that, if we had to make a decision at the beginning of the year about whether we "wanted" to spend all year watching puppy videos or reading about Iraq...well, I guess not that many people would want to spend all year reading about Iraq. But I reckon that many people would want, would choose some combination of puppies and Iraq if they had to choose ahead of time. The internet is a combination of what we want and what we should want, and so is the NYTimes, but they represent a different balance between those two things. The Times is 100 parts puppies, 400 parts Iraq. The internet is 10000000000 parts puppies, 100000000 Iraq (or something to that effect. When you change how things are sold, you may not change what people want, as many theorists claim, but you do change how we measure what people want.

Maybe we never have to defer to a theorist to tell us what we should be reading or watching in order to be a better citizen. Maybe we just need to tweak our media choice environment so that it gives the inner elitist a fighting chance against the inner hedonist.