Adding value in a crowded media ecosystem

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York's journalism school and prominent media critic, had a fantastic post yesterday asking journalists a crucial question about the way they do their jobs: "Where do you add value?"

Here's the meat of it:

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

I've tried to let that question guide my reporting for the last three years (and I'm pretty sure I've asked some version of it in a newsroom meeting at some point), and I think Jarvis is spot-on: We have less time and fewer resources to do our jobs than ever before, so there's less leeway than ever for the mindless, repetitive fluff that has made up so much of the daily grind of journalism since time immemorial.

I've been troubled at times by how much of my time at work is spent on stories in which my added value is minimal at best. I mean the stories that the local weekly is going to cover just as well as we will; the ones where I'm just retracing another paper's steps because I've been beaten on a story; the quick-turnaround, one-or-two-source stories that are there literally to fill space over the weekend cycle.

There's a reason we do these kinds of stories. As a small daily newspaper with just five news reporters, we need these stories just to reach that critical mass of news that keeps readers from opening their papers and saying, "There's nothing in here." And many of these stories are news to our readers: Just because we aren't the first or only outlet to cover them doesn't mean they aren't still newsworthy. (This is a fallacy to which I'm especially prone; I regularly have to remind myself of the previous sentence when deciding whether to follow on a previously reported story that I know I still need to cover.)

Here's where I think Jarvis' flaw lies: He seems to be operating on the assumption that if a story is out there, people will find it. That makes sense for much big-issue national coverage. No one wants to read the AP's summary of the State of the Union; they want to watch the speech itself and then read some trenchant analysis of it. (And no one wants to read the Washington Post's summary of the New York Times' warrantless wiretapping scoops; they want to read the Times' original.)

But on the local news level, that's simply not the way things work. A local TV station might be the first ones to report a kidnapping arrest last night and I might not have much to add to their account, but that doesn't mean the story is at the level of "commodity knowledge," as Jarvis calls it. I can't assume that most of our readers are voracious news consumers who will find a story soon after it's reported, no matter where. People have lives; they don't watch the news every night, and they don't constantly check the websites of several area newspapers throughout the day to spot the first iteration of every news story. Isn't that part of what we're learning in this new media ecosystem--that the news now has to find consumers, rather than vice versa? I think that's exactly what we're doing with some of these less "value-intensive" stories.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Jarvis that we simply can't afford repetition and stenography anymore. The shift is going to take a lot of tough concessions and inspire quite a few "But that's the way we've always done it!" objections. But it absolutely must be done. If old media institutions (or any media outlets, for that matter) want to play a role in the new media ecosystem, every inch of type and every second of video needs to add some value to the consumer. Anything less is not only bad business; it's a dereliction of duty.