I once had a job interview with a national broadcaster where I was asked about the then-current Lewinsky-Clinton scandal. When I replied that I felt it was time to move on, the interviewer frowned. I didn’t get the job.
That interview came to mind this week when I read Journalists and the information-attention markets: Towards an economic theory of journalism by Susanne Fengler and Stephan Russ-Mohl. (Sage Journals subscription required. Site day pass: $20)
According to their paper, my opinion on the Lewinsky story meant I was something of a journalistic spendthrift. They argue that — just like publishers and newsroom managers — journalists are economically motivated.
“Journalists can be described as rational actors seeking to promote their own interests, reacting to material and non-material incentives and rewards, calculating risks and benefits,” they wrote. “They seek to maximize attention for their work, they try to minimize costs of investigation and research, to use their sources to their greatest professional benefit, and so forth.”
For example, “pack journalism” can be considered a type of “free riding,” and thus the tragedy of the commons: “hot news” (such as the Lewinsky story) gets overused. James Hamilton wrote about this phenomenon in All the News that’s Fit to Sell: “The fixed costs of learning … tips the balance in story selection toward continuous coverage of a given event rather than undertaking new investigations.”
The greatest strength of Fengler and Russ-Mohl’s paper is how it describes the interaction between journalists and sources — and how the vested interests of both can create blind spots:
“While most agents in all the principal-agent relationships involved in the flow of news processing may, in general, be committed to telling the truth, all of them have incentives to either exaggerate or to withhold some of the truth to their ‘principals’ in order to look better and more professional. The ‘blind spots’ of media coverage are not merely accidental. They are, most frequently, the result of self-interested behavior.
“If withholding chunks of relevant information can be seen as highly probable, iterative behavior of all actors involved in news processing, this may add up to a cumulative effect.”
More research, say the authors, will help identify and predict these blind spots more systematically. Once identified, these blind spots could “possibly be solved by adjusting the parameters and incentives under which journalists operate.”
We live in hope.
In the meantime, this is an essential piece of reading. The paper includes an overview of how economic factors have shaped journalism over the past 150 years — helping it move towards from a partisan to an objective format (for mass audiences and unoffended advertisers), influencing content, and providing an “indirect information subsidy” in the shape of public relations. Oh, and don’t miss the footnotes, too.
But it also comes at a curious time. Just as the business models of news institutions have been shaken, so the economics of journalistic interaction are becoming vastly different to those of the past 100 years — sources no longer need journalists in the same way. The balance of power has shifted. Journalists have no idea where best to invest their time: in blogging? Social networking? Video? Good old fashioned talking? Press releases? Twitter?
Anyone who can pick apart these economics deserves high praise indeed.
