Ken Layne: 'There Aren't Many Online Journalists Left'
The Online Journalism Review columnist decries most print reporting as formulaic but concedes online journalism "doesn't matter anymore."

I Want Media, 05/01/01

Ken Layne is known as Citizen Layne at Online Journalism Review, a Web-based journal produced at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Layne is perhaps best known for the biting, sarcastic edge he gives his reporting, especially his articles on media. He most recently applied his cutting wit to an insightful series of dispatches from last week's National Association of Broadcasters' 2001 convention in Las Vegas.

I Want Media: What was your impression of NAB 2001? Did you learn anything?

Ken Layne: It was just another horrible trade show held by a lobbying firm. If I learned anything, it was through the usual process of hearing a bunch of public lies and then spending all night on the Internet looking for conflicting evidence. People make jokes about the uselessness of Internet research, but in truth it's a pretty good free library of old news articles, editorials and government documents. The push for digital broadcasting is well-documented and transparently sordid stuff.

IWM: NAB President and CEO Edward Fritts said in his speech that broadcasters face a tough year ahead. Was the overall mood at the convention sort of down?

Layne: Out of 115,000 people at this show, I'm sure a few felt gloomy. But this was mostly a place to play with new broadcasting equipment and then party with your work buddies.

IWM: What did these broadcasting people have to say about the Internet?

Layne: Very little, considering the show was titled "Convergence." There was a certain smugness to the speeches. After a few years of being scared to death of the Internet, NAB members seem pleased with the Web crash. Now the Net is just a co-branding tool and an infrastructure for moving video between networks and affiliates and having studio databases of commercials and promos and such. Of course, broadband will eventually screw broadcasters the same way Napster upset the music industry, and the NAB isn't prepared for that.

IWM: With the exception of ABC, all of the big networks have left the NAB due to the group's stance on preserving ownership caps. Any signs of reconciliation?

Layne: Not really. The networks are just components of these giant media/entertainment/beverage/manufacturing corporations, and they've got the upper hand. On the regulatory front, things are terrific for the big guys. For a CBS-Viacom or NBC-GE-MSNBC or AOL/Time-Warner/CNN/WB, the future is all about controlling as many cable stations as possible to keep up with the eroding network audience. And the climate is good for them to buy lots more affiliates, with the FCC saying "Why not?" and the courts and Congress unlikely to intervene. The NAB is seriously diminished, whether Fritts likes it or not.

IWM: Is the FCC's support of easing of media ownership limits a good thing or a bad thing?

Layne: Probably a bad thing, but it's tough to sympathize with the NAB. These guys didn't have any guilt about crushing micro-power radio stations, so why should I care if Viacom crushes an Eddie Fritts disciple who owns the affiliate in Wherever, Iowa?

IWM: In one of your NAB 2001 reports you wrote that digital television doesn't "fix a consumer problem." Is that yet another reason why DTV is slow to take off?

Layne: There are some gadget nuts who will always run out and buy the latest thing, and there's still a lot of money in this country. Sales of HDTV sets are creeping up. The NAB says this shows consumers embracing the stuff. That's nonsense.

If consumers were drooling over digital TV, the NAB wouldn't be begging Congress to force manufacturers to include digital tuners. The manufacturers are doing just fine selling regular sets and have understandably told the NAB to get bent.

I'm pretty average when it comes to TV consumption -- there's a set in the living room and another in my office, both cheap and both just fine for watching the news. I've had cable whenever I could afford it, even though I despise cable monopolies. So we just got DirecTV and I told AT&T to go to hell. Satellite is cheaper, the channels are plentiful, and it feels good to hurt a cable company.

Something like DirecTV fixes a problem. I want a lot of channels but I hate being screwed by a cable company. So here's an option that's easy to operate and fairly priced. A digital TV set costs thousands of dollars and gives some barely noticed sound/picture improvement on a few shows. Who cares?

IWM: Why did OJR send a reporter to NAB 2001?

Layne: Last year Web-only journalists were still getting second-class treatment at these media events -- the Olympics in Sydney, the GOP and Democratic presidential conventions, etc. And at the San Francisco NAB show in September, an online reporter for the Bay Guardian got arrested and thrown out for snapping pictures of some micro-power protesters.

My editor's original idea was to send somebody to see how online journalists were treated this time around. But nobody really thinks about "online journalists" as some specific class these days. There aren't many of us left, for one thing.

And the theme of this show was "convergence," so we thought there might be some interesting stuff for our readers. Those angles fell through and I was forced to actually cover the NAB as if I knew something about broadcasting.

IWM: Suck.com last week commended your first-person NAB 2001 coverage. However, doesn't that kind of approach shift the focus off of your assigned subject and on to you?

Layne: That's backwards. A bunch of people who would never care about a broadcasting convention read a week's worth of detailed NAB 2001 reports because I can tell a halfway interesting story. The world doesn't need another wire-service piece quoting Eddie Fritts' lame speech off a press release.

I go to these canned events to write about the process of journalism. OJR is a trade magazine. We talk about reporting. And my interest in reporting isn't so-and-so got hired or fired. It's more like, "What happened here compared to what was written?"

There's a huge gulf between the reality of events and the journalistic machine's coverage. Take Greenspan's interest-rate cut this month. The articles are fiction: "Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan shook the very foundations of capitalism today with his breathtakingly bold surprise slashing of the lending rate." What really happened is a bunch of wire-service reporters sat in the Fed's press room, drinking coffee and balancing their checkbooks and reading the sports page, and then a secretary walked by and dropped a stack of Xeroxed press releases by the door, and everybody swarmed around the stack to see the number, and then they called their editor and said "half percent." The editor has three finished bulletins on the screen, picks the one with the right number, and puts it on the wire. Then the reporters sit around trying to turn this utterly dull routine into a lede for the full story. Finally, they call the two analysts they always call for a quote, file the thing and go to lunch.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it's a process worth dissecting -- at least for a journalism review. Reality shows are the big thing on TV, but you never see a reality show about the creation of news. But beyond all that sort of argument, I don't have any fondness for journalists and all their smug nonsense about putting the story first. What most print reporting does is put the journalistic formula first. And the world yawns.

IWM: What's your prognosis for online journalism?

Layne: It doesn't matter anymore. The novelty stage is over and it's just another news outlet, usually paired with print or broadcast. Of course, I hope the Online Journalism Review does well, at least until I figure a way out of this racket and learn to make an honest living. I've been doing a lot of electrical work on my house and am considering becoming an electrician.

IWM: Do you think people will pay for online content?

Layne: No. People don't even want to pay for online porn these days.

IWM: How can traditional media make the Web work for them?

Layne: Sell advertising as a package -- newspaper and Web site, broadcast and Web site. Put some extra stuff on the site if it doesn't cost money. Let reporters keep online diaries of their coverage. Have a dedicated person assemble relevant links to a print/broadcast story. Avoid those full-screen ads and pop-up windows, because that junk causes bookmark removal. Don't expect to make much money from a site, just use it as a component.



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