The Age of Hybrids

On Thursday night’s edition of The Colbert Report, Stephen’s guest was Jerry Mitchell, a renowned investigative reporter whose diligent digging has led to the convictions to date of four KKK members for the murders of civil rights activists. The host greeted his guest with, “From my research, I see that you are a newspaper reporter. What is that?”

The question seemed especially well timed as a follow-up to Michael Massing’s New York Review of Books article about news on the Internet.

I freely admit to a profound ignorance concerning anything to do with politics, but the subject of politics is not alone in moving to the Web, and the latest stage in the evolution of human communication applies equally to any topic. Newspapers in their traditional form are clearly not long for this world, but hasn’t the digitization of information been the sword held over the heads of many forms of media, especially books, for years?

Still, the shift is undeniable. As a hanger-on of the publishing industry, working mainly on textbooks, I can attest to its effects. On the first page of a memo accompanying a recent proofreading project, where the publication details would normally be it said instead, “No print copies; content to be posted online only.”

Like the antediluvian auto industry, it seems newspapers and printers, along with the rest of us clinging to the coat-tails of published forms of communication, will have to suss out a new paradigm or get cozy in history’s seconds bin along with beta tapes and laserdiscs.

Where are we going from here? In his article, Massing writes of “reporter-blogger” Paul Kiel, “Kiel is an example of an emerging new breed of ‘hybrids,’ schooled in both the practices of print journalism and the uses of cyberspace.” It seems hybridization is everywhere; technologies are converging and becoming interactive at a dizzying rate: cars, phones, Internet, TVs, music, maps—so isn’t this just news becoming interactive as well? Does the delivery method matter as long as it’s still news?

We all get that the hybrid car is a stop-gap; something must eventually replace the internal combustion engine to wean us off our fixes of fossil fuel. So if our traditional-news drugs of choice must be replaced, is there value in the hybrids that now give us our fix, and what “active ingredients” in those drugs should be carried forward?

Massing’s article suggests that one of the key differences between traditional news-gathering and news blogging is that in many news blogs, the discussion is no longer balanced. He points out that this may be a good thing, as newspaper coverage can carry its own biases. But isn't the down side a deafness to other voices?

How do we avoid a blogosphere that “supplies the reader with ‘prefiltered information’ supporting his or her own views,” as Massing, quoting Bill Wasik, puts it? Anyone who has watched the terrifying documentary The Corporation is aware of the dangers of corporately funded and sanctioned media product. The democratization that the Internet has permitted seems twinned with a dilution of quality, as our class has discussed. As Massing says, “a premium is put on the sexy and sensational.”

The big questions for me, therefore, are not which delivery method will eventually win out in the transitional sweepstakes, but how the “product” will be paid for, and how its quality will be controlled. If there is no neutrality, how do we make sure people hear all sides of a discussion? Who will sort the wheat from all that chaff?

As Deadwood’s Al Swearengen knows, no matter how heady, a no-holds-barred environment eventually degrades into chaos without controls of some kind, whether benevolent or not. The hybrids of this age will be replaced by new, probably interactive technologies, but the old debate surrounding what constitutes news, and who gets to call it that, will rage on.