It was the seals all along!
Thursday, 04. 15. 2010 – Opinion
I don’t think the Globe is trying to downplay our role in the decline of wild pacific salmon stocks, but I can understand why a few people have read it that way:
Seals, sea lions devastating West Coast salmon runs
That it’s at all unclear demonstrates the limitations of the legacy media format. Style, structure and frequency constraints compel them to produce a series of myopic snapshots rather than a comprehensive dialogue.
And I wonder: is anyone actually satisfied with this type of news?
And further: if demands for fresh hourly content were ignored, and reporters were tasked with writing features or serial pieces, would the quality of our media improve?
Might Mark Hume have taken the time to estimate the seal take and compare it to the annual commercial fishery to give us some context? Might he have taken the time to find an opposing voice? To actually drive us to a conclusion as to whether anything should be done about the ‘devastation’? Might there even be a section on the Globe and Mail site dedicated exclusively to the salmon fishery, and other, ‘big issues’- full of all the current and historical opinion, news and dialogue?
The web as a medium is capable of being so much more than a mere extension of a daily newspaper. It’s not tossed into a big blue bin at the end of the day- it’s persistent.
When I dream of the future of this site, I dream of a divergence from the standard shoot and scoot coverage- I dream of a persisting dialogue.
I suppose the final question is: if it existed, would anyone bother to read it?
Most popular story at The Sun today: Tiger’s wife close to filing for divorce: report
One Response to “It was the seals all along!”
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April 16th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Write, file….go to dinner. Legacy media is industrial media. Set word limits, no links, “news holes”; all of which create the idea that there is a “news story” rather than information embedded in a larger context.
Mark is a comparatively good journalist. But he is constrained by the limits and conventions of the medium. You are completely right when you say that the web is capable of much more. It’s searchable, archived and has links. If you want to find out what the commercial salmon fishery does…Google is your friend.
Now, as to anyone reading it: the reality is that very few people will dig into a story. Their attention is not going to be engaged. But, in a sense, that doesn’t matter because the cost of producing and publishing such a story on the web are relatively trivial. A couple of hundred people would justify the hour or two writing a good story would take. And if you string together enough “good stories” you begin to create an audience. And that, in turn, can actually have a value.
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