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 The Future of Journalism Is Written in NeonPosted on Apr 13, 2010
My search for the I.F. Stone of the 21st century took me to the campus of the University of Southern California and the highly energized office of the Web-based news operation Neon Tommy, sponsored by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The university, long shackled with a reputation for conservatism, might be considered an odd place to look for a potential successor to Stone, a crusading liberal journalist ostracized by the mainstream media during the Cold War who nevertheless broke major stories in his own I.F. Stone’s Weekly. But USC is changing. And even the old conservative USC produced progressives such as my personal hero, Carey McWilliams, who was editor of The Nation from 1955 to 1975. Truthdig’s editor, Robert Scheer, is on the Annenberg faculty. I wanted to talk to some of the Neon Tommy staff because I think that the salvation of journalism rests with young people who are talented, ambitious, intelligent, obsessive and crazy enough to jump into what is rapidly becoming a low-paying, insecure business. As Alan Mutter said of young journalists in his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, “The starving-artist lifestyle may be colorful and appealing for a while, but it gets old fast if you are bunking on a friend’s sofa, living under the same roof you did in junior high and lying awake at night wondering how you are going to repay your staggering five-figure student loan. “If nothing changes, the next generation of journalists will give up and move on to entirely different pursuits. And you can’t blame them.” I got a much more hopeful view when I visited with three students on the Neon Tommy staff, Callie Schweitzer, Olga Khazan and Kevin Grant. Advertisement I smiled. I was once like that. Nothing was going to stop me either. The name Neon Tommy is derived from Tommy Trojan, a campus symbol, and neon, a retro kind of word that invokes the days of neon lights, Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in “His Girl Friday” and newsboys screaming “Extra!” The evocation of an earlier era is perfect, for Neon Tommy combines the best in the new multimedia journalism with intensive reporting, clear writing and speed in stories on politics, government, culture, sports and whatever else interests its staff. It also recalls a touch of “The Front Page,” the old newspaper play upon which the film “His Girl Friday” was based. “We have a lot of people with different interests, and sometimes those interests take them to stories that nobody has heard before,” said Khazan. Neon Tommy looks for news far beyond the campus, filling a void left by the diminished staffs of the Los Angeles Times, suburban papers and local television and radio stations. That was clear on March 4 when Neon Tommy dispatched 30 reporters to the streets and campuses to cover protests by students, faculty and relatives against the extreme reduction in funding for public education in California and elsewhere. Filing videos, still pictures and words from Starbucks and their cell phones, the reporters in the field gave a fast and visual report on what was happening on the campuses. In the newsroom, a few staff members posted the incoming stories. Neon Tommy linked to campus and local websites around the country so its readers could see the extent of the protest. “Until we did that, we didn’t know what we were capable of,” said Grant. After the demonstration, Neon Tommy wanted to know what the major candidates for governor of California would do to save the public education system. Reporters called the offices of Democrat Jerry Brown and Republicans Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner. None of them called back. Neon Tommy called almost every day for a month, each time posting their frustrating result. Finally, Schweitzer wrote, “The lack of response on such a hot button issue is truly appalling. It is proof that putting pressure on politicians for 30 days is to no avail. If the media cannot get answers from the political elite, what are voters to expect?” I talked to the faculty members who advise Neon Tommy; Marc Cooper, the director; and Alan Mittelstaedt, the managing editor. They said that the Annenberg dean, Ernest J. Wilson III, and the journalism school director, Geneva Overholser, felt the need for such a Web-based news operation to give the students practical experience and showcase their work. Other journalism schools have news websites. What I like about Neon Tommy is a certain blue-collar sensibility, perfect for the difficult new era when elite high-paid journalists will be pretty much a memory. “As the old media fades away, our folks are replacing them,” said Cooper.
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By igelle elias terhemen, April 19, 2010 at 11:40 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
journalism is an all time rich and progressive vocation ,paying of bills and leaving well is like the finishing of an apartment that is designed accorden to your means, so let journalist design their their life styles to suit their income level.
Report thisBy NT Reporter, April 16, 2010 at 8:53 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
To Just a Girl,
Report thisWho are you to care where someone in this article is from? You are wrong. Journalism needs something just like NeonTommy. Schools with resources, such as Annenberg, should be leading the way and paying their reporters, which is exactly what they are doing. We are trying to make news relevant again and figure out something that works. If schools like Annenberg don’t try, who will?
By amunaor, April 14, 2010 at 10:52 am Link to this comment
THANKS PSmith for taking the time to dig up all of those links!
Journalist, Naomi Klein deserves mention here also:
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism -
http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism/dp/0312427999/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271270362&sr=8-1
Naomi’s revelation of the massive, CI of A sponsored, bloody purges that took place during the 1970’s, in Argentina and Chile, so as to ‘Clean the Slate’ in preparation for Friedman’s, ubiquitous religion of the Multi-National.
Decade of the 1970’s -
Sergio de Castro, Pinochet’s ‘Freidman Schooled’ economics minister, said he could never have done it without Pinochet’s iron fist backing him up. (Referring to the implementation of a brutal policy for ‘Wiping the Slate Clean’ in order to make way for the new religion of a U.S. sponsored, Freidman based, ‘Free Market’ ideology. The economists taught their students to look upon the population as a psychiatric patient, requiring ‘Shock Treatment’ in effort to cleanse it of its ‘collective’ cancer, simply because it - the population mindset - didn’t fit Friedman’s free-market model.)
It was Nixon who would give the Freidman Chicago Boys and their professors something they had long dreamed of: a chance to prove that their capitalist utopia was more than a theory in a basement workshop – a shot at remaking a country from scratch. Democracy had been inhospitable to the Chicago Boys in Chile; dictatorship would prove an easier fit – Klein
Chile’s coup, when it finally came, would feature three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in neighboring countries and would reemerge, three decades later, in Iraq. The shock of the coup; financial shock; the other, Ewen Cameron’s shock, drug and sensory deprivation research, codified as torture techniques in the ‘Kubark’ manual and disseminated through extensive CIA training programs for Latin American police and military. – Klein
This is the same Free Market formula Reaganomics and Thatcherism imbued itself with. Amongst the Chicago Boy Institution’s professors included such luminaries of destruction as George Shultz, and Donald Rumsfeld; Rumsfeld describing Freidman and his colleagues “a real cluster of dememted geniuses.”
In 1985 John McCain visits Pinochet. McCain described the meeting with Pinochet “as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism.” Gee, I wonder who planted that bug into Pinochet’s deranged psyche?
***
RE: PSmith
WAR ON DEMOCRACY
Mr. Duane Clarridge of the CIA’s Murder-and-Torture-R’-US Operations department—demonstrating his inner psychopath on live TV for John Pilger -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5L1VdlktOw#t=01m54s
CHILE
John Pilger - Pinochet’s coup - concentration camp - torture - The Nixon / Kissinger / Rockefeller Pinochet Chilean coup of September 11th 1973 - 30,000 murdered, 100,000 tortured - War on Democracy –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRn7VaOyi8Q#t=01m16s
Report this***
Peace, Best Wishes and Hope
By prosefights, April 14, 2010 at 7:37 am Link to this comment
msm tries to shape, not report, the news.
Without Internet our stolen $22,036 would be gone for sure. Google ‘nojeh nsa lawsuit’ for details. Outcome is not so sure because of internet.
msm is largely populated with liberal arts educated who are mostly into interpretation as opposed to facts. Aka BS artists.
Internet solutions may not last too long because of looming increased cost and availabity of electricity.
msm paints Iran as wanting nuclear bombs as opposed to its need for more electricity.
Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
Mark Twain
Report thisBy Gordy, April 14, 2010 at 4:12 am Link to this comment
Hellz yeah, I hope kids like these continue to have a
Report thisniche.
By ash bhoopathy (BettrAt), April 13, 2010 at 8:38 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
It delights me to no end that other people are concerned and are carrying the
torch to figure out what the future of journalism should be. There are those of us
who (while we live in Generation Y or digital or whatever the latest label is that
they’ve created for us) feel that informed sources of content are more important
now than they ever were.
I’m curious to see what you come up with. If I could give you any hints at what I’d
Report thispay for, I’d suggest curation, personalization, and providing the intellectual
scaffolding for me to reflect in a deeper way about written articles/content. This
doesn’t have to mean expensive video production—there are other ways to
achieve this.
By amunaor, April 13, 2010 at 11:57 am Link to this comment
New Journalists Please Lineup Here:
Iceland - world’s first free speech haven:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/iceland-worlds-first-free-speech-haven
WikiLeaks:
http://wikileaks.org/
More Info at WikiLeaks on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/wikileaks
Sunlight is always the best disinfectant!
Peace, Best Wishes and Hope
Report thisBy Just a girl, April 13, 2010 at 11:50 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
It’s easy to talk about nothing stopping you when your father is an executive at CBS and you have no student loans. Yes your interviewees are smart and hard-working, but some people can afford to take any opportunity that comes their way—even if it’s an unpaid internship or a $20K job right out of school—and some people can’t. I work two jobs to pay off my student loans, and I have had seven days off in the past 10 months. That’s including weekends.
I love journalism, but I can personally attest that being a cub reporter from a middle-class background really tests your resolve. It forces you to make decisions that wealthier kids simply don’t face. I’m sure that’s true of every profession, but I think it’s especially the case in an industry where not only is networking half of the battle, but unpaid internships and work opportunities—like Neon Tommy—are rampant. Neon Tommy is a great site, but I don’t think it’s doing anything to return journalism to its working class roots. If anything, it’s doing the opposite.
Report thisBy Nobody, April 13, 2010 at 8:10 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
The issue isn’t finding bright young things to carry the mantle, it is:
a) finding a distribution model that is truly independent, self-financing, and
run by people who uphold the highest standards,
and b) finding ways to support (i/e basic living needs) for all those journalists
who’ve devoted their lives to this craft and then find themselves in late middle
age without enough to live on, and out on the streets.
Why did you axe my post on the growing evidence that the US military is
Report thistargetting Reuters journalists? The guy in Thailand was shot directly through
the heart in an incident involving live fire into the AIR. That’s a hell of a
misdirect or ricochet. That guy was shot direct in the centre of the body mass
with the bullet out the back. That makes it a hit. No-one else was hit, specially
not like that, so why him? If you ask me, add that to the list of nearly a dozen
people Reuters corros whose deaths should be investigated for murder.
By balkas, April 13, 2010 at 6:27 am Link to this comment
However, if the new mystory reporters are paid by private people, we wld still get a private product.
If boyarsky’s piece is accurate, one can conclude firmly that neohacks wld be just like the old ones.
One of these new ‘reporters’ ha salready said that she has no solution.
And loaded with such ‘knowledge’ she’ll go on with enlightening us.
She doesn’t know that of necessary truth there is a or the solution.
Of course, a journalist in US, is not aware or seems to be unaware, that everything is caused. So, one looks for causes of slavery, lynching, denial of medical treatment, wars; finds and removes them and wars, serfdom dissapear.
Of course, plutocrats-stratocrats wld not assist anyone in looking for causes; most likely such a scientific search wld deterred or even punished. tnx
Report thisBy bachu, April 13, 2010 at 12:52 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
If they have good hair, good skin, good teeth and overall good TV personality they can always have a lucrative career as panelists on cable TV as many of the so called print journalists are doing at the moment on MSMBC and CNN.
Report this