Osler's Razor

Journalism is changing.  Print media is becoming secondary to online media, and that weight shift has thrown much of the journalism world into disarray.  U.S. News no longer exists as a magazine, and Time and Newsweek are mere pamphlets.  Many large-city newspapers no longer print a paper every day.  Bloggers and blogger-agglomerations like the Huffington Post have become increasingly important "news" sources.

A lot of this is bad news.  Trained, relatively objective journalists are being usurped by corporate-paid hacks and people with a big bag of opinion and a pocketful of facts.  Investigative journalism, which broke the Watergate story and so many others, is nearly extinct.

Still, there are some good things happening.  Real journalists are starting to craft stories for the online world rather than print, and the results can be very impressive.  One benefit of this development is that those projects can be rich with data in a way that was never possible in print.  I'm not necessarily talking about "big data," which can have some issues-- just enough data to ground things in reality rather than anecdote, thus pulling news away from the Nancy Grace model of sensationalizing a few oddball cases.   I'd like to point to three example in my own little field of law.

First, consider Dafna Linzer (pictured) and Cora Currier's wonderful series about clemency for ProPublica.  (You can see it here).   The written stories reflected a wealth of data about clemency, but the authors also made available the numbers themselves via an ebook.  For those of us who care about such things, it was a feast.

Second, take a look at Ron Fournier's National Journal piece on the same subject.  Besides Ron's sharp analysis, the online article offers two take-aways that would be hard to put in a print edition-- a complex graph and a link to an actual commutation petition.

Finally, I was very impressed by what Alia Malek and the others at Al Jazeera America did with clemency: a multi-media masterpiece, loaded with more goodies than the Sunday Brunch at the Yale Club.

I love the fact that this approach-- which reflects the full complexity of real news-- cuts against the dumbing-down of media.  It assumes that some in the audience want more than a nibble, and are smart enough to understand the depth of meaning embedded in these things of great importance.  They are created by smart people like Linzer, Fournier, and Malek,  and allow for a level of discourse that print never did, and never could.

And there is this… this new "smart journalism" moves popular media toward the academy.  These journalist are engaging stories and the data behind those stories in a way that we professors can appreciate.  The combination of raw data and analysis is right in our wheelhouse.  The sad thing is that while journalism moves towards the academy, I don't see us responding yet.  We haven't stepped towards the media to begin the dance towards greater truths, broadly shared.  We need to do that, by inviting these journalists to our conferences, by collaborating with them, and by occasionally stepping into their world to write for broader audiences.

The media is changing.  So should we.