There is a gentleman out there that I would consider a friend (and not just in the “Facebook” sense) that I have to admit… I am very jealous of right now. Allow me a moment to elaborate:
When I was younger, I really wanted to be Bob Costas. Not because I wanted to be shorter or have less facial hair, but because Costas had the coolest job in the world. He was the host of NBC’s late-late night talk show Later, an half-hour interview program in which Costas spent the entire 22 minutes with one guest for an in-depth conversation. No band, no gimmicks, just a real dialogue.
Costas interviewed a great variety of people from nearly every walk of public life, from Julian Bond to Dana Carvey. These interviews would have you completely engrossed no matter who was being interviewed. While Costas is a fantastic sports broadcaster, his real skill was in interviewing.
I wanted to be that Costas, able to interview anyone at any time, while dreaming that I could be as good an interviewer as Costas.
Well, my friend John Milewski of the Wilson Center in D.C. has done something very close to that.
John is the new host of the Wilson Center’s interview show Dialogue. John (much like Cowher did Knoll) took over recently for the previous host George Liston Seay who passed away some months ago. Dialogue is a show that I was familiar with before Milewski took over, but not a regular viewer of, and that is entirely my fault as it is the closest show you will find that resembles the old Later, with some Bill Moyers thrown in for good measure. While I have teased John about doing a hockey show, he is in the perfect situation to do just that. The format of the show is set perfectly to allow John to do a human rights show one week, and a show on the economics of sports the next. Not only is the show set up to allow for such diversity, John has the chops to handle that broad range of topics as well.
I would highly encourage anyone who can find the show on their local PBS or MhZ affiliate to give Dialogue a chance, particularly if the topic piques your interest in the slightest. I have no doubt that John and his production team will not let you down.
Now, if only John could find some way to get a certain sub-mariner into the set dressing…
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John’s first episode as host and executive producer of Dialogue aired last night, with a round table discussion about the current and future state of the newspaper industry. John’s panelists were Len Downie (formerly of the Washington Post), Allison Silver (Washington Independent and the Huffington Post), and Professor Paul Starr (Professor of Sociology at Princeton).
I have to say that I found a touch of irony in this topic, as John helped relaunch the Newseum in D.C. last year.
The basic direction of the discussion was “what’s next” for newspapers, and do they in fact have a future? One thing I found interesting, but not surprising, was how connected each member of the panel was to their past and their expectations for the medium. Downie, a former editor at the Post and an investigative journalist for the paper in it’s most celebrated past (the Watergate era), believed that the newspaper had its heyday from the early 1970s to the early days of the current internet era. He also believed that the size of the bullpen today was still larger than when he was a reporter, and his concern was would editorial boards be able to make smart decisions as current newsrooms shrank to levels smaller than they were in the 1970s. He also believed that with fewer corporate bureaucracies running things these days, journalists were taking over again.
Silver, a founding editor of the Washington Independent, agreed with some of Downie’s points, but also offered that the Vietnam era allowed journalists to become “rock stars” was the high point of the industry, with the gobbling up of papers and internet sites by conglomerates as the beginning of the downturn. Where Downie clearly represented the old guard ideal of a newspaper journalist, Silver was very much the “new idea” representative, arguing that the industry was definitely changing, and quite possibly for the better.
Professor Starr kept to his Sociology roots, and theorized that newspapers have dominated for 300 years, and that it was the end of the 1940s that began the fall of the newspaper, and that the 1980s represented the real end of the newspaper. Starr stated that this wasn’t just an American issue, but that the demographic of newspaper readership was in flux worldwide (albeit at different paces, regionally). He also argued that newspapers used to be a sort of clearinghouse for several things: news at various levels (national, state, local), as well as puzzles, humor, entertainment news, sports, et cetera. Now, thanks to specialization, if someone wants sports news, they go to ESPN. If someone wants to do a puzzle, there are thousands of sites for that. While he believed that there would be some sort of newspaper like publication in the future, it would not be much like what we have access to today.
Milewski brought everything together nicely with his bookend comments. He opened the show with the idea that in the past the newspaper was a kind of citizen’s handbook for an involved electorate. Today, with the various news sources available on the internet and television, everyone brings their own fact sheet to the discussion, and there is no more central clearinghouse for ideas.
There is a lot to be said there, and my only complaint for the show was that it wasn’t another 30 minutes longer to allow for a deeper discussion of that point.
Prior to electronic media, at best you had two or three sources for news if you lived in a large enough city. Large metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, for example, had more than one paper, to allow for the populace to select a particular viewpoint. While the same can be said today with viewers of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, the primary difference is that with newspapers up to the early 1940s, each paper still had a central theme of accurately presenting the news regardless of viewpoint. The opinions of said papers were left to the Op-Ed pages. Nowadays, anchors are screaming their opinions over each other, and viewers gravitate to whomever they think yells the best.
Newspapers currently are not able to compete with that idea (or volume), and thus they are slowly starting to collapse under their own weight, having enjoyed a boom in popularity prior to the 24 hour news nets. (For what it may be worth, I think that the high point of the newspaper was during World War II, when newspapers were still faster than radio or newsreels in delivering news from overseas. I do agree that the late 1980s and early 1990s began the downward trends in the industry, with the advent of 24 hour televised news and the internet.)
The new model may very well be the weekly magazine titled The Week, which culls stories from multiple areas and sources, allowing readers to get both sides (or more, if possible) of every topic, all the while delivering the supporting pages of news from sports, entertainment, food and dining, advice, and even a page of puzzles. I would not be at all surprised if more and more newspapers went to a weekly summary format like The Week. To me, it certainly seems like the next step in the evolution of the printed news format.
And that is the one thing I felt was missing from the first episode of Dialogue: a potential resolution of where, realistically, the panelists thought printed news was heading. It would seem that the lack of such a discussion was due solely to the time restraints of the show.
Essentially, the show left me wanting to hear more from the participants, and a little upset that the show had to end…
But, isn’t that what all good Dialogues should do?
Well done all. I’m looking forward to the next episode already.
CNN, MSNBC, and Fox pretty much consist of news shows with their “personalities” and shouting matches. There’s actually very little news on any of these channels (Headline News does a better job but still hosts garbage like Nancy Grace). And since these are the go-to sources for news, viewers who don’t look at the other channels, let alone read newspapers, are subscribing to bias, be it liberal, conservative, or whatever direction the wind is blowing on CNN.
One of the dangerous things that makes discourse almost impossible anymore (excuse my generalization) is that if you already have a viewpoint on something, you can pretty much find a “source” sharing that viewpoint on the Internet. For example, my sister swore up and down that FEMA was constructing concentration camps and had “proof” (this was before Glenn Beck got into the act). A little research, as in very little, pretty much blew that out of the water. But that’s the thing, a lot of people only want to hear what they want to hear and I feel that’s one argument against the Internet.
Sorry to ramble. This is a subject I feel *very* strongly about.