Flipping the Line: The wise man accepts, the idiot insists

The public trusts the media less because it’s getting smarter, not dumber.

The Line welcomes angry rebuttals and responses to our work. The best will be featured in our ongoing series, Flipping the Line. Today, writer Clarke Ries takes issue with Andrew MacDougall’s observations on the state of the media in the wake of the latest round of layoffs at Bell.

By: Clarke Ries

You know the Luddites as a punch line. They’re a pejorative, used to describe whichever batch of God’s perfect idiots are flailing against the inevitable as everyone around them adapts to it.

This is often overly generous to the idiots and deeply unfair to the actual Luddites.

They were skilled artisans — blue-collar textile workers who made a good living at a necessary and honourable trade. Then somebody invented the steam-powered loom and their livelihood evaporated.

This metaphor is also probably overly generous to Canadian journalists, who are unlikely to assassinate any of the capitalists on the other side of the free-market see-saw with a cavalry pistol, and who will not require 12,000 troops to suppress.

What Canadian journalists do unquestionably share with the original Luddites, along with the buggy-whip manufacturers, the human computers, the Appalachian coal-miners, and everybody else body-checked through the glass by scientific progress, is a stubborn refusal to see the writing on the wall.

For any newsie struggling to make out what’s daubed on the drywall in the blood of a hundred dying community papers, allow me.

The public trusts you less because it’s getting smarter, not dumber.

We know what a “gotcha” question is. We’re irritated that you use the privilege of your access to ask them when you could be asking genuine questions. You know, open-ended? Reflecting actual curiosity about what the target of the question thinks?

If you want a reputation for hard-hitting journalism, do some research first and ask a thoughtful follow-up question. If you want a cheap headline, don’t expect us to read what’s under it.

We know how talking-head TV works. Scripted conversations, constant interruption, toxic zingers, ad breaks, all over in a few minutes. It’s highly-choreographed theatre of a particularly loathsome sort, and we’ve been rooting against it for years.

The journalist class sneers at Joe Rogan, but while your prestige interview programs and their exquisitely-coiffed hosts go the way of the Avro Arrow, a half-evolved ape without a college degree just renewed his podcast deal with Spotify for a cool nine figures.

How, you ask? Because Rogan — the self-described smartest dumb guy in the world — invites guests over and then has a pleasant and interesting talk with them for three uninterrupted hours. Don’t tell us we’ve got an attention-span issue.

Oh, and Rogan started in his basement, with terrible recording equipment and the assistance of a single audibly-stoned tech guy. As a side gig. “Without state funding and subsidies from the telecom oligopoly, we can’t possibly deliver the news to Canadians” is not the rallying cry you think it is.

Giving your product away for free is a terrible business model.

You’d think this would go without saying. Other industries have figured this out. Lemonade stands run by six-year-olds have figured this out.

The city bus is happy to sell ad space, but it won’t let your sweaty tuchus near one of its seats unless you pay for the privilege.

The Montreal Canadiens finished last season at the bottom of their division, but they still found the courage to charge sports fans for season tickets. Even at their lowest, and things got desperately low, they didn’t stake their financial future on the Molson ads pasted to the arena boards.

And yet! If you navigate your way across the world wide web to most of Canada’s major news publications and click on a headline, you can read the entire article for free, from lede to closing graf. Read five in a month, and the customer is gently nudged to subscribe/switch to incognito mode to check out that sixth article.

I cannot wrap my arms around the chutzpah required to beg for taxpayer funding to fuel your mortgage-payment machine when you haven’t bothered implementing a hard paywall. Magellan couldn’t circumnavigate that chutzpah.

Sure, you say, but what if your particular legacy institution has cut staffing? Like, to the point where the money guys can no longer demand payment for your work product with a straight face?

In that case, my friend, you are deadwood in the nature documentary we call life, destined to be consumed in the renewing flame. David Attenborough will lovingly narrate a close-up of your replacement budding out of the fire-blackened topsoil.

You’re so busy complaining about the market advantages you’ve lost, you’re wasting the market advantages you’ve still got.

Focus your inner ear, if you please, on the sound of one hand clapping — off the side of your head, as I itemize the trust fund of legacy advantages that your younger, hungrier competitors would kill to have.

It’s true that you now have to compete with experts giving away their expertise for free on social media. It’s also true that social media participants wildly overestimate how many people are inside Thunderdome with them. For most Canadians, social media is Mars. So be an ambassador from Mars, and bring the online ramblings of experts to Earth with you.

It’s true that everyone and their uncle is now a content creator. It’s also true that most of said content is amateur-hour and downstream of shoe-leather reporting done by people with press passes.

People with direct access to interesting, important public figures who will give exclusive interviews, on and off the record.

People who went to school to learn how to research and write an appealing and informative article, and then apprenticed under the best in the country at delivering that article in style.

People who buy ink by the barrel and deliver their product onto Canadian doorsteps, digital and actual, in a halo of legitimacy conferred by association with legacy media institutions.

People like you.

If you’re getting rolled up, lit up, and smoked out in the content wars by somebody’s unemployed uncle, work harder or find a new line of work, don’t blame the algorithm.

Nobody cares.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger, Mel Brooks quipped. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Most Canadians wake up in the morning, shuffle out the front door and do something considerably less pleasant to make their rent than rewriting wire copy and pontificating on Canada’s failings.

While I’ve ascended to a pretty cushy gig, I’ve worked in the cold, in the dust, in the wet, in the dark. I’ve come home dirty, bloody, stained, and stinking to high heaven. I’ve wrestled drunken bar patrons, mucked out neglected compost piles, and dragged an asphalt trenching machine uphill, both ways. I have been in so much pain.

You want to whine about Fiddler’s Green sprouting a few yellow patches? Do it to an auditorium of my past coworkers, preferably just after they come off a bad shift and just before they take a shower. Sell tickets, please.

But if you want to live the life of kings, quit bewailing bad fortune and write something they’ll think is worth their hard-earned money.

Then charge them to read it.

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