Tag Archives: writing

Getting Tired of Trying to tell the Truth

It’s not always easy writing these weekly posts. I try to deal with things of consequence, and usually I choose things that may be negative in nature. I also try to learn a little bit more about these topics by doing some research and approaching the post in a thoughtful way.  All of this means I have gone down several depressing rabbit holes in the course of writing these pieces over the years.

I have to tell you that, cumulatively, it takes a toll. Some weeks, it can only be described as downright depressing. And that’s just for myself, who only does these once a week. What if this were my full-time job? What if I were a journalist reporting on an ever more confounding world? How would I find the motivation to do my job every day?

The answer, at least according to a recent survey of 402 journalists by PR industry platform creator Muck Rake, is that I could well be considering a different job. Last year, 56% of those journalists considered quitting.

The reasons are many. I and others have repeatedly talked the dismal state of journalism in North America. The advertising-based economic model that supports true reporting is falling apart. Publishers have found that it’s more profitable to pander to prejudice and preconceived beliefs than it is to actually try to report the truth and hope to change people’s minds. When it comes to journalism, it appears that Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (from the movie A Few Good Men) may have been right. We can’t handle the truth. We prefer to spoon fed polarized punditry that aligns with our beliefs. When profitability is based on the number of eye-balls gained, you get a lot more of them at a far lower cost by peddling opinion rather than proof. This has led to round after round of mass layoffs, cutting newsroom staffing by double digit percentages.

This reality brings a crushing load of economic pressure down on journalists. According to the Muck Rake survey, most journalist are battling burnout due to working longer hours with fewer resources. But it’s not just the economic restraints that are taking their toll on journalists. A good part of the problem is the evolving nature of how news develops and propagates through our society.

There used to be such a thing as a 24-hour news cycle which was defined by a daily publication deadline, whether that was the printing of a newspaper or the broadcast of the nightly news. As tight as 24 hours was, it was downright leisurely compared to the split-second reality of today’s information environment. New stories develop, break and fade from significance in minutes now rather than days or weeks as was true in the past. And that means that a journalist that hopes to keep up always has to be on. There is no such thing as downtime or being “off the grid.” Even with new tools and platforms to help monitor and filter the tidal wave of signal vs. noise that is today’s information ecosystem, a journalist always has to be plugged in and logged on to do their job.

That is exhausting.

But perhaps the biggest reason why journalists are considering a career change is not the economic constraints nor the hours worked. It’s the nature of the job itself. No one choses to be a journalist because they want to get rich. It’s a career built on passion. Good journalists want to do something significant and make a difference. They do it because they value objectivity and truth and believe that by reporting it, they can raise the level of thought and discourse in our society. Given the apparent dumpster fire that seems to sum up the world today, can you blame them for becoming disillusioned with their chosen career?

All of this is tremendously sad. But even more than that, it is profoundly frightening. In a time when we need more reliably curated, reliably reported information about the state of affairs than ever before, those we have always trusted to provide this are running – in droves – towards the nearest exit.

My 1000th Post – and My 20 Year Journey

Note: This week marks the 1000th post I’ve written for MediaPost. For this blog, all of those posts are here, plus a number that I’ve written for other publications and exclusively for Out of My Gord. But the sentiments here apply to all those posts. If you’re wondering, I’ve written 1233 posts in total.

According to the MediaPost search tool, this is my 1000th post for this publication. There are a few duplicates in there, but I’m not going to quibble. No matter how you count them up, that’s a lot of posts.

My first post was written on August 19th, 2004. Back then I wrote exclusively for the emerging search industry. Google was only 6 years old.  They had just gone public, with investors hoping to cash in on this new thing called paid search. Social media was even greener. There was no Facebook. Something called Myspace had launched the year before.

In the 20 years I’ve written for MediaPost, I’ve bounced from masthead to masthead. My editorial bent evolved from being Search industry specific to eventually find my sweet spot, which I found at the intersection of human behavior and technology.

It’s been a long and usually interesting journey. When I started, I was the parent of two young children who I dragged along to industry events, using the summer search conference in San Jose as an opportunity to take a family camping vacation. I am now a grandfather, and I haven’t been to a digital conference for almost 10 years (the last being the conferences I used to host and program for the good folks here at MediaPost).

When I started writing these posts, I was both a humanist and a technophile. I believed that people were inherently good, and that technology would be the tool we would use to be better. The Internet was just starting to figure out how to make money, but it was still idealistic enough that people like me believed it would be mostly a good thing. Google still had the phrase “Don’t be Evil” as part of its code of conduct.

Knowing this post was coming up, I’ve spent the past few months wondering what I’d write when the time came. I didn’t want it to be yet another look back at the past 20 years. The history I have included I’ve done so to provide some context.

No, I wanted this to be what this journey has been like for me. There is one thing about having an editorial deadline that forces you to come up with something to write about every week or two. It compels you to pay attention. It also forces you to think. The person I am now – what I believe and how I think about both people and technology – has been shaped in no small part by writing these 1000 posts over the past 20 years.

So, If I started as a humanist and technophile, what am I now, 20 years later? That is a very tough question to answer. I am much more pessimistic now. And this post has forced me to examine the causes of my pessimism.

I realized I am still a humanist. I still believe that if I’m face to face with a stranger, I’ll always place my bet on them helping me if I need it. I have faith that it will pay off more often than it won’t. If anything, we humans may be just a tiny little bit better than we were 20 years ago: a little more compassionate, a little more accepting, a little more kind.

So, if humans haven’t changed, what has? Why do I have less faith in the future than I did 20 years ago? Something has certainly changed. But what was it, I wondered?

Coincidentally, as I was thinking of this, I was also reading the late Philip Zimbardo’s book – The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Zimbardo was the researcher who oversaw the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary young men were randomly assigned roles as guards or inmates in a makeshift prison set up in a Stanford University basement. To make a long story short – ordinary people started doing such terrible things that they had to cut the experiment short after just 6 days.

 Zimbardo reminded me that people are usually not dispositionally completely good or bad, but we can find ourselves in situations that can push us in either direction. We all have the capacity to be good or evil. Our behavior depends on the environment we function in. To use an analogy Zimbardo himself used, it may not be the apples that are bad. It could be the barrel.

So I realized, it isn’t people who have changed in the last 20 years, but the environment we live in. And a big part of that environment is the media landscape we have built in those two decades. That landscape looks nothing like it did back in 2004.  With the help of technology, we have built an information landscape that doesn’t really play to the strengths of humanity. It almost always shows us the worst side of ourselves. Journalism has been replaced by punditry. Dialogue and debate have been pushed out of the way by demagoguery and divisiveness.

So yes, I’m more pessimistic now that I was when I started this journey 20 years ago. But there is a glimmer of hope here. If people had truly changed, there is not a lot we can do about that. But if it’s the media landscape that’s changed, that’s a different story. Because we built it, we can also fix it.

It’s something I’ll be thinking about as I start a new year.

Why The World No Longer Makes Sense

Does it seem that the world no longer makes sense? That may not just be you. The world may in fact no longer be making sense.

In the late 1960s, psychologist Karl Weick introduced the world to the concept of sensemaking, but we were making sense of things long before that. It’s the mental process we go through to try to reconcile who we believe we are to the world in which we find ourselves.  It’s how we give meaning to our life.

Weick identified 7 properties critical to the process of sensemaking. I won’t mention them all, but here are three that are critical to keep in mind:

  1. Who we believe we are forms the foundation we use to make sense of the world
  2. Sensemaking needs retrospection. We need time to mull over new information we receive and form it into a narrative that makes sense to us.
  3. Sensemaking is a social activity. We look for narratives that seem plausible, and when we find them, we share them with others.

I think you see where I’m going with this. Simply put, our ability to make sense of the world is in jeopardy, both for internal and external reasons.

External to us, the quality of the narratives that are available to us to help us make sense of the world has nosedived in the past two decades. Prior to social media and the implosion of journalism, there was a baseline of objectivity in the narratives we were exposed to. One would hope that there was a kernel of truth buried somewhere in what we heard, read or saw on major news providers.

But that’s not the case today. Sensationalism has taken over journalism, driven by the need for profitability by showing ads to an increasingly polarized audience. In the process, it’s dragged the narratives we need to make sense of the world to the extremes that lie on either end of common sense.

This wouldn’t be quite as catastrophic for sensemaking if we were more skeptical. The sensemaking cycle does allow us to judge the quality of new information for ourselves, deciding whether it fits with our frame of what we believe the world to be, or if we need to update that frame. But all that validation requires time and cognitive effort. And that’s the second place where sensemaking is in jeopardy: we don’t have the time or energy to be skeptical anymore. The world moves too quickly to be mulled over.

In essence, our sensemaking is us creating a model of the world that we can use without requiring us to think too much. It’s our own proxy for reality. And, as a model, it is subject to all the limitations that come with modeling. As the British statistician George E.P. Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

What Box didn’t say is, the more wrong our model is, the less likely it is to be useful. And that’s the looming issue with sensemaking. The model we use to determine what is real is become less and less tethered to actual reality.

It was exactly that problem that prompted Daniel Schmachtenberger and others to set up the Consilience Project. The idea of the Project is this – the more diversity in perspectives you can include in your model, the more likely the model is to be accurate. That’s what “consilience” means: pulling perspectives from different disciplines together to get a more accurate picture of complex issues.  It literally means the “jumping together” of knowledge.

The Consilience Project is trying to reverse the erosion of modern sensemaking – both from an internal and external perspective – that comes from the overt polarization and the narrowing of perspective that currently typifies the information sources we use in our own sensemaking models.  As Schmachtenberger says,  “If there are whole chunks of populations that you only have pejorative strawman versions of, where you can’t explain why they think what they think without making them dumb or bad, you should be dubious of your own modeling.”

That, in a nutshell, explains the current media landscape. No wonder nothing makes sense anymore.