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Media:Random Harvest
April 27, 2000
One of the swellest features of online life was supposed to be the randomness of it all. The old ways of organizing news and other information would be smashed. Out with the prepackaged templates of paper newspapers and magazines -- page layouts and such -- that instruct us which news matters most. In with the raw and open-ended democracy of the Web. Here's a list of of stories, says the Internet; you decide what matters most.
- Second farmer killed in Zimbabwe
- Pakistan lawyers seek death for ex-PM Sharif
- Elián court ruling looms
The night before, I'd heard that 1,300 people had been arrested at the big spring-break, anti-IMF protests in Washington, and had expected to wake up to headlines about their fate. Had the earnest kids been sent overnight to the electric chair of some wicked global tribunal, or just released to their parents? The Yahoo page was silent.
But beneath those three mysterious headlines appeared the word more. I clicked it and was sent to a page called "Yahoo! News," which offered a different story list. Under "Top Story" -- a taste of sweet hierarchy! -- was a wire about the International Monetary Fund protesters. Below it, a prediction for Wall Street's day, followed by a Mideast tensions story, followed by "Bon Jovi a Film Star Until He Loses His Head," and so on. Each headline on this list was helpfully followed by the story's lead sentence. But it was a busy morning and the list was still just a list. I wished an editor had taken the trouble to put Bon Jovi's head somewhere deeper inside Yahoo, and saved me the trouble of looking at it. Then again, there must be a million Yahoo users who want their Bon Jovi news first and foremost, and they, too, must be served. Online democracy is glorious, as long as you've got all day to weed and sift through everyone else's idea of news.
Contrast this journey into the fab randomness of the Net with the half hour I'd spent reading the front section of The New York Times (on paper) a few days before. It was Sunday and the great paper had arrived in its usual way -- voluminous, but deeply hierarchical. There's a lot in here, said the front page, but I'm going to tell you what really matters. No random harvest for The Times.
Straddling the middle three columns of the front page, above the fold, in a box, was a story about, of all things, Iranian history. The headline was so-so: "How a Plot Convulsed Iran in '53 (and in '79)." But the byline was one that I know gives good value, James Risen. And there was a slug about three paragraphs down that read, "Secrets of History: The CIA in Iran. A Special Report," a clear signal that The Times thought this story a standout. All this, together with its ultraprominent placement by the paper's hierarchy-obsessed hierarchs, made the piece instantly magnetic.
And there was more. Next to the story was a photo of a CIA document that The Times had apparently unearthed about the agency's role in the 1953 coup that returned the Shah of Iran to power. The document's first line: "CLANDESTINE SERVICE HISTORY." But best of all was another photo, the story's hood ornament, a drop-dead shot of the young shah and his empress arriving in Rome as the coup exploded back in Tehran. Although surrounded by security and military types and a general air of chaos, they seem to be floating through it all like a pair of exquisitely tailored gods in enormous dark sunglasses, a vision straight out of Fellini's La Dolce Vita. The photo was an inspired choice: It gave flesh, even glamour, to a story about a bunch of old documents.
After all this buildup, it was crucial that the story deliver. You can't always trust editors to know what works; if all they've got is a dud, they'll tout a dud. But The Times had a pearl. Risen's story was elegantly put together, and packed with great subplots and characters, including Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's father, Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, a "gentleman spy" named Donald Wilber, and the shah's "forceful and scheming twin sister" (as the CIA called her). There were two nice sidebars, plus a time line describing Iranian history from 1941 to the present. Against all odds, The Times made a long-buried tale feel relevant to a time when Cold War plots are far away.
Returning to the front page, I noticed below the fold a story on the World Bank-IMF protests, which were then under way. But it was a news analysis piece about the besieged global loan agencies, not a hard-news report on the protesters I was wondering about. Next to it was a photo of a D.C. cop holding a truncheon over a supine protester, with a caption directing the reader to page 6.
Was The Times declaring political violence in 1950s Iran more significant than that in Washington right now? Yup. Such is the arrogance of hierarchy. Most online news outlets would have you choose among Iran and Elián and IMF and Zimbabwe and Bon Jovi and everything else out there. On the Net, the media let us do all the work that newspaper editors are paid to do, and often, as in the case of that Times story, do quite well.
Is it any wonder that nobody's making money from online news?
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William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.
For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com.
All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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