Salesmanship

One of my favorite quotes in all of filmdom comes from The Princess Bride. When Buttercup wails, “You mock my pain!” Westley answers succinctly:

“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

As someone who has spent almost half his life in sales, that quote resonates with me more ways than I can begin to tell you. And, by way of illustration, let me draw your attention to a recent post by Rebecca Blood. Responding to a blog entry from Salon’s Scott Rosenberg about his experience at a recent panel talk on elitism in media and blogging, she says that he came away with the wrong impression:

The dichotomy in the argument he describes isn't "blogs vs journalism". The unspoken premise underlying this argument is that books and articles are published commercially because they represent the best writing that is available. But that's not the way the publishing business works.
Publishers are interested in printing books and articles they can sell, nothing more, nothing less. When publishers evaluate a book proposal, they don't ask if the work is true or original or insightful or well-written. First and foremost, they ask themselves if they can sell it. If they don't think they can, they pass. If they believe there is a market and that they can effectively market the work, they buy it.

If you haven’t noticed that mediocrity rules the entertainment world then you haven’t been paying attention. And here’s the reason. Good or bad, who cares? All that matters is; can it be sold? Is there a market? We are running a business here, after all. And this, in turn, led me to wonder about the business that Rebecca leaves out of her analysis: the business of reporting the news.

How much of what we see and hear in the news is the product of honest and unbiased reporting and how much is the product of can I sell it? There’s an old axiom in the news business that says “If it bleeds, it leads” which means simply that bad news sells. Another way of saying it is “The dog that doesn’t bite never gets covered”. Now, if news reporting is biased in favor of the negative – if that is what the news industry feels the market is looking for – is it unrealistic to surmise that other biases exist, as well? At what point does “All the News That’s Fit to Print” become “All the News That Fits Our Demographic”?

Let’s say that you are an editor of a major metropolitan newspaper – or a producer in the news division at a TV station. You are choosing which stories you are going to headline for the next edition or broadcast. Today, your choices are two, both of which concern the current conflict in Iraq. One is about a car-bomb that killed ten people near Baghdad; the other has to do with Kurdish families rebuilding their lives and sending their children – including their daughters – to school. Which story do you lead with? Okay, it’s fair enough to say that the car-bomb story is an (all too familiar) attention-grabber, so you go with it. What about the other story? Do you run it, perhaps a few pages deeper in the paper or a few minutes later in the broadcast?

Or do you decide that it’s not newsworthy, that you can’t sell it, or that it’s not what your demographic wants to see?

And, if so, what happens to that story? Especially when another editor/producer in another city looks at the choices and makes the same decision you do? And when, day after day, the positive is discarded in favor of the negative because the prevailing wisdom is that’s what sells – disregarding for the moment that there may be other, more personal reasons why good news about the Middle East is suppressed – how does that affect public opinion? If all that people see or hear about a subject – any subject – is negative, why would anyone ever think that their collective opinion about it would be positive?

I would argue that blogs are threatening to journalism (and journalists) but that the threat has nothing at all to do with the quality of the end product. Instead, it has everything to do with the quantity of information available and the news industry’s control over how it gets published – or if it gets published at all. The MSM considers itself to be the gateway for news to reach the public. For something to be considered actual ‘news’ and not just hearsay, rumor or innuendo, it has to be authenticated and come from a reputable source. Meaning, of course, one of them. Blogs are changing all that and, in doing so, they’re committing the worst sin of all: they’re giving away what journalists don’t want to sell.

And that’s terrible salesmanship.

Update: Scott Rosenberg responds to Rebecca's post on his site. My favorite bit:

Well, you know, mediocrity flourishes everywhere! So sayeth Sturgeon's Law: 90 percent of everything is crud. Further complicating matters, your view of which 10 percent isn't crud is likely to be different from mine, or Keen's, or Blood's. All "bests," in the end, are subjective. Outside of sports and other scored pursuits, "best" is just another word for "my favorite."

So the real challenge is to find ways of helping each of us find our way to a higher percentage of the stuff each of us thinks isn't cruddy. And that's where I side with Blood and the blogosphere: any new media structure that enables more voices to be heard and found deserves our embrace, because it increases the size of the pool in which we fish for our personal supply of non-crud.