I spend a lot time thinking about the news – mostly because I don’t have a lot of time to consume it. I know I need the right data and information to make decisions and play a meaningful role in society, but unless it’s mobile and there when I need (usually in 5-minute increments), then I miss it.
But at the same time as a digital communications professional, I continually look for the best ways to use media across platforms to inform and engage audiences.
Have our habits and expectations as digital consumer really altered the way we consume political news or and information? Have they altered the way media organizations deliver the news? Who do we trust the most to deliver our political news and information every day? How will political media continue to change in 2011?
These questions are behind a series of interviews I conducted this winter with people I know and trust in the media space and have pulled together in a series of profiles called The Brave New World of Political Information. Over the next few weeks, I’ll look at some of their responses, starting with New York Times columnist Matt Bai.
Matt Bai – The New York Times
Matt Bai writes the “Political Times” column for the New York Times and is a frequent contributor for the Time Magazine, where he covered both the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Bai often explores issues of generational change in American politics and society. His seminal cover stories in the magazine include the 2008 cover essay “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” and a 2004 profile of John Kerry titled “Kerry’s Undeclared War.” His work was honored in both the 2005 and 2006 editions of The Best American Political Writing.
Bai is also the author of The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, now available in paperback. The book, which chronicles the rise of the first Internet-age political movement and the people who built it, was honored as a New York Times Notable Book for 2007. The Economist called The Argument “engaging and painstakingly reported,” and the Washington Post called it “a must read.”
Before joining Time Magazine in 2002, Bai spent five years as a national correspondent for Newsweek. In 2001, he was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, where he led a seminar on the next generation of political journalism. He began his career as a city desk reporter for the Boston Globe, and his international experience includes coverage from Iraq and Liberia.
What is the first publication, show, blog, or site that you turn to in the morning for news and information?
The New York Times, not surprisingly, and not just to see if I’ve written a column. I don’t think the Times can be your sole source of news, any more than any other site can be, but it’s indispensable and unrivaled in its depth. So I consume as much of it as I’ve got time for, not as a writer but as a reader, like anybody else.
How have the New York Times and your field of journalism changed in the last two years?
Well, both have changed massively, obviously. The field is more niche-driven and more crowded. And the Times itself has transitioned from a newspaper that posts its content online to a website that publishes some of its content in print. That transition is still occurring every day, and it’s not seamless, but in the big picture it’s happening at a remarkably accelerated rate.
What is your biggest challenge in this new media era?
There are many, but for me, as a relatively new columnist, the biggest challenge turns out to be breaking through all the noise and building a relationship with readers. There’s just so much content out there now, and people customize their content so much more than they ever could before, that you really have to be on readers’ RSS feeds and in their Flipboard favorites and all of that. It’s not really enough to just be posted on a homepage – even one as well-trafficked as the Times’.
It’s also a challenge for me personally to find the line between interactive and just plain silly. For instance, there’s all this pressure to tweet all day long, which I won’t do. I mean, does the world really need yet more of my thoughts?
And do I really need to spend more time on the iPhone or the computer rather than, say, with my kids? No and no. I do think you do have to resist some of this technological craziness in order to give the words you write some value, and in order to have some quality of life outside the digital world.
What kinds of “new media” literacies do the current generation of media producers need to survive?
I wish I knew. We need to know how people are consuming the content, so we can reach them. But we ought not to let all the technology change our definition of substantive journalism. Write first, then figure out how to package it — I think the Times has had a lot of success approaching it basically that way.
Where do you want your publication/office to be a year from now?
I hope and expect that we’ll continue to build the best online news site in the world, which in some ways means continuing to shift the focus away from print, which is fine with me. The Times has an awesome home page, but I do think we can still expand and improve the sections behind it, so that the Times becomes really a series of multiple, stand-alone home pages for all kinds of readers, much like the print version. And I imagine that will happen.
What do you think readers want from their media outlets?
Mostly what they’ve always wanted – truth and enlightenment – but perhaps with a bit more perspective and interpretation than we used to provide. And I think now it’s important to build community among your readers. We have to remember that readers aren’t just passive receivers anymore – they want to see into the process of how we produce the news, and they want to know that we’re listening, too. And that means fostering a certain transparency about what we do and admitting when we could do them better.
I’ll give you a case in point, and my bosses might not appreciate it: I read a lot of the Times on my iphone app. So a few months ago I noticed that the app kept crashing and wasn’t really usable, and this went on and on. Finally I wrote to an editor to ask about it, and it turns out that, in fact, the app had been failing because of some technical glitch, and the Times was busy working on it. Now, that’s good to know, but why did a columnist at the paper have to e-mail an editor to find that out? Why didn’t the people running the iPhone content post something to tell their readers that they were aware of the problem and were working on a fix? That’s what I mean by transparency and community.
You can’t think of readers just as readers anymore. They’re constituents, and you have to be communicating with them. You just can’t be this impassive institution anymore. Not in news, and not anywhere else in the society, either.
What person, site, publication, or blog do you trust the most about political news and information?
Well, as I said, that would be the Times. I think Politico does a better and better job of rendering Washington in a more granular and very credible way, too. I don’t read bloggers, generally. I think there are some very good ones, but if you don’t want to become a vehicle for everyone else’s collective wisdom, then it’s best not to consume it, or at least that’s my philosophy.
