"Access Denied"

"Once you’re looking for it, you see signs of access panic everywhere. Before election coverage had gathered much speed, Awl pal (and newsletter creator) Laura Olin, who led social media operations for Obama’s 2012 campaign, 
suggested that Twitter would be used by candidates as a sort of press wire: for some stories, or responses, it was easier for a campaign to simply @ an opponent or make a point directly in front of millions of followers. If the post or exchange is sufficiently newsworthy, the press would write about it anyway.

There are situations that used to require the presence of a reporter to write something down and publish it that can now be resolved with a short, colloquial post. For the quick quote-response type of story, a subject has less need to grant access and the reporter has less leverage to demand it. This, it seemed, would change the jobs of both political operatives and reporters alike...

If Trump creates a television spectacle, Fox and MSNBC will likely cut to it, live. It will be discussed thereafter. Networks, despite this, are banding together to complain that Trump is denying them access typical during presidential campaigns; meanwhile, Trump is demanding CNN give $5 million to charity or else he won’t participate in the next debate. The Huffington Post’s July announcement that it would categorize all Trump stories as “entertainment,” keeping them out of the politics section, doesn’t seem to have slowed its coverage. “Donald Trump’s campaign severely restricted journalists’ movements Tuesday night in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, by keeping them in a press pen,” begins a HuffPo storywritten by the site’s senior media reporter and posted in its “Media” section. We won’t take the bait, we scream, neck-deep in red chum...

One’s expectations of fairness and fullness have transferred from editors and producers and their products to engineers and developers and their products. The trick, this time around, is that these products are designed in such a way to reflect such expectations back to the user: we are persuaded that our feeds are our fault, which minimizes the systems through which they are continuously created. (Don’t blame us! Your feed is made of your choices. Choices you make within a framework that we’ve built!) Neutral editors or publications were always an illusion. They’re people, or made of people! Neutral feeds are an even trickier one. They’re the products of systems. Systems designed by people. (Systems within which Roberts’s “parallel intellectual infrastructure” of conservative media is both inevitable and considered part of the big balanced mix.)...

Or, I mean, maybe these conditions will create for audiences a clearer need for stories that the powerful don’t want told, and those audiences will reward these stories with their attention. But predicting that the further empowerment of the powerful will actually result in greater accountability, rather than just demand it, is maybe a little… optimistic? I mean, maybe social platforms will usher in a new era of investigative reporting and subsequent reform. Or maybe they’re the worst possible place for that! Someone should investigate. Would share."

http://www.theawl.com/2015/12/access-denied

First of all, I lovvveeeee this author's writing style. Read the tags too, at the very bottom above the comments. 

This is really interesting and important and its convincing me that this is an even more pressing problem than I had thought it was: the question of media falling apart, and the new ways that we access information.

I am very interested in the idea of curation, and proper curation, of the enormous world of knowledge that is available to all of us. It's absurd to say that because we "can" Google anything or have access to all these public Twitter feeds, we can actually individually do our own research on every topic. We need curators and collectors; we need people to see the gaps in what is available publically, and the gaps in how information is presented (ex. If it all had a specific bias) and we need these people to have structures and incentives to fill these gaps. We need people who will collect all this raw data and turn it into something that is easy to fit into the everyday lives of the people who need that information. And, in the age of the Internet when we passively encounter so much information and media, we really need people who are thinking hard about curation systems. 

I don't want to go back to a world where, like, 3 news channels put themselves in charge of curating information for all Americans. But right now, this is so terrifyingly true, it's these social media and search platforms that were not designed for this and who I frankly don't trust with this responsibility. 

Whoever comes up with the practice and tools for realistic, scalable curation is going to be my superhero.

Related: 2015 is end of Internet, all the other ones...

FB: #MustRead About the theoretical and real-world consequences of the diminishing power of the press - for story subjects, reporters, and consumers "Politicians, corporations and celebrities enjoy different types and measures of power. But the effects of access panic are also noticeable as they relate to the far less powerful: just as publication without the leverage of a captive audience can’t so easily demand to sit down with a reluctant and powerful subject, a reporter might find more resistance from less powerful subjects wary of his publications’ motives...


Cooperation was never the default. But the calculation changes significantly when news outlets have less to offer. A protester might consciously accept the risk of a quote being included in a less sympathetic story if that story is the best or only way to raise awareness for a cause. That same protester, in a world in which the local paper can no more guarantee a large audience than a few dozen sympathetic Twitter users, might tell a reporter who she knows is going to have to write an on-the-one-hand story, or something that would be, in her view, worse—something condescending or racist, for example—to fuck right off. The reporter’s response, that he’s just doing his job (as in the Mizzou incident), will ring hollow, because it demands the protester accept premises about The Press that she might… not. It assumes a situation in which he is able to provide some sort of access to audience and legitimacy; it says, implicitly, that he is about to record history and represent it to the masses, so she’d better let him get her side of the story. This might sound absurd to a subject who came to a protest not because of a story from a publication, but because of a post from an activist on Twitter."