Filed by Bil at 11:13 am under Pop Culture, Social Issues, The Media

Note of contention: I have been trying to post this article for over a week now, but something was wrong with our Word Press editor software. Yes. Technical problems with the website prevented me from posting an article titled “Websites are the future”…anyway, here it is, in all last week’s glory…

I’m going to write this article with three points that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, starting with:

1) Pay for what you get.

If you don’t give money to Chicago Public Radio, here’s what you have to look forward to. Or, if you don’t listen to Chicago Public Radio, it’s what you have to look forward to hearing me talk about.

You don’t want that, do you?

Give $20 at WBEZ.org

Speaking of websites being the future…

2) Make the most of a dire situation.

I work for a website. My day job as customer support at a certain online automotive research & listings website seems remarkably secure, given the fact that GM and Chrysler, cumulatively, are declining to renew about 1700 dealerships’ franchise contracts, forcing many of them to close entirely, and putting somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 citizens out of work. The auto industry right now is like an ill-fated combination of the Titanic, the Challenger, the Death Star, and Britney Spears, and we’re not through the worst of it yet.

But the worse it gets out there, it seems, the more I feel needed at work. More and more I am not just technical support, I am also (unwittingly) emotional support. Which is ridiculous…that’s not in my job description, and anyway, I have my own problems, I don’t want to hear about some stranger’s over the phone.

Annoyances aside, however – because I work at this website, and because consumers do most of their car research and even pre-shopping online nowadays, thus making my company indispensable to the survival of individual dealerships, I leave the office every day knowing that my company will be there tomorrow. Dealers realize – many of them do, anyway – that while it costs an arm and a leg to advertise their inventory on our site, it will actually cost them more NOT to advertise on our site.

…Wow, when you put it that way, it makes us seem like opportunistic, soulless bastards. Hey, what are you gonna do…It’s for-profit. (Snap! Take that, Capitalism.)

But there is a difference between being opportunistic and seizing an opportunity. It depends on how you play it. You can be Bernie Madoff or you can be Eminem. The situation is dire, and our company is really trying as hard as it can to help dealerships survive the rough patch, because the more dealerships don’t go out of business, the more we don’t go out of business, too.

So, for as irritating as my job can be at times, at least I have a job, and I’m pretty sure I’ll continue to have this job for as long as I can stand it.

Brief tangent: I walked outside today on my lunch break and there was some crazy homeless dude honking away on a beat up old alto sax. He sounded atrocious. It was painful.

As it so happens, I had pulled my own tenor sax out of its case last night for about the fifth time in the last three years, and I did NOT sound pretty:

Bil vs. the saxophone

But at least, I thought to myself as I walked past, at least I’m still better than this guy. Which is a weird and terrible thing to think, because I in no way need to feel threatened by that poor homeless man. Like my follow up thoughts should be yeah, I’m better at the sax than this man. I also have a job. And a home. And some deodorant.

But hey, to bring it back around: All this guy had in the world was his saxophone and the clothes on his back. He was making the most of a dire situation. Kudos.

Speaking of giant industries crumbling like a cake…

3) Connect the dots.

There’s this fascinating discussion I found on the Chicago Public Radio Blog – the article is called “The Future of Journalism is sooo hot right now!” If you have any interest in the way the journalism industry is headed, I strongly recommend listening to the panel discussion. They’ve got the entire recorded discussion that you can listen to at the bottom of the page. It’s brilliant.

They talk about not only the way professionals may or may not have to adapt in order to make a decent living in the field, they talk about how news organizations survive, and because the panel is so varied, you get a sense of how some of the individual Chicago papers perceive one another. It’s pretty cool.

My favorite point they make on the industry is this: the industry is not dying, it is in transition, like a natural forest fire, clearing the way for fresh growth. In a dire situation such as this, opportunity abounds, and where opportunity abounds, creativity flows.

They also bring up quality several times – quality in journalism has the potential to go down (if genuine journalistic organizations start trying to compete with everyday blogs), but it also has great potential to improve. It’s up to the new journalists, and the outlook is very optimistic.

Something here, too, that is never expressly said but I somehow take away from it is this: websites are the present. Print is not dead, and it is not dying, there is simply the internet as well. The internet is fast and often interactive, but not always as efficient and with more interaction comes more potentially false information. With websites, journalists now ought to strive more for solid, quality reporting and stories that matter. Carl Bernstein said it best: good reporting “is the best obtainable version of the truth.” The internet is simply a means of presentation.

I find the idea of journalism so much more interesting than the news itself; with 24-hour news networks, up-to-the-minute wire feeds, I feel sometimes that the news of the world is like the endless plate of spaghetti at Sizzler: you only need one plate, but they keep bringing more. And more. And more. And then you barf.

But the idea of journalism – the thought that you can take pieces of factual information and put them together so that a story makes sense to a reader – is endlessly intriguing. I guess it’s the same with plays and novels and so on – you take your facts (fictional or real) and you put them in order (chronological or not) and you tell your tale (fictional or real) with as much honesty as you can muster.

It’s like connecting the dots: a piece of information, a factoid, is a single dot. You get two pieces of information, you have a one-dimesnional line. The human tendency is to go from earlier to later, but the line can go both ways. You get a third piece of information, now you’ve got two dimensions (a triangle). You add a fourth piece, now you’ve got a three-dimensional story (a pyramid). They might not necessarily pertain to one another at first, but arranged properly, they can make a structurally interesting three-dimensional story. That’s high quality.

I guess now the test is: can I put my own dots together to come up with a story that I can present? Let’s find out…

1) Websites are the future (ironic). Donate money via an online pay service to help stop the internet from becoming the future. Being a good person means websites are not the future.
2) Websites are the future (non-ironic). Using the internet to make the most of the situation helps everyone. Being a good business means the internet is the future.
3) The future is now. The internet has been around for decades and the buzz has worn off; we are now in the process of making the internet work for us instead of us working for the internet. We are integrating real life with online capabilities. We are selling cars with the help of websites. We use the internet to help fund a radio organization that would like to remind everyone that the internet is not the only thing in the world, and meanwhile this radio organization’s blog hosts a recording of a live panel discussion by journalists who would also like to remind everyone the internet is not the only thing in the world.

That’s a decent enough arrangement of points that on the surface don’t really have much to do with each other: intriguing, building off its ideas, self-referential and charmingly low-key…But what about a conclusion?

I’m not there yet. That, I think, will have to wait for the actual writing of it. I will write it (and conclude it) in the future; presently, I will go to the Chicago Ale House for a beer and leave the internet behind.

Websites to check out:

The Future of Journalism is sooo hot right now!
The Chicago Journalism TownHall: Panel Discussion (Part 1)

And, randomly:

Hypercities - this is just so freakin’ cool…