They say you should never meet heroes, but that’s bullshit. In 2010 I talked about blogging at a media conference in Hilversum. That was trendy then. The American journalist and my role model Mike Allen was also on the program. He had his news site in a short time Politico developed into an established medium by sending out a thorough political newsletter every morning.
While I was giving my Dutch lecture, hero Allen sat in the front row. He didn’t suffer from jet lag, because the man got up every morning at four o’clock to write his newsletter. Because it is six hours later in the Netherlands, my story fell exactly during his working hours. He tapped his laptop eagerly. After that, Allen took part in a panel. The laptop went on stage with me. Every now and then he looked up, said something clever – for example that journalists should be much more service-oriented – and continued to write.
I would never forget his work ethic, nor that comment about service orientation.
The implicit promise of journalists to their audience is to inform them as well as possible. When journalists started doing this a few centuries ago, printing daily news stories on paper was the best method.
Not much has changed since then. Sure, journalists work online these days. They use more image and sound. But for the most part, they still inform the public through news stories that would not have been out of place in a nineteenth-century newspaper.
Mike Allen’s critique was 12 years ago: put yourself in the reader’s lives and try to come up with new forms of journalism that fit their needs. His readers were busy in the morning, but wanted to know what was going on in political Washington. Allen’s point-by-point newsletter was the successful answer.
After fifteen years and thousands of newsletters—he skipped seven editions to climb a mountain—Allen embarked on a new journalism experiment: Axios.com. On this news site, the articles are as short as possible and contain pointers such as ‘Why is this important’ and ‘the big picture’. He came up with this ‘smart brevity’ out of frustration. Why do journalists write lengthy news stories while the public is faced with more information than ever before?
Allen is not the only American journalist developing service-oriented formats. Take Ben Smith, the world’s best media journalist. Last week he launched the news site Semaphor, in response to declining public confidence in the press. Editor-in-chief Smith wants his journalists to write according to a service-oriented structure: the reader must be able to see through fixed sections what the news is, what the journalist thinks about it and what are frequently heard counter-arguments. They should also link to interesting perspectives from competing media.
I miss this service-oriented innovation drive in the Netherlands. It would do our journalism good if we adopt Allen and Smith’s subservient attitude, put the reader’s wishes first and thus develop new formats.
Sometimes that heroic wisdom does hold true. A few years ago I would have breakfast with Ben Smith. I was waiting for him at the bar of a New York diner. He came in, walked right up to me and said, “Hello waiter, one coffee please.”
Ernst-Jan Pfauth writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 31, 2022