Howard Mortman, C-SPAN communications director, pleasantly strolled me down Memory Lane during his recent lecture at William Peace University concerning the rise of social media. Then he slapped me back into a present and petrifying reality. More about that downpage.
It now seems quaint, perhaps Paleolithic by modern comparison, that as a young reporter at a small Pennsylvania daily newspaper I had a rotary-dial phone and pounded out breaking news on a Royal manual typewriter.
I would hand my copy layered with scribbled proofreader marks to Esther the typesetter. Esther’s magic machine spit out reams of yellow paper tape populated by curious and seemingly misaligned holes that were code for the news of the day destined to roll off the press.
My first encounter with a technological revolution occurred when I moved downriver to a county seat newspaper. I was awarded an IBM Selectric typewriter. Its electric keyboard’s strange symbols inserted codes on my 8 1/2×11 page that were translated by a computerized scanner.
That process made jobs like Esther’s obsolete.
But we still had no cell phones, faxes, or Internet. Dusty reference books in the local public library, envelopes engorged with our newspaper clippings, and institutional memory served as our Google. Our pockets jangled with dimes to call in a story. Dictation over a pay phone was how we uploaded and downloaded stories eagerly awaited by our afternoon readers.
The second Information Age boom was the advent of computers into the newsroom. Wow! It was like being a Jedi journalist with a cyber genie in the box waiting to grant unlimited word search wishes.
Fast-forward to Mortman’s appearance at William Peace University to discuss how the nation’s only public affairs cable TV network employs today’s social media juggernaut to create some sizzle in the 100 million households where it’s available.
“We are not for the faint of heart,” Mortman said. “Sometimes it’s really interesting and riveting; sometimes it’s not.”
C-SPAN provides gavel-to-gavel coverage of congressional hearings and Washington political events without editorial comments by bobble-head pundits. For those whose pulse doesn’t quicken over politics, it could be an antidote to insomnia.
Mortman asked for a show of hands from the 50 or so students to determine who was a cable consumer. Had he asked for a show of fingers, there wouldn’t have been enough to fill one hand.
For an old, ink-stained wretch encrusted in the notion that long-form journalism best pollinates alert and aware citizens, that’s when the petrifying portion of Mortman’s lecture began to unravel.
None subscribed to a newspaper.
“That’s amazing. You guys are putting newspapers out of business,” Mortman said.
“How many of you get your news from the nightly news, the Big Three?” Mortman asked.
A small handful. Fewer still knew who Brian Williams was. Only two said they cared he was suspended from his job — one because her mother was a fan, the other because he was shocked the NBC anchor lied about news events.
“How do you all get your news?” Mortman asked.
CNN, WRAL, a USA Today app, and the BBC, a few students said. A nice, albeit left-leaning, mix. Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, others said. Sigh.
“How many of you watch Jon Stewart? There go the hands. Me, too,” Mortman said.
So if I understand this, today’s college students prefer a fake newscaster consistently adulterating real news stories into a comedy shtick to a real news anchor who, on rare occasions, invents stories about his derring-do.
“We become what we behold,” said Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian intellectual whose communication theory made him a cult hero, and whose prophecy of the World Wide Web nearly three decades before it occurred exemplified his grasp of media and technology, and their effects on culture. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”
Mortman’s job at C-SPAN is to shape its unblinking eye through social media tools.
The Internet and its many tentacles operate off of the “prevalence and availability of video,” Mortman said. Video is something of which C-SPAN has a lot.
So the C-SPAN execs do things such as using Facebook or a Twitter account to link to their Web page to see video clips posted on YouTube.
U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., resigns over taxpayer and campaign spending improprieties? C-SPAN puts a clip of his last floor speech on YouTube, tweets it out, and the Twitterverse magnifies it. Drunken Secret Service agents crashing White House barricades in the news? Put a clip of a subsequent congressional hearing on YouTube and tweet it for a cascade of hits.
That same formula helped one wacky clip land in C-SPAN’s No. 6 most-viewed spot of all time, and it had a Raleigh connection.
C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program featured political strategist guests Brad Woodhouse, a Democrat, and brother Dallas, a Republican, who were the stars of the documentary “Woodhouse Divided.” As they bickered on national TV, their mother Joy Woodhouse unexpectedly called in on an open line to scold them.
“It was thrilling for us. We clipped it immediately, and it went, as they say, viral,” Mortman said.
The next day matriarch Joy Woodhouse opened a Twitter account to see what everyone was saying about her taking her sons to the cyber woodshed.
As McLuhan might say, the medium is the message.
Dan E. Way (@danway_carolina) is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.