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For the Contemporary Media Glossary: "Story Torture"
Let us add to our modern vocabulary of new concepts (both serious and silly) of "the outrage economy" "the currency of attention" and "metafilm" and "mansplaining" and "metaenabling" and the like yet one more: "story torture": "Story torture is the media strategy of taking a news item and torturing every possible angle out of it. Like real torture, the key is not letting the story die, instead slowly beating it from every last possible angle."
The definition of Story Torture really only takes 4 letters, as noted in the picture: ESPN.
Isn't this related to excessive milking? Like, until the teats bleed?
Does that come after story beating, flogging, choking, yanking, wanking, rubbing, and making into a Major Motion Picture narrated by Mel Gibson?
Yet another home run for Abe Sauer. (Quick quibble — the Denton / A.J. thing, surely Denton was saying A.J. has to explain who Favre is? Not to mention why the r and the v are transposed when spoken?)
You mean like running a million posts about the same movie?
Sure if they're by the same critic, if not, then no it's not.
Isn't it, in theory, kind of a great thing to attack a story from every possible angle (or at least a lot of them)? I think there's a lot to be said for the internet as a news medium exactly because it can weave a whole variety of dimensions into a (literally) linked narrative. Newspapers and TV can sorta do it with sidebars and series and spin-off reports, but nowhere near as immediately. Given a choice, I'll take story torture over the older model, where the implication is "This is the story; this is the appropriate way to organize the coverage; these are the relevant data; everything over there is incidental."
Granted that no medium automatically makes for good journalism, and granted that Deadspin and Gawker Media and Nick Denton have their problems. But I don't quite see the connection between story torture and those problems. And I really don't see how the problems Abe cites — the all-consuming devotion to pageviews, the moral vacuum, the sermonizing on one hand while contributing to the crassness on the other — are any more specific to Deadspin and Gawker Media than they are to any other major news organization.
Yeah in theory. The problem is that one story gets covered to the exclusion of everything else. Rat dies pushing lever.
Well, I cannot argue that the "old model" was any better. Though, are there really only two choices?
And I'm not so sure I noted a "problem" as much as a system for creating pageviews where there maybe weren't that many, a phenomenon that really has no one to blame but the reader.
However, I DO see a problem with paying sources because after doing that long enough sources are going to become A) fabricated and B) unwilling to talk to those of us who have nothing to offer them.
@dntsqz: Sure. I'm just not convinced there are severe consequences for humanity or anyone else if Deadspin flogs Brett Favre's penis to death. I'm not convinced there are severe consequences in regard other news stories being flogged to death, either! I mean, I think there are severe consequences somewhere, for sure; but I think the real problem is a lot more subtle than "Everyone's too busy paying attention to Michael Jackson dying, and they're missing x."
@Abe: Fair enough. And yeah, (A) is a pretty big problem; (B) concerns me less, practically speaking. But I'm squicked out by Denton's willingness to pay sources, too.
And no, of course not only two choices. I'd just venture we're experiencing what will eventually come to be seen as the first stage of a qualitative step up, if that makes any sense. That is: Favre penis-flogging notwithstanding, the ability to cover a lot more angles of a single story very rapidly (and to sustain the audience's interest in it) is a good thing; to make it into a better thing, we just have to get better at how we do it.
Your argument reminds me of both pro-Picasso statements circa 1910 and pro-hypertext statements circa 1995. Take from that what you want.
My guess: covering from a lot more angles of a single story will happen in a SINGLE story. The repeats and follow-ons will sound boring a lot faster a few cycles from now.
But the need to get better isn't on the "do it" side, it's on the "consume it" side. And with money the champion of the ding it better side, the consuming it side doesn't have a chance. That is to say, look at what Fox News has accomplished in just a decade and extrapolate it a generation. That the "ability to cover a lot more angles" exists (it always kinda'has)is meaningless.
@dntsqz: You are intentionally being smarter than I am, AND I DO NOT APPRECIATE IT.
But yeah: increasing centralization of the multiple narratives would be a logical step.
@Abe: But no, that ability kinda always hasn't. Unless you are saying that the present speed and volume and ease with which we move information, relative to, well, ever before, are irrelevant.
I dunno. I kinda think the Fox News effect you're concerned about may turn out to be irrelevant; it relies on an audience willfully wrapping itself in a myth, and it's not clear how easy it will be a generation down the line to keep doing that, in part because by then, a bigger chunk of the population will have lived with a world where multiple mainstream perspectives are the norm for so much longer than is currently the case. On the other hand, I am prone to a surfeit of optimism.
Well, Kathy Falk just quit so you better be optimistic.
Ha! Yeah, if I had more than a year and a half to compare it to, I would say things are pretty weird here politically. But since I don't, I wonder if it's not always kinda like this. Is it?
Not in Dane. Falk's been there for 12 years. The county's THAT close to medicinal weed but the GOP is gaining for the first time in forever. Case in point, this shit never would have happened on Soglin's watch without kicking and screaming:
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt_and_politics/article_b06ca23c-b4a0-11df-b569-001cc4c03286.html
For the record, I don;t live in Dane.
@Moff: I learned it from watching you!
@Abe: Maybe we can extrapolate from a decade of Fox, but human fortune is not now nor has it ever been perpetual. Just as everybody wants to tell us lately that the only people who read Rules for Radicals are on the right (they're not), in ten years everybody is likely to have some other Alanis-ready "Who'd have guessed" piece in hand.
Sorry, in ten years that will be "Who'd of guessed."
@Abe: I know. You're still probably better versed in the local politics than I am.
And wow, I had not seen that McDonald's story. MIND-BOGGLING. That's why I patronize the Taco Bell across the street instead.
@dntsqz: You get up EARLY, dude.
Duuuude, Ella's!
They like sandwiches generally.