Last night I listened to the NPR reporter interview the director from the service organization that just got dropped after a foster child was murdered here in LA. They guy took his time and explained patiently how his organization, which had been consistently rated in the top 10% of such providers to the government offices whose business is foster children and adoption got puked on for no good reasons.
It struck me that this was a no-win situation, especially as he mentioned that there is an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation means that somebody knows, its just that a bigger somebody with authority doesn't know yet and so officially nothing can be said. But that's somebody still knows. The problem is getting to that somebody is what makes for sensationalism. It is journalism and communications in a nutshell.
The NPR journalist took calls after the director of the service organization finished his statements. A woman from Orange County wanted to know the demographics of foster children and how it was that a family that keeps pit bulls can be approved as foster parents and potential adoptive parents. She wants blood. The LATimes journalist breaking the story is up next. I got out of my car and turned of the radio in disgust.
What's going on here is that the radio station and the newspaper, as part of their business model, need to highlight what's potentially wrong, which is by definition sensational. There's nothing wrong with that, it's important. What's wrong is that the newspaper cannot own that audience because the real audience for this story is longitudinal. The kind of outrage and blood the caller expressed is like an online flamewar with a newb. She obviously knows nothing about the subcontracting details and the authority delegated between the full-time bureacrats in the child welfare department, the care-giving subcontractors and the board of supervisors. None of us do. All we know is a two year old kid was murdered and the system didn't protect her.
The director mentioned the scorecarding system that the County uses to rate its subcontractors as well as the three government officials who would have to be involved in the approval of transfer from foster parentage to adoptive parentage. What we don't know is how well the system works so much of the time that we pay no attention to it. And if we are genuinely interested, where would we look? Most importantly how could we use a different form of communication to translate the energy of outrage which is currently owned by the radio station and the print media journalists into the energy of responsibility owned by the director's care-giving organization?
You see? The length of the attention span of the media in its current instantiation does a disservice to every organization that gets scandalized because the energy of the anti-scandal owned by the media outweighs the energy of reform.
Part of this imbalance is inevitable and cannot be fixed. Consumers cannot be producers. Anybody can enjoy listening to music, but only a few can play it, and only fewer still can compose it. We have a faux system of journalism that promises to enable democracy in conflict with this fundamental human fact. Everybody can be outraged at the death of a two year old, but only a very few of us can prevent it. The Director did not, and maybe he could not. However consumers can become prosumers if they are informed in the right ways. And so voters can become reformers if they are given the proper background. But this is not a job for journalism as it is currently constructed - it is more a job for the communications directors of such agency's as the one now under fire.
If this story generated 50,000 hits at the LATimes, how long with those same eyeballs stay glued? How long can the investigating journalist on the story write about it and follow up? How can those eyeballs be moved to a longer attention span with a prosumer / reformer / watchdog capacity that is credible even in the eyes of the Board of Supervisors, the child welfare agency and the subcontractors kiretsu? This is the problem to be solved in all of journalism and in all of communications. Journalism has to itself move from pique to education or the burden needs to be gracefully transitioned to the communications abilities of the first parties. When the care-giver's agency can take those 50,000 hits and disseminate on a long term basis, then we have a win.
Until then it will be outrage as usual and frustration with the system. This is what the current media generates.
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