The five W’s in journalism every student learns on day one are “Who, what, when, where and why”?
Recently the Associated Press, founded in 1846 and winner of 59 Pulitzers, announced that they are buying out U.S. print journalists and either not replacing them or replacing them with video-journalists or “visual reporting” in corporate speak.
I have been a photojournalist in my career and also a writer. My photojournalism was pretty good I would say, but it never broached the subject of why. It was always about Who, What, Where, maybe sometimes How. But rarely Why. I was paid to get the image and to document what it was about. There are exceptions of course to this, but they are not the norm.
Due to the continued drop in usage of AP stories by its member news agencies, and a shift to more photo and video-based reporting, AP has decided to shift away from their traditional print media journalists. While the company’s leaders claim they are doing this from a position of “strength” and that they have no intention of abandoning their core mission of providing factual impartial news, the question that needs to be asked is:
Why?
In journalism school the first thing you are taught is to ask the five W’s, which frame all stories” Who did it? What is it? When did it happen? Where did it happen? And finally, perhaps the most important question of all, “Why did it happen?”
As we move more and more into a video dominated world, the details of why things happen become more opaque. The complexities of Why are many, often not initially stated or purposely hidden (why did we go to war against Iran? The President’s reasons change day to day, sometime hour to hour).
The core of any story is why. Why was someone murdered, or we passed a law or any other news piece you can name. Without the why we are left clueless, to choose our own why’s that may be totally wrong. Think about Robert Kennedy Jr and his vaccine attacks. Why is he doing this? Why are vaccines important? The answers to these questions inform people, rather than simply being the next headline or video tag in a rolling feed on Instagram, never to return again. The decisions made by uninformed people simply watching video feeds with little or no context can range from January 6th insurrection, to allowing their children to die from measles because they don’t understand the why of vaccines.
When we drop the Whys we drop the meaning of news. Add to that, that AI gets its understanding of news from sources like AP. Without that underlying meaning, the answers we get as time goes on from Ai will get even worse than they are today.
While we still have places like the New York Times and Substack to find out the why’s, the shrinking nature of the news world, and the constant attacks by wanna be dictators like Trump put all of us at risk.
This is not a bit of news we should cheer. We should start looking harder for the missing why.
The original story was reported by AP but carried by the Seattle Times here. Read more on the history of the AP here.
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Superb reporting, Al, and thank you for the unsparing, why, why, for the love of God, why’s we should all be asking of Trump and RFK Junior’s insane policies on war and disease prevention. I remember very well the 4 W’s and one H, drilled into us by Professor Jackson at the UW, may he rest in peace. I never thought I’d live to see the venerated Associated Press reduced to news lite. Excellent piece!
If I understand “why” this article was written, there are a couple missing pieces.
Video journalism doesn’t go into “why”, like print journalism does? Please explain. Is this because it isn’t done well? Because there less space for such content in a video, and it’s the last thing on the priority list? Is the fuss over 60 Minutes about something else?
AI misses out on important content? Is this because of that defect in video journalism, or more because training an AI model on print content is far more efficient that the same content in a video? Could this be the other side of the coin – journalism’s commercial problem as a provider of content that tends to be shared for free online by AI and search engines? If you’re looking for the story on something, and the content is in an AP video, you pretty much have to watch their video, it isn’t going to be excerpted in a search engine return.
I personally hate the modern trend of publishing everything as videos, and I could rant on about why, but AP just seems to be living in the real world here. In another couple decades, who grew up reading anything, will all be gone, and it will be a world of video watchers.
Thanks Don. By the way I’m on a personal mission to change how Ai is spelled since online the large I is the same font as the small L! So I am Al and Ai is that!
I’ve seen video journalism get into the why but as we know most video journalism needs to be very short form these days because people’s attention span has dropped almost zero. I agree with you that I really don’t like watching videos for news. Almost worthless.