Lecturer Emphasizes Online Media

On Thursday Oct. 24, journalist Peter Savodnik ’94 gave a lecture sponsored by the Department of English and American Literature, Ross Commons and the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs titled “Why We Need a New Media Now and What It Will Look Like”, the first lecture in the Meet the Press Lecture Series this year, in the conference room of Robert A. Jones ’59 House.

The room was filled with attendees eager to hear Savodnik, who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and GQ among other publications and has reported from Russia, China, the Middle East and across the United States, speak about the future of media. In addition to being a graduate of Middlebury College, Savodnik has also taught two Winter Term courses at Middlebury.

“We talked a lot about ideas,” said Harry Zieve-Cohen ’15, who was a student in the class as a first-year. “I sort of found since then that my own interests are in the confluence of literature and politics. It was a more rigorous and [academically] serious ...  J-term course than most J-term classes. People should take his class this January.”

In his lecture, Savodnik discussed how Stateless Media, the news company he founded that produces short videos called “shortreals” that deliver news stories in a more exciting and cinematic format, began. The first shortreal he made, “Brothers Shaikh,” is about a British man named Nasser Shaikh who travels from Britain to Sri Lanka to find the hotel where his brother Khuram was murdered and where Khuram’s girlfriend was raped.

Savodnik then spoke about why we need a new form of media. Though for many years he had vowed to remain a print journalist, in recent years Savodnik began realizing the deficiencies of current media. Print journalism is rapidly shrinking, making it no longer a medium that engages the public. “Journalists ... run the distinct risk of becoming more and more like academics, that is, instead of speaking to the whole world, [they are] speaking more and more to each other,” Savodnik said.

The lecture captivated the audience’s attention and caused a spirited discussion in the Q&A session, in which many members of the audience, who have grown up with traditional media, questioned Savodnik’s idea of new media. As the organizer of the Meet the Press Lecture Series, Scholar-in-Residence Sue Halpern from the English and American Literatures department observes, “[t]here were a fair number of skeptics in the audience and ... their pointed questions were useful in helping the rest of us understand Peter Savodnik’s vision.”

The topic of journalism relates further to America’s troubled democratic regime. Many problems that plague the government today seem to be closely connected to the condition of the media.

“At this point in time it’s questionable whether we have either a free press, given the corporate ownership of so many media outlets, or a functioning democracy, as evidence by the government shutdown among other gerrymandered disasters,” Halpern wrote in an email. “What makes so-called new media important is the possibility of reinvigorating the press, in part by bypassing the constraints of traditional media.”

“Without a healthy media, democracy cannot function,” Zieve-Cohen said. “Indeed, I don’t think it’s a stretch to trace many of American democracy’s current problems to our present lack of a mature and intelligent media.”

Campus journalism seems to embody in some respects the idea of new media, as shown by many projects on campus.

“Because students are already familiar and comfortable and used to multimedia as consumers,” wrote Halpern, “and because there are so many students here who have multimedia skills themselves, Middlebury students are already doing this kind of work themselves. MiddBeat is a good example. The audio-visual profiles done by the Narrative Journalism fellows is another, as is the ‘Portraits (in) Justice’ project, and there are many others.”