A spoilt child's view: In defense of "outsight journalism"

[imomus]

The word "outsight" doesn't really exist in the English language. This, I think, is an oversight. Or perhaps an undersight.

We know all about insight. In the world of journalism, for instance, insight would be a glimpse into the inside of things, often made by an insider, someone who participates in the world he's describing, or at least can give that impression after a couple of interviews and an afternoon of research.

Of course, it's more complicated than that. Most journalists are only semi-insiders, and the trade faces a difficult loyalty-balancing act. The cabalistic groups of insiders who run much of modern life clearly don't want too much of their modus operandi given away, but rewriting their press releases or printing their top-down leaks is not good journalism. On the other hand, if you reveal too much you'll be blocked from future access to the kind of inside information you depend on. It's irrelevant whether your story's factually correct or not -- the punishment for embarrassing power will be that you get fewer interesting stories in future, or get them later than your rivals. You'll be pushed outside the insider world.

So an insight journalist walks a scary line between inside and outside, between flirtation with power and betrayal of it, between loyalty to sources and loyalty to readers. But what does an outsight journalist do? Well, mostly an outsight journalist makes value judgements and unexpected connections. The outsight journalist is a critic and a poet.

At Wired News, I was a classic outsight journalist. I never met my editors, who lived not only in a different state from me, but -- most of the time -- in a different date (San Francisco is mostly yesterday if you're in Japan). I also never met most of the people I wrote about, nor spoke to them on the phone. I didn't even read Wired much -- I didn't buy a single copy of the paper magazine the whole time I wrote for Wired, and the website wasn't in my bookmarks list. I was an outsider both to Wired and to the tech world it covers. And I thought that was an advantage.

Don't get me wrong -- I'd sometimes look at articles on the Wired site and marvel at their technical nous, their business knowledge. Informed insider journalism, written by people who really know their subject, is fantastic, some of the best writing there is. I couldn't hope to compete with that. What I could do is "freshen" a world possibly made stale by repetition of familiar stories (the new business that comes from leftfield, the invention that remakes lost corporate fortunes, the scandal about misused power). Rather than rehashing those familiar themes, I could startle readers by framing things they already knew about a bit differently, or slagging things off, or pointing up toxic politics in everyday things, or making unexpected connections. Estrangement journalism, verfremdungseffekt journalism. The exoticization of the everyday. Refreshing! Provocative! Hey, I never thought of it that way!

Context, originality, ethics, fresh associations, estrangement; these were the things I aimed for, the virtues of outsight journalism. They require a more distant, yet also more personal view. They're the essence of commentary rather than factual writing. They may seem like eccentricity, quirkiness, subjectivity, but actually they help you be more objective, because you compare their take with your own and with the standard view, and triangulate quite an accurate picture of the thing in question. The outsight is a valuable part of that.

Click Opera is all about outsight. It's also about glamour. I write about things I'm attracted to precisely because they're new to me, or strange to me. There's a connection between outsight writing and glamour; they both get generated by distance. Only outsiders perceive things as glamorous.

Let's say I want to write something about fashion, children's fashion. I'm preparing, imagine, an article about Milk magazine, Vogue Bambini and Kidswear. It's interesting to me because I don't have kids, don't buy the magazines, have no real investment in fashion and no friends in the industry to feed me inside tittle-tattle. Remember, we don't want insider-generated insight journalism with its characteristic wobbly walk along a line of divided loyalties, its inner narrative of betrayal, its spy, quisling and double agent metaphors. We want outsight: how does this world look from the outside? What unexpected connections might this world -- children's fashion -- have with totally different worlds?

As an outsight journalist, I'd structure my article with questions, the ones that pop into my head about this bubble world of children's fashion. Many of these questions would be critical, in the sense that they'd be concerned with power, and imbalances of power between the parties involved.

* How important is it that these magazines -- and the clothes they show -- are not bought by the people who'll wear the clothes in question?

* Are these magazines about clothes at all, or are they about power, status, display, and so on?

* Is there a sartorial age of consent? The age at which, in Morrissey's poignant words, "she'll be walking your streets in the clothes that she went out and chose for herself"?

* Does the passivity -- the lack of agency -- of the children shown in these magazines actually just exaggerate the passivity and lack of agency of all models in all fashion magazines?

* Might passivity and lack of agency -- surprisingly! -- lead to better dressing? After all, few people love themselves as tenderly as parents love their children, and the children in these magazines are dressed (I'd say) better than anyone else in the Western world. Might love for others -- extended into "dressing others against their will" -- be a better sartorial motive than the supposedly-noble one of self-projection, self-expression? In other words, might these magazines be one in the eye for the Western cult of individualism?

That's how I'd structure my outsight article about children's fashion. Sure, I might research a few facts about the turnover of the children's clothes market, and make a few observations about this season's styles. But those are things anyone could do. Asking an outsider's questions -- and gaining fresh perspective from the answers -- is something only a good outsighter could do. Or possibly a slightly spoiled child.

Comments

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

"In the world of journalism, for instance, insight would be a glimpse into the inside of things, often made by an insider, someone who participates in the world he's describing, or at least can give that impression after a couple of interviews and an afternoon of research."

the insider is not the journalist, but the person he interviews as part of his reporting. honestly, i don't see the advantage of not doing a lot of research or interviewing several people for an article. it hasn't stopped really great reporters like ron rosenbaum, or tom wolfe, or calvin trillin and many else from writing absolutely unusual pieces with a very special perspective, and about fields they often had no special knowledge of before starting to work on an article. it has more to do with the way of thinking, and the way of attacking a subject and giving these thoughts an appropriately precise form, than with the reporting techniques.
at the same time, i think you are often doing the same thing you are critizising in mainstream journalism. the "mainstream journalist" with the "standard view" would say "i haven't seen anything by straub/huillet, but i know such boring, pretentious avantgarde crap can't compete with an epic achievement like "the wire"". while you would say "i haven't seen "the wire", nor "the simpsons", but this can only be dull 19th century convenience entertainment, i'd rather have another inspirational bore by straub/huillet". i think, that is not the perspective of the fresh outsider, but rather everyone stays in his camp. i'd be more fascinated i fyou could work out some unseen aspects of, say, "24", coming from someone foreign to this world of entertainment production, and linking it with avantgarde filmmaking, maybe in a very negative way, but it should be done with precision, and not with a bold stroke dismissing things unknown to you. having heard about something is no the same as having seen/read/heard it oneself. i had heard that godard's later works are seen by many as difficult and extrememly boring, but in what way precisely, and what they could still give me, and where i think they fail, i could only know after i saw them myself.
another thing i find unfortunate in some of your articles is a sloppiness with facts, that often are at the core of your arguments, for example, when you once wrote you preferred the "art world" to the "music world" in part because it is ruled by women, and gave only one or two examples for this claim, when all my browsing of art magazines, web sites, rankings etc stongly suggest to me that rather the opposite is the case. such claims lead, in my opinion, rather to counter-feminism than to towards a self-fulfilling prophecy. more an "unself-fulfilling prophecy" (a term by ron rosenbaum, by the way). i mostly find your blogging best when you write about what you know really well, music and your own music making, for instance. and your lyrics, of course. and your novel, i'm convinced, are great writings. there is all the subtle poetry, your articles lack when they get boldly polemic in an imprecise way.

[(Anonymous)]

Hear, hear!