Just last week, the question
came again. It is a common one, sometimes from a former colleague in
newspaperdom, sometimes from a current colleague here at Stratfor and often
from a reader. It is always to the effect of, "Why is Stratfor so
often out of sync with the news media?" All of us at Stratfor encounter
questions regarding the difference between geopolitical intelligence and political journalism. One
useful reply to ponder is that in conventional journalism, the person providing
information is presumed to know more about the subject matter than the reader.
At Stratfor, the case is frequently the opposite: Our readers typically are
expert in the topics we study and write about, and our task is to provide the
already well-informed with further insights. But the question is larger than
that.
For as the camp of those who
make their living selling -- or trying to sell -- words and images grows
exponentially via the Internet, the placement of one's electronically tethered
tent takes on a new importance. This campsite has its own ecology, something
scholars have taken to calling the "media ecosystem." We co-exist in
this ecosystem, but geopolitical intelligence is scarcely part of the
journalistic flora and fauna. Our uniqueness creates unique challenges, and
these are worth some discussion in this space that is generally devoted to more
specific geopolitical themes.
For the moment, let's skip how
we approach subjects such as Syria's civil war, a protest by Colombian farmers
or the tweet by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani after a chat
with U.S. President Barack Obama in comparison to our colleagues in
the conventional news business. Instead, let's go to the core dynamic of the
media in our age and work back outward through the various layers to what we do
in the same virtual space, namely, intelligence.
This requires some indulgence,
so first, open a new tab in your browser window and go to the search engine
Google. No cheating; you must do so before you continue this column. Now, type
the following search terms: "David," "Goliath" and
"mergers and acquisitions." Hit enter.
What you will see -- and
please test us on this -- is essentially a survey of all the small companies of
late that have purchased larger ones, along with strategies for small companies
to target bigger rivals and maybe an essay or two on various sectoral
consolidations. You could get the same information with a week's sorting of SEC
filings. But instead, you have just circumvented that laborious process by
going straight to just one of the "meta-narratives" that form the
superstructure of journalism.
Meta-Narratives at
Journalism's Core
Welcome to the news media's
inner core. For the fundamental truth of news reporting is that it is
constructed atop pre-existing narratives comprising a subject the reader
already knows or expects, a description using familiar symbolism often
of a moral nature, and a narrative that builds through implicit
metaphor from the stories already embedded in our culture and collective
consciousness. No writer can, and no writer should, resist these
communicative tools. What better way to explain a small Italian tech company's
challenge to Microsoft's purchase of Skype than to cast the effort as a
"David vs. Goliath battle"? The currency of language really is the
collection of what might be called the "meta-stories." Pick up any
daily newspaper and you're sure to find Horatio Alger on the business page, Don
Quixote in sports, Homer's Odyssey in the education news and a Shakespeare
tragedy or two in the style section. They usually won't be clearly identified
as such but you can find them. "David and Goliath" is just an
unusually good example because it's irresistible to any scribe writing about a
clash of Main Street and Wal-Mart. Storytellers proceed out of their own
cultural canon, and Western journalists write from the Western canon.
There's nothing wrong with
this. For the art of storytelling -- journalism, that is -- is
essentially unchanged from the tale-telling of Neolithic shamans millennia ago
up through and including today's New York Times. Cultural
anthropologists will explain that our brains are wired for this. So be it.
Still working outward from
this core reality comes a related phenomenon, the mirroring journalists engage
in of one another's stories. How "group think" enters the picture is
really a topic for another day. But imagine a crowded orchestra hall with all
the concertgoers clapping in unison for an encore. How do 10,000 strangers
suddenly, quickly and spontaneously calibrate their clapping into a unified
tempo without formal guidance? Such random synchronization is a topic of significant
scientific study. Let's skip the details, but the emergence of the familiar
contours of the media -- whether they be around the "New
South" or the "Arab Spring" or the "East Asian
Miracle" -- is pretty much the same phenomenon. We at Stratfor may not "sync up".
Journalists certainly do.
Meta-Narratives Meet
Meta-Data
There is nothing new in this;
it is a process almost as old as the printing press itself. But where it gets
particularly new and interesting is with my penultimate layer of
difference, the place where meta-narratives meet meta-data.
"Meta-data," as the
technologists call it, is more simply understood as "data about
data." When a reader of a web page enables a "cookie," this is
really an exchange of meta-data that enables the provider to "customize
your experience" -- i.e., to try to sell you something in most
cases. Backstage at a website like the one I run, we spend a great deal of time
"tagging" our analyses with terms we judge a reader likely to use:
"Syria" or "chemical weapons" or "Assad," for
example. This is how in the exercise above you found all the stories on small
and large companies thanks to the many Internet tacticians who had the presence
of mind to "tag" David and Goliath.
Where the online battle for
eyeballs becomes truly epic, however, (Google "the definition of
epic" for yet another storyteller's meta-story) is when these series
of tags are organized into a form of meta-data called a "taxonomy."
These are really just electronic breadcrumbs to lead to a particular website.
The more precisely a webmaster places the bread crumbs relative to the
migrating birds -- in this case, readers -- the fuller the
cyber-hunter's knapsack of "hits" at the end of the day.
Some web designers actually call these forms of meta-data "canonical
taxonomies," a serendipitous term that supports the argument here.
And thus we arrive at the
outermost layer of the media's skin in our emerging and interconnected
age. This invisible skin over it all comes in the form of a new term of art,
"search engine optimization," or in the trade just
"SEO." This is the grand global competition involving thousands of
bits of electronic birdseed at millions of websites whose owners all hope their
electronic nets will snare the migratory reader-fowl amid billions of searches
each and every day.
With journalists already
predisposed by centuries of convention to converge on stories knitted from a
common canon, the marriage of meta-narrative and meta-data simply accelerates
to the speed of light the calibration of topic and theme. The "news"
you consume is now commoditized and delivered per spec according to your TV
preferences, your zip code and probably your shoe size. It is as if the 10,000
strangers in a concert hall who take a minute or so to calibrate their claps in
hope of an encore suddenly have pulsating strobe lights helping set their
tempo. It would no longer take a minute for them to
sync up; they could be clapping in unison in less than 10 seconds. In the case
of SEO, the concert hall is global, the "claps" are news bits, sound
bites and tweets, and the order of magnitude is millions of times greater.
If a bit simplified, these
layers add up to become the connective tissue in a media-centric and media-driven
age. Which leads me back to the original question of why Stratfor so often
"fails to sync up with the media."
An actual debate we had in the
office helps explain. It was Sept. 5, and the world was on edge over the
prospect of an imminent U.S. attack on Syria. This was the story
in the mainstream media, and our dozens of stories on Syria were delivering a
huge spike in much-appreciated traffic to Stratfor's online magazine. But our
fundamental value proposition, the reason Stratfor exists, is that we do not
always play the media's game.
That we were virtually alone
among online publishers when we turned our gaze to farmer-led protests in
Colombia that threatened to spread and involve other sectors, disrupting the
economy and perhaps upending a pending trade treaty proved problematic because
there was no wave of a meta-narrative for us to catch. For by the doctrines of
the Internet's new commercial religion, a move disrupting the click stream was
-- and is -- pure heresy. But our readers still need to know about Colombia,
just as they need our unique perspectives on Syria.
Applying the Scientific
Method to Journalism
Yes, we exist in the same
media ecology -- the Internet -- as our journalist brethren. In that
sense we compete, even while not being rivals. For while we do appear much like
journalism at first glance, another way to consider the difference is to
describe intelligence as "journalism with the scientific method."
Every forecast and article we
do is essentially a lab experiment, in which we put the claims of politicians,
the reports on unemployment statistics, the significance of a raid or a bombing
to the test of geopolitics. We spend much more time studying the constraints on
political actors -- what they simply cannot do economically, militarily or
geographically -- than we do examining what they claim they will do. Our
narratives are not derived from any canon, but materialize from careful
examination of what could feasibly transpire rather than what someone says will
occur.
This is abstract. In fact, we
deal with many abstractions. The Oxford English Dictionary says of the
scientific method, perhaps the key differentiator of journalism and
intelligence: "A method or procedure that has characterized natural
science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation,
measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of
hypotheses."
The key characteristic to
ponder here is that such methodology -- intelligence, in this case --
seeks to enable the acquisition of knowledge by allowing reality to speak for
itself. Journalism, however, creates a reality atop many random assumptions
through the means described. It is not a plot, a liberal conspiracy or a secret
conservative agenda at work, as so many media critics will charge. It is simply
the way the media ecosystem functions.
And so the intelligence
company is the outlier in this media ecosystem. Yes, we live in it, but no we
are not an organic part of it. We operate with a different rulebook, one at
odds with our fellow inhabitants in this ecosystem.
Thus, we cannot sync up with
the mainstream media, as convenient as that might be. We play on the
margins of meta-data, tagging, taxonomies and search engine optimization. But
we can't play very well because of who we are and how we do our jobs.
Journalism, in our age more
than ever before, tells you what you want to know. Stratfor
tells you what you need to know. We cannot build a
taxonomy to automatically guide us. In a world of search engine Davids and
Goliaths, Stratfor aims for a role more akin to that of Samuel, the seer credited
with giving us the stories of both. Samuel represents the recorder of the
significance of events, the one who saw it as his task to point out just where
those events might lead. This is an ambition we share.
Editor's Note: Writing
in George Friedman's stead this week is David D. Judson, editor-in-chief of Stratfor.
Geopolitical Intelligence, Political Journalism and 'Wants' vs.'Needs' is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
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