"The New New News" Illustrates Hybrid Vigor of News-Theatre

Expectations are everything, so let me say at the outset that I wasn't expecting all that much from The New New News: A Living Newspaper (at Erickson Theater off-Broadway through February 27, then North Seattle Community College March 4 through 13). As an experimental hybrid of news-gathering and drama, it resembles a huge red button with no obvious label. Could be something good, could be something bad.

The risk pays off. It's not like anything else you're going to see on stages around town, and it delivers on that holy grail of theatrical enterprise, which is to get to you leave talking about what you just saw. Partly that's because it's determinedly topical--ripped from the headlines, if there are headlines still to rip from.

By coincidence, I saw it back-to-back with a South Park episode in which the gang try to save their closed-circuit TV news ratings, and end up running ginned-up rumors and celebrity gossip. Something similar happens in The New New News, in which the gang's plutocrat publisher instructs them to double their news site's traffic in 24 hours by documenting their own attempts to cover what's going on in online news gathering around Seattle.

If the 24-hour countdown is a hoary way of drumming up dramatic stakes, that actually mimics the time-based pressures of modern news gathering. 

Yes, there are drawbacks to hybridization. As theatre, the development of character and dramatic playing-out sometimes gets short shrift. There's no first act, really, in which we'd get to meet the characters and form impressions of them, before plot catapults them in different directions. And so far as online news goes, the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons recedes into paleolithic history. 

Yet there's an authenticity that comes from the particular way the play was developed. "NewsWrights" Paul Mullin and Dawson Nichols wrote the script, after doing a number of interviews with online news gatherers around town, and shadowing them throughout their day. If you know the local players, it's fun to spot a Monica-Guzman-esque character, and hear banter that sounds lifted from the last days of the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Sports columnist Art Thiel and his Sportspress Northwest venture get coverage, Publicola gets name-dropped, photographer Cliff DesPeaux and Seattle Crime's Jonah Spangenthal-Lee are interviewed, and our own Jeremy Barker shows up as a tipster. 

There's real drama in the way the play catches people struggling with a profound insecurity in the face of technological disruption; Pete (Mark Fullerton) is the old-guard newspaper editor wrestling with a robbery of integrity, Oscar (Joseph P. McCarthy) is the old dog of a boozehound who finds that tech can actually help him keep up to his old tricks, Holly (Kayla Adams) and Brad (Jordan Williams) are the millennials for whom social media and Google are innate reflexes. (The professional actors include Michelle Chiachiere, Fullerton, Joe Ivy, Catherine Kettrick, McCarthy, and Jordan Williams, and they're joined by a number of student actors from North Seattle Community College.)

A series of thwarted online seminars by a professor of journalism is less successful (nothing to do with the talents of Robert Agostinelli, it's just that the character insists upon irrelevancy), while interviews with real Seattleites found at Green Lake work reasonably well as scene-change filler. Because transparency is the word of the day, the NewsWrights interpolate footage from a production meeting, with Mullin debating Nichols over the tension between dramatic fictionalization and their work interviewing real-life sources.

I said it's a play that will leave you talking, so as proof, let me list a few hot buttons that get pressed. Traffic and monetization--as an instance of what's measured mattering, traffic has become intensely important on a granular scale. Not only can traffic be measured by the post, it can be measured by the minute throughout the day. But because traffic is intimately tied with monetization (the play leads you through CPM, CPC, and CPA), people are also cagey about how much they have, and how they get it.

Newspapers have an audit bureau they try to game; television has the Nielsen ratings; radio, Arbitron. But many online sites self-report traffic, rather than through a third party. (The SunBreak uses Quantcast, which screens out bot traffic and tracks cookies to try to avoid double-counting someone who visits from home and work.) Online advertising is troublesome, too, because an audience can come from anywhere, which was not an issue with newspapers or, for the most part, local TV and radio. But there's no reason to think that a largely Seattle audience is visiting Seattlepi.com's "Fat to fit" celebrity photo gallery. 

The end-stage of the news outlet in the corporate era appears to be the content farm--where stories are written on demand on search-friendly topics that are meant to attract advertisers and allow for specific product placement. 

Even so, online advertising rates remain (artificially, I think) depressed. After a year and half of existence, The SunBreak brings in a grand total of some $200 per month, with our U.S. readership of 10,000 people per month. I will freely admit that we are lackadaisical at selling ads, but I also think that advertisers are terrible at telling that we are a good, inexpensive spot to advertise. We also have three subscribers, which is amazing given that we can't actually make you pay *cough* legally. (Those three people have purchased my faith that the rest of you are basically good people.)

I refuse to let monetization drive our coverage strategy, because I want us to gain an identity before we bargain on its worth to anyone. But that makes watching something like The New New News poignant because the people in the newsroom there did have something worth something, an identity, a reputation--until one day they didn't. Even now, it's startling for me to think that--here let me just open up my New York Times app--everyone used to have pay to read this, or they didn't read it at all.