Gawker Stalker caused quite a fuss in the press, even on network TV news shows and internationally, including a story in the Times of London.
But here’s the funny part: The only thing new in this story was that Gawker put its celebrity sightings atop a Google map with pretty Wisp boxes. The only thing new was a redesign. What the press was supposedly up-in-arms about — readers “stalking” celebrities and reporting their encounters — has been going on since Gawker began. I remember when I introduced Nick Denton to James Truman in the Conde Nast cafeteria and Nick said, “We stalk you.” James gave him a befuddled grin, but then, that’s how he always looked.
But the media coverage didn’t note this angle — which is really just the power of graphics. One outlet acted as if there was some new outrage and in the echo chamber that is the media, the same story got picked up again and again and again. That’s the way news media work: News is the product of a giant virtual Xerox machine.
None of the media outlets also noted the irony of their outrage: Media stalks celebrities every day. Citizens don’t rent helicopters to buzz weddings; media do. Whenever the trend of citizen witnesses taking pictures is brought up, someone will fret that this will motivate citizens to harass stars. As if professional reporters and photographers don’t?
Another trivial example of a media meme gone wild: When Howard Stern gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly, he said — laughing, the magazine made clear — that he is never satisifed; that 4 million listeners paying $12 a buck wasn’t even good news; he wanted 20 million. Papers picked this up as Stern scolding his fans, yelling at them. They didn’t bother to read the source. Stern had a fit, not with EW, but with the media Xeroxers. The story went all over on the wire. And yesterday, he read email from fans not using Sirius who were mad at what he said in the wire story. But because they can’t hear him, he’s powerless to correct the record.
I bring up these trivial examples of the press in action because when we judge big, professional media vs. competitors, we tend to concentrate on Baghdad bureaus and White House scoops. But much of the news much of the time is trivial, like this. And the skewed stories that get spread and spread again are trivial. But consider that everytime a journalist gets something wrong, there’s someone who knows better and who now doesn’t trust the press. And they can’t correct the stories that keep spreading because the press isn’t built for that.
Every story should have a link to submit a correction or links to the larger story on the web. Thanks to connectivity and linking, news can now be architected better to get the truth.
This is a good point. Once in a while, every average citizen is present when news is made and subsequently reported. This gives everyone the opportunity to judge whether the news as reported matches the news as they experienced it in person.
My experience is that it does not. Quite a few times now, I have been present when some sort of event happened that turned up on the news later on. On each occasion, the reporting on the news seemed quite a lot different from what I had observed in person.
Now, everyone in a crowd is going to have a unique take on something that happens in their presence and any two observers rarely agree on what, exactly, they have seen, but in every case the news report was quite different from my direct experience. You would think they would match at least part of the time.
I’ve also been present when the news was directly manipulated by the news people. I happened to be passing City Hall one time when a tiny protest of about twenty people was going on (something to do with Home Depot and day laborers - a lot of it was in Spanish and I never did figure it all out). The news people showed up and filmed it. Watching the news that night, however, the apparent size of the protest was greatly magnified by the way it was filmed and presented. The twenty person protest was magnified into an apparent one to two hundred person protest by the news team. Amazingly, the news report was just as shaky about what, exactly, was being protested as I was in person.
Well, Jeff, let’s get some facts straight. The Gawker Stalker Map IS a different beast than the old Gawker Stalker sightings. It wasn’t just a re-design with a map dropped on the front-end. The 1.0 version was a round-up of reader email that was posted once a week. Sightings were days old. (I know because I did them, and it was the worst part of guest-editing the site. It’s no fun wading through email and copying/pasting crap into a blog post without giving any thought towards quality or authenticity.)
But now they have a team of interns plugging the same tips into the map feature as the emails come in throughout the day. That’s a big difference, especially when Nick/Gawker promoted it that way so the confusion is understandable if not warranted. Of course, the PR hysteria is total nonsense because when it comes down to it, the sightings are now “hours” old instead of “days” which means they are still just as harmless from a “crazed fan” perspective.
But really, it’s no secret that publicists live to talk to the press, create controversy, and spur more coverage. It’s not like celeb PR people hate the Gawkers and Star magazines of the world. It’s all part of the game and neither side actually cares how they’re perceived as long as the media keeps talking about them. The problem is how easy it is for both sides to manipulate the media, which is so often a willing participant (enabler) in the game.
(Oh, I swear I requested to sit next to you at yesterday’s lunch before Nick pulled the ol’ rug out on me!)
cnn showbiz is covering this story in a massive way.
the folks at gawker are getting super rich with all that traffic
Andrew,
Lunch is on me.
All very trenchant, Mr Jarvis. But none of it an excuse for using the word ‘architect’ as a verb.
So, based on his inability to control the press as he sees fit, we can safely conclude that Howard is not really “the King of all Media”. HAHAHAHAHA
(that would be the pentagon, wouldnt it?)
The correction mechanisms you desire are a key feature of WikiNews. Granted, the project is still in its infancy, and is lacking in breadth, but it’s still interesting enough that it merits discussion. Here’s an example:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Talk:U.S._Assistant_Secretary_of_State_alleges_Iran_“may_be_capable_of_making_a_nuclear_bomb_within_16_days”
This is the Talk page for a recent news item, where several people are engaged in a very lively discussion about the NPOV (neutral point of view) of the title and article body, picking apart whether the title might be misleading, or if it is in fact an objective description of what has actually happened.