Thanks for broadening the term journalism & to start new thuoghts about storytelling!

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Michael Gentry

“dofollow”> Melbourne

Ok then, let’s give up the whole idea of journalism. It just doesn’t work! Cut the reporting staff, let’s have “crowds” do world-class coverage. Who needs investigative journalism and critical reporting? We’ve got wikileaks.org now!

even contextless, not fact-checked, “raw” data of a twitter stream from iran *will* be processed by the recipient in form of a story with the conventional media coverage serving as a backdrop. the story appears to be a fundamental mode of human understanding. the “storyteller” might or might not vanish, the “story” is here to stay.

finally, journalists as “enablers, community organizers, teachers, curators, filters, tool makers, algorithm writers” are in desperate need of stories as well. try “organizing a community” without a story around it.

Storytelling isn’t just about (one-way) telling. It is also about delving head-on into the world around you, and the world talking back. I hope we don’t lose that spirit in journalism.

Since ancient times, the story-tellers of societies have been revered — they are trained, and the good ones immerse the listener in the story and don’t get in the way of the story with their own persona.

This fetishistic call to remove the narrator in fact only dissolves us into a million unacknowledged subjectivities masquerading as “science”. The narration power in fact merely shifts to the coder, the data-scraper, the widgeteer, who grabs the streams and reproduces or filters them. Jarvis, with his always-on adulation of Google, fails to acknowledge the actual fictionalizing that occurs by those wielding the “server truths”.

Give me the authenticated and respected journalist-narrator any day. He can be informed by more streams and be more interactive, but let him tell the story — and let people pay for his work.

“Who will stay the dyer’s hand?”

That’s true, but journalists don’t seem to be up to the task.

All too often, they lack the basic knowledge required to verify facts.

No, quote checking isn’t fact checking.

For example, the “climate gate” files included several source code files. A group of journalists reviewed the text files and concluded that they didn’t reveal any evidence of misbehavior. That alone reveals ignorance of basic scientific principles. However, their inability to read code means that they didn’t even have a chance to look at whether the manipulations were kosher. (They weren’t.)

Then again, there’s nothing to distinguish that effort from a planned coverup so ignorance may not be the problem in this case. (Their conclusions aren’t even consistent with what the authors of the e-mails have admitted.)

That’s not true. It might be nice if it was true, but it’s not.

Advocacy journalism is the standard now.

> We do not (or should not) editorialise.

You do. If you want readers to treat you as if you don’t, you have to stop.