I can’t possibly add more to the tributes to and memories of Tim Russert, except this:
Russert was a true pundit. Today, there is no more abundant resource than punditry; we all can broadcast our opinions and I celebrate that because we can hear the voices of the people. But a real pundit adds value to the conversation: perspective, facts, new viewpoints, intellectual honesty that come from research, reporting, experience, thought. Russert did that with fairness, seriousness, and joy. He always seemed to do it for the story, not the attention. All that cannot be said of another TV pundit I can name.
I talked to a reporter this week about the embattled Associated Press and said three times that I didn’t want it to die. I might take that back.
The AP has filed truly noxious takedown notices against Rogers Cadenhead’s community-created Drudge Retort, arguing copyright violations for quotes from 33 to 79 words long.
Hillary Rodham Clinton says she expects her marathon Democratic race against Barack Obama to be resolved next week, as superdelegates decide who is the stronger candidate in the fall. “I think that after the final primaries, people are going to start making up their minds,” she said. “I think that is the natural progression that one would expect.”
If you follow the link, you’ll see that the blog entry reproduces 18 words from the story and a 32-word quote by Hillary Clinton under a user-written headline. The blog entry drew 108 comments in the ensuing discussion.
This complaint comes from an organization that leaches off original reporting and kills links and credit to the source of that journalism. Yes, it has a right to reproduce reporting from member news organizations. But as I point out here, the AP is hurting original reporting by not crediting and linking to the journalism at its source. We should be operating under an ethic of the link to original reporting; this is an ethic that the AP systematically violates.
What would be better for journalism would be for aggregators — Daylife (where I am a partner), Inform, Google News, Pro Publica — to link directly to original reporting without rewriting it through its mill. That is what is happening in Ohio, where newspapers are now sharing original stories. If the AP doesn’t watch out, that is what could happen everywhere.
I have also objected to the AP doing a deal with Google that put Google in the content business, hurting the AP’s members and other sources of journalism. We should want Google to link to original reporting. But the AP insisted on Google licensing its content.
In its complaint against Cadenhead, the AP is flouting fair use and fair comment. It is ignoring the essential structure of the link architecture of the web. It is declaring war on blogs and commenters.
So let’s fire back. I urge bloggers everywhere to go to the AP and reproduce a story at length in solidarity with Cadenhead and Drudge Retort. Here’s mine:
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — The Cedar River poured over its banks here Thursday, forcing the evacuation of more than 3,000 homes, causing a railroad bridge to collapse and leaving cars underwater on downtown streets.
Officials estimated that 100 blocks were underwater in Cedar Rapids, where several days of preparation could not hold back the rain-swollen river. Rescuers had to use boats to reach many stranded residents, and people could be seen dragging suitcases up closed highway exit ramps to escape the water.
“We’re just kind of at God’s mercy right now, so hopefully people that never prayed before this, it might be a good time to start,” Linn County Sheriff Don Zeller said. “We’re going to need a lot of prayers and people are going to need a lot of patience and understanding.”
About 3,200 homes were evacuated and some 8,000 residents displaced, officials estimated….
That’s just the homogenized AP version of the news.
Here’s original journalism: a story from Gazette Online and another; aerial photos; users‘ photos (not the property of the AP, I’ll bet). A look at the Gazette’s home page:
Who needs the AP tapioca when we can get reporting like this from the source wtih no more than a link? Isn’t it a better service to reader and journalist to link directly to the original reporting?
So, bloggers, unless the AP recants and apologizes to Cadenhead, I urge you to avoid linking to the AP and to link to reporting at its source.
I learn from Craig Newmark that Pro Publica, the new and independent investigative journalism enterprise, has launched. What’s particularly nice is that they will not only investigate on their own — with their staff of 20 journalists so far — but are also aggregating, following, and commenting on other investigative journalism available on the web. This is about journalism’s link layer and sending audience to journalism at its source.
1. The goal of the press is transparency. We want to shine sunlight on the powerful in public.
2. The press must be transparent. Not to be transparent is to be hypocritical. Opaqueness is not an act of trust.
3. Public means public. When something happens in the public, whether it is seen and heard by one person or by 100, it can now be seen and heard by the world thanks to any one of those witnesses. That’s what public means.
Isn’t that obvious?
Apparently not, given the arguments over Mayhill Fowler, which Jay Rosen adroitly summarizes and comments on, and other debates about the rules of the press, what they are, and who holds them. I think the argument is getting unnecessarily overcomplicated and muddy. It’s simple, as simple as I put forward above.
Now out of these rules, there are some consequences.
Everyone — including Mayhill Fowler — agrees that transparency of her identity and purpose would have been preferable. No one is arguing with that.
I say the rules mean that editors should be training their staffs to be always open, always transparent — even in cruddy little blog discussions. I’m saddened that some don’t.
These rules mean that anything that happens in public is public. Corollary to that: Anything a politician does should be public.
Public figures, especially politicians, already assume that everything they say can and will be used against them in a court of public opinion. So I have no sympathy for Barack Obama — who knew his “bittergate” session was on the record if closed to press invitations, as Jay points out — and Bill Clinton — who was very much in a public place when he spoke about Todd Purdhum.
So let’s say that Fowler didn’t ask the question at the rope line but overheard it: Should she report what she heard? I say yes. Let’s say she asked the question and didn’t report it but the person next to her did. OK? Still yes. Let’s say that person next to her was not a civilian but was a reporter with credentials around the neck? Would that reporter report what she’d heard? You bet she would. Now let’s say someone else asked the question and shared the answer, someone who had never reported, blogged, or published before but who realized that this was something others would want to know, so she went to a blog or forum and retold the story in the comments. So? So what? It’s all public. It’s all reporting. It’s all news if we think it is.
Now the biggest consequence of these simple rules for the press: We, the press, should be making it our sworn goal to eradicate off-the-record and anonymous sourcing and secret deals. Of course, the problem is that is those special arrangements are what reporters believe give them access to the powerful. And access is what makes them powerful, they think. Access, to paraphrase a few hacks (British usage) in Rosen’s post, is what gets them their good stories. Access is also what makes them special: they have it and you don’t. These are the rules that keep the club a club. These are also the rules that corrupt journalists who traffic in them with those they are supposed to be covering and uncovering.
Of course, off-the-record anonymity and secrecy will linger on, especially in investigative reporting (which, remember, is a tiny percentage of the reporting actually done).
But can’t we at least agree that we don’t like off-the-record deals with anonymous sources to keep secrets? Can’t we agree that that is antithetical to rule No. 1 above, to the mission of the press?
And shouldn’t we be happy, as Jay is in his post, that there is more reporting and more sunshine from more witnesses now empowered? Shouldn’t that added journalism be welcomed by journalists? Of course, it should — unless the journalists want to protect their club, which is no longer a tenable position in the public. And keep in mind that as more and more journalists get laid off and become bloggers, they’ll find themselves on the other side of that rope, off the bus, out of the club. I say that shouldn’t matter. Professionalism and standards don’t come with a paycheck.
I was hoping we were getting past the point where there was a line. I was hoping that we were getting to the point that, as Jay says, we could agree that there are more and new systems of trust — rules and ethics — and that we could be open to learning them. I was hoping.
But I think the discussion has gotten so murky that it is time to bring it back to the basics, the essentials. Let’s sing the chorus:
1. The goal of the press is transparency.
2. The press must be transparent.
3. Public means public.
: LATER: Jay Rosen finds in this post by Jeff Bercovici the poster child of what he calls the guild mentality and what I call the clubbyness of journalism. Felix Salmon disagrees with his Portfolio colleague. So Jay, Felix, and I are the anticlub, the unguild.
In the news business these days, innovation is coming from the oddest places, like Gannett (which has revolutionized its newsrooms more than any other company I can name here) and now the Washington Times. Yes, the Washington Times. Craig Stoltz reviews the new web design there and I think he’s right: It’s groundbreaking. The ability to dig deeper with media, themes (aka tags), and links (very Daylifey, I might add) is quite nice. The wowy presentation of that on the main story on the home page does not, unfortunately, carry through to story pages. But the information and organization is still there. See also the organization of news by themes. I’d have to live with it to see whether it works or wears thin. But give them points: It’s refreshing.
My ethic of identity is simple and clear: I stand by my words here and elsewhere with my name. I tell commenters that I will give them credence if they do likewise.
Elsewhere, online and in journalism, the ethic of identity is less clear today. Take as illustration the case of this post involving Politico and a bit of sockpuppetry from an employee of the newspaper in the comments.
The shortest possible synopsis: Politico’s Michael Calderone criticized Off the Bus’ Mayhill Fowler for criticizing Todd Purdum’s “hatchet job” on Bill Clinton — her words — and for misrepresenting herself — his word — when she questioned and recorded Clinton … and I, in turn, criticized Calderone parenthetically using this as an illustration of the clubbiness of the press. Calderone emailed me twice and then called me in short order to complain about my complaint and about the context (a discussion of race in newsrooms). We disagreed.
I arrived home and found a comment on my post that echoed his opinions closely under the name Mary. I looked up the IP and found it came from a Politico-related company. I responded to Mary and noted the source — and the irony that this appeared to be a person at Politico misrepresenting herself. Calderone emailed me saying he did not write the comment — which I hadn’t said — but acknowledged that a colleague did. He then left a comment on my post — which is how I would have preferred this discussion to have happened, in public. I looked at the IP address and it was identical to Mary’s. So I then asked him point-blank whether he wrote Mary’s comment. He said he did not and I take him at his word. I suppose the IP is the company’s firewall.
So I wrote to Politico’s editor, John Harris, asking his policy and views for this post. (Here is the complete email exchange.) On reporters’ identity, Harris said: “At Politico I expect reporters to identify themselves clearly as journalists when asking questions of public officials or average citizens alike. If there were exceptions to this, I would want as editor to be closely consulted about the reasons.”
But then I was rather shocked at what he said about hidden identity in comments — sockpuppetry: “My preference is that if Politico staff are going to engage in debates about journalism they do so with name attached. But the case of leaving comments on a blog or submitting a question to an on-line chat strikes me as not exactly involving sacred principles. When I was at the Post I would frequently send in questions under various to colleagues for their on-line chats, just to be mischievous. These days with a new publication I’m too busy for that nonsense. In any event, have you never done something similar?”
No, I have not. I am surprised that Harris would treat this as a prank even as he acknowledged that “Mary” not only did not reveal her Politico affiliation or reveal a last name but also gave a false first name. This is how you want your employees to act in a news organization? I would think that news organizations would be particularly sensitive to this after the cases of Lee Siegal of the New Republic and Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times.
I especially find it odd that Politico is not living up to the standard to which Calderone holds Mayhill Fowler. Why the slack? Well, after all, it’s only a blog and only a comment, eh? Said Harris: “I don’t get the fuss about the identity of the blog commenter.”
So what of Mayhill Fowler? I agree with Off the Bus cofounder (and friend) Jay Rosen that ideally, she would have revealed her affiliation to Clinton. But in a good profile of her in the LA Times, she makes it clear that her recorder was in the open. And I repeat my contention in my debate with the Guardian’s Michael Tomasky that this idea of playing by journalism’s rules becomes almost moot when journalism can done by any witness with a tape recorder and a blog. Says the Guardian’s Neil McIntosh:
I’m not sure how traditional journalistic rules of engagement (off the record, on the record, scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) can be enforced when everyone has a camcorder in their pocket, and an easy way to reach millions via Wordpress and some Googlejuice. In the reporting of public, or semi-public, or even private events where there are more than a few present, the only battle left is over who does the story best, and gets it up first.
This is about a few things: publicness., professionalism, and identity.
The acts of public figures in public places and even our lives there are now more public than ever. In an age that values transparency, I think that’s a good thing.
I understand the wistfulness for a set of professional rules carried out by a finite set of professionals. It seemed so in-control then. But I also think it is a very good thing that journalism and the sunshine it brings are opened wide. And my point to Calderone (and to Tomasky) was that we need to beware using these rules as a means to limit journalism to a closed club.
So now back to identity. This is more than an issue of professionalism (though I do think Politico and other news organizations should hold to a standard of open and persistent identity in their sets of rules). I think open and honest identity is an ethic for everyone online or off. Standing by your words and thoughts is a matter of etiquette and honor and respect for those with whom you are speaking. I believe that true identity is the secret to Facebook’s success. I see a layer of identity on the internet that will have higher value than the that without identity or with false identity.
If you want to disagree with what I say, great. But at least have the balls I do and say it under your own name.
: LATER: It gets worse. I got email from the person calling herself “Mary.” She misses the point by a mile. I won’t quote her by name; I leave it to her to have the guts to add her name to this discussion. She asked me not to post her email. I said sorry, but she works in public. I have to quote some of what she said:
My conduct seems standard practice. My stories frequently get hundreds scathing comments and spark harsh e-mails from readers that don’t identify themselves or where they work. If I’m interested in engaging further or curious whether they work for a particular campaign, I write them. . . .
This was the first time I’ve ever commented on a blog and I ended up embarrassed at work as a result, which leaves me questioning whether it’s worth it to join in on the great democratization of media.
Now that I realize anything I say can be escalated to my boss — without any obligation to contact me first — I think I’ll be staying off the Interwebs for a while.
Some of my response:
You miss the point by a mile.
This is a matter of honesty, integrity, and ethics.
You lied. You did not disclose your identity and affiliation. You even made up your name.
Should journalists lie? Ever?
Standard practice? God forbid. . . .
You say that you shouldn’t interact on the internet. That is precisely the wrong lesson to take from this. You should interact with your public but you should do so in a transparent and honest manner. . . .
I said more. I’ll spare you and her. Mind you, this is not a discussion with an unwashed blogger. This is a discussion with a journalist at a journalistic organization with a journalism degree. I find that shocking.
Truth is not a hard lesson to teach, is it?
: LATER STILL: Jacques Steinberg picks up on the Fowler story in tomorrow’s Times. There w have Jonathan Alter taking the clubby position and Jane Hamsher firing a grenade launcher through it:
“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Jonathan Alter, a columnist and political reporter for Newsweek, said in an interview. “If you don’t have trust, you don’t get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that she claims she wants to assist.”
“You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody,” Mr. Alter added. “It’s just a form of cheating not to.”
But to Jane Hamsher, a onetime Hollywood producer who founded Firedoglake, a politics-oriented Web site that tilts left, Mr. Alter’s rules of the road are in need of repaving. For starters, she said, the onus was on Mr. Clinton to establish who Ms. Fowler was before deciding to speak as he did. That he failed to quiz her at all, Ms. Hamsher said, was Mr. Clinton’s problem, not Ms. Fowler’s. As a result, Ms. Hamsher said, the public got to experience the unplugged musings of a former president (and candidate’s spouse) in a way that might never have been captured on tape by an old boy on the bus like Mr. Alter.
“It’s hurting America that journalists consider their first loyalty to be to their subjects, and not to the people they’re reporting for,” she said. Told, for example, that the Times ethics policy states that “staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover (whether face to face or otherwise),” Ms. Hamsher was dismissive. In the context of political reporting, she said, such guidelines are intended to “protect this clubby group of journalists and their high-ranking political subjects, and keep access to themselves.”
“That,” she added, “is not the world we’re living in anymore.”
A few shows ago, On the Media reported on a revolt against the Associated Press in Ohio, where papers across the state are trading and publishing each others’ original stories rather than sending them through the AP homogenizer. There are a few important implications in this, one about the fate of the AP and the other about an ethic I think news organizations must adopt to link to and promote original journalism.
The link layer on news
In the ecosystem of links and the new architecture of news that it spawns, I believe it is vital that we as an industry find ways to point to and give credit to original reporting. That is how original journalism will be supported, in the end: by monetizing the audience that comes to it, whether through advertising or contributions.
This leads to a new Golden Rule of Links in journalism — link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff. This emerges from blogging etiquette but is exactly contrary to the old, competitive ways of news organizations: wasting now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories so you could say you’d done it yourself. That must change.
This ethic of the link will become all the more important as news organizations pare down to their essence. I’ve said often that they will have to do what they do best and link to the rest.
And I believe that it will become important for us to link to our sources and influences — as well as transcripts and additional reporting — to show readers how we arrived where we have in a story. When I was last in London, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger called this footnoting a story. He’s better educated than I; I’ll call it linkboxing.
Add that together and we end up with a new link layer atop the news: links to original reporting; links to complementary reporting; links to sources (not to mention links to and from discussions). It’s part of the new architecture of news that I wrote and doodled about here. Upendra Shardanand, the founder of Daylife (where I am a partner), wrote about it here, arguing that the key to the new architecturer is superior navigation to news.
This is why I got excited about working on Daylife, because I believe it provides key infrastructure for this link layer: It allows sites to link to the world’s coverage of a topic — so they can link to the rest and so they can put stories in context — and it also sends traffic to journalism. One thing we’re working on is finding ways to get better at sending traffic to journalism at its source. There are a few algorithmic solutions to see who was early in on a story, but this is also where the ethic of the link also comes in: If everyone links to — not just attributes but links to — the Washington Post’s coverage of Walter Reed then it will make it easier to find where stories begin. We should expose credit where credit is due.
The link layer is also why I got involved with Publish2, sitting on its board, because it will provide the platform for that linkboxing. I say all this not just to plug two companies in which I have an interest but to show that there is a method to my madness. I want to be involved in building of the new architecture of news.
The Associated Press and the link layer
So now I return to the Associated Press. This new ecology of news is what’s at work in Ohio. By running other papers’ stories, the newsrooms are participating in a print version of linking to original journalism. Importantly, these stories are not going through the AP mill, being rewritten under an AP style and brand (which its contract with papers allows because the AP is a cooperative). Instead, now the original stories are getting more attention across the state.
Susan Goldberg, editor of the Plain Dealer, told Bob Garfield on OtM: “I think it’s a lot better because we can get the stories faster. Nobody is rewriting them. … We don’t really need that function.” And later: “I frankly think we’re getting better, more distinctively written stories because they’re not going through the AP mill. But I also think that it does allow us to make some smarter choices. We, and everybody else, have smaller staffs than we used to, and we’ve got to pick some priorities.”
What she’s saying, to translate into Buzzmachinese, is that they’re doing what they does best and linking to the rest and they are linking to original journalism: the new architecture at work.
I have no doubt the Goldberg-Garfield interview caused a hard gulp down the street from me at AP HQ, where they’re dealing with budget-choked newspapers complaining about rates. That is what this little revolt is really about. These dissidents are not trying to kill the AP; they depend upon it more now that their staffs are shrinking. But one wonders what a world looks like with a shrunken AP or, God forbid, without one.
Does the AP possibly become more of a curator of original stories than a reprocessing mill? What reporting does it still need to do complement the work that local papers do best? Do they still need state wires and bureaux or can papers indeed go it alone? As papers inevitably become more local, will they — should they — even bother with national and international news or should they just link to it via smart aggregation?
How does competitor Reuters play into this? Is it in a better position because it is not hampered as a cooperative and is building a consumer brand? I’ve talked about a reverse syndication model as a new opportunity, which was actually sprung from a talk with an AP executive but it is Reuters that is executing on it (rather than syndicating its content to Yahoo, Reuters is now sending them headlines, Yahoo sends Reuters traffic, and Reuters shares the revenue that results; this is linking with money attached). What does a combination of Reuters’ original reporting and, say, Daylife’s aggregation provide in covering the rest of the world?
This gets even more complex when journalism busts out of its professional fence and it is practiced by many people in many places: the ecosystem only explodes. The AP acknowledges that new structure in its deal with Now Public and Reuters does likewise in its deal with Global Voices.
The transformation of news is obviously not as simple as taking print stories and putting them online and even getting fancy adding video and comments. This transformation is happening at a fundamental, architectural level that has impact we are only beginning to figure out.
But out of this discussion, I’d like to start here: with a discussion of the ethic of the link in journalism.
: LATER: In my email, I just got a link to an important study the AP conducted on news use in the next generation. The PDF of the presentation is here (I don’t see a link to the PR yet). The AP’s Jim Kennedy told my students at CUNY about this. They propose a new model of multiple entry points into news — a new way to look at the process — around facts, updates, background, and followup.
Note well that the AP is trying to get its industry to think ahead and rearchitect news but that’s no easy job.
: Reading the AP study… One of the most intriguing findings is that young people use news to build social capital (to converse or to impress).
I’m not saying editing is bad. But as news becomes a process rather than a product, editing can affect that process. Note the lead story from the NY Times home page right now:
The edited, packaged story says that one person died in yet another crane collapse in New York today. But right below that, the lightning fast Sewell Chan has later, more up-to-date and correct information in his blog — two have died — which the Times wisely feeds directly onto the home page, contradicting their own edited story. In a breaking story, a blog in the hands of a good reporter beats a long line of editors.
This is one reason why Rupert Murdoch is complaining about 8.3 editors touching the average story in the Wall Street Journal. When I taped a segment for CBS News once, I counted 12 people who touched it before it was even edited for air. At Time Inc., the were famous for editing and re-editing every story until it was churned into butter. At The Times, there are three editors for every reporter. But when I consulted at About.com, it had about eight writers for every editor (that ratio has since changed). About.com, like blogs, is a publish-first, edit-later operation. On this blog, you could say that I have no editors — or you could say that I have 100,000 of you.
Clay Shirky in his wonderful book Here Comes Everybody calls this new process “publish first, filter later.”
The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact.
So does editing.
Albert Wenger, the VC, takes that new biorhythm and applies it to not just journalism but financial information (talking about the company we both invested in, Covestor). This will be the nature of many business processes, including design and messaging. Process and structure change.
Editing of everything before publication has been seen as a necessity in journalism, but I think it will increasingly be seen as a luxury (and sometimes, ibid. Murdoch, a drag, an inefficiency). When I say this, traditional journalists are horrified. But that’s often because of their tradition and the necessities of production (e.g., fitting into a scarce space) — not to mention their jobs.
When I worked at the Chicago Tribune way back in the dawn of my career (pre-computers, children), we had to hammer on our (manual, kids) typewriters so the last of more than 10 carbons could be read. Why so many? That’s just what a new managing editor of the paper asked as he decreed that the 10-carbon books should be destroyed, replaced by five-carbon books. The office manager protested that it would be a waste. No, said the editor, I don’t want back sliding. Destroy them. So we typed on five-carbon books — for about two weeks. Then we backslid. We were told to put two five-carbon books together so everybody could get their copies again and so they could all weigh in on every story. This was editing as status.
Rather than assuming that everything must be edited, we will need to ask why something should be edited, what’s the goal and what’s the cost (to the product and its urgency and to the budget). As newspapers continue to cut back, what do they need more: reporting or editing? I say reporting. Editors will not and should not die, but they will become a scarcer species.
This American Life, my favorite US radio show after Howard Stern (a sentiment I seem to share inversely with TAL host Ira Glass) has a truly great episode made in partnership with NPR News explaining the debt crisis. It’s the clearest explanatory journalism I’ve seen or heard on the topic.
I’ve seen a couple of efforts lately to help determine who’s credible online and though I understand the need and the motive, these attempts are fundamentally flawed and perhaps even more damaging than they are helpful.
It’s very simple — though that’s the problem; credibility isn’t so simple. They list articles and you get to “credit” or “discredit” them. These scores are, in turn, compiled for writers and publications.
The first and most obvious problem, which TechCrunch points out, is that this is bait for grudges. Fox from one side, the Times from the other will get discredited by their detractors all day long. One man’s bias is often the other man’s truth.
The second and more fundamental problem is that there’s no basis to decide credibility. Does one error ruin an article’s credibility? How many discredits does it take to ruin a reporter’s or a publication’s? And then what does that mean? That they lied? That you don’t believe them? That you don’t like them? That they make mistakes? That they don’t report enough? That they use anonymous sources? That they relied on bad sources? That they wrote it badly? That they weren’t transparent?
And who’s doing the judging? Are they credible? Who’s judging the judges, then?
Over the years, I’ve heard of various attempts to determine credibility or bias algorithmically, in an effort to take out this human bias in the process of finding bias, but that’s just an engineer’s wet dream. Again, the problem is definition (not to mention technical limitations of analyzing text and ideas).
Newstrust has tried to do this in a subtler way, with star ratings and comment, but it faces the same issues: Who’s doing the rating? On what basis?
I think these folks are attacking the problem from the wrong perspective. They’re trying to play whack-a-mole with credibility and identify all the bad stuff — just as news people, long accustomed to packaging the world in a pretty box with a bow on top, keep wanting to kill every bad comment on their sites. They’ll fail. Life insists on being messy. The task of identifying the bad stuff is so large — there is, indeed, too much junk — that these folks try to scale their effort with simplicity or technology. Won’t work. They’ll never find all the bad stuff. Ultimately, this can be dangerous because good people who do good work can easily be besmirched by bad judges with grudges.
Instead, I think it would be far more useful to concentrate on finding the good stuff. That is the real challenge in the new architecture of news and media, in the ecosystem of distribution and aggregation. When all the articles on a given topic are brought together by Daylife (where, disclosure, I am a partner) or Google News the need and the true service is to find the best articles because that’s what we want to spend our time on. (A restaurant guide with only bad reviews doesn’t help me eat.)
We also need to find ways to surface original reporting so we can support that reporting with our attention (and with traffic and ads). This is why I believe that there should be an ethic in professional journalism, as there is in blogs, to link to prior work and sources. All roads should link back to the original reporting.
There is still clearly bias in this approach of finding the best. Many will recommend Paul Krugman, many won’t trust that recommendation. Who’s doing the recommending still matters (and so it would be very helpful to have transparency among them). But by highlighting the good rather than trying to expunge the bad, we would try to support good journalism wherever it is done — msm or blog. And that’s really the point, isn’t it?
On top of that, every news site should have a means for people to help correct errors — that’s as simple as adding comments (though doing so does add a cost to police them). Correcting errors makes one more credible; that, too, is an ethic of blogs. And that, too, will improve the journalism, just as you improve mine in comments here. At the end of the day, there’ll always be disagreements, though. Look at the post below about airlines; there’s plenty of argument there. Is that really about credibility? No. It’s about conversation.
Nick Denton — who’s doing his best to destroy all journalism, of course — goes after the most sacred of cows (at his most profane website) arguing that it is time to for The New York Times abandon the false divide between news and opinion.
What’s really happening at The Times, in my view, is that its blogs have been a Trojan horse for the invasion of voice and opinion into the news columns. I say it’s a most welcome shot of blood into those old, gray veins. Nick gives plenty of examples, starting with:
When Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo fell through, hotshot reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin produced a scathing analysis of the deal-making skills of the Redmond software giant’s boss, Steve Ballmer. ‘Microsoft has tried to spin its reversal as a show of “discipline†and “self-control.†But what it really shows — painfully — is Mr. Ballmer’s indecisiveness about this deal.’ Ouch! And fun! But you won’t find Bill Keller and his fellow editors boasting about Sorkin’s punchiness: because they’re still in denial about the blurring of news and opinion, and so much else.
I’ve also valued finally getting Saul Hansell’s opinions (call it analysis, then) in the Bits blog. And I like hearing the voices of the other writers in the other blogs. This, as Nick points out, is one way for newspapers to battle the commodification of news: “An intelligent or provocative slant is one way that a newspaper can differentiate its story from the thousand other rehashes of the same information. British hyper-competitive newspapers have made an art of such spin; as America’s media becomes more competitive, outlets are following Fleet Street’s example.”
So opinion crosses a media divide: How can you write a blog without a human voice? And once you import stuff from that blog, even a Times blog, into print, you’ve brought in a human voice — that is, one with a stated perspective — into a publication that has prided itself on having no perspective. Heh.
There’s another divide to consider here, an organizational divide. Don’t forget that at The Times and many American newspapers, there’s a wall between business and editorial and another wall between the newsroom and the editorial page. The silly conceit of this is that opinion can be relegated to and imprisoned in the walls and pages of an editorial department: They own opinion and nobody else is allowed to have any — and that is the inoculation that has, historically, preserved the news department’s own conceit that it is objective: See, we don’t do opinion, those people over there do.
So one has to ask what the difference is between Andrew Sorkin and Paul Krugman except that Sorkin is paid to spend more of his time reporting with more sources. So — no offense to Krugman; I just picked the most convenient beat — but what whose opinion/perspective/viewpoint is more useful? If we take the argument that newspapers make against blogs — they just have opinions; they don’t report — that would give the contest to Sorkin, now that he is allowed to have opinions. So what’s the point of having opinion-page columnists? Why not just have reporters who can also share their perspective?
There’s another opinion divide to consider: inside v. outside. What about those bloggers? As newspapers get relationships with them — The Times has taken Freakonomics under its wing and the Washington Post today announced it is syndicating TechCrunch onto its side (as it syndicates my PrezVid) — one need wonder about their opinions. They have them. Michael Arrington certainly has them — including opinions about mainstream newspapers, we should remember. So how does that fit with the news-opinion divide? I was surprised to learn recently that Freakonomics is under The Times’ Opinion section. Why? The Post put TechCrunch stories on its technology news page. What’s the difference: prissiness, as Nick says, or turf battles? (And by the way, in all these cases, I think a network relationship is smarter than a syndicated relationship — but that’s the subject of another post another day.)
Nick concludes:
You know what? Screw the news-opinion divide. When the Times was still pure, reporters would simply trot out some tame expert to give the story the slant they planned; it’s less convoluted—and wordy—for writers like Sorkin and Stanley simply to express their own views. Readers can get raw information from wire services and press releases; the only value the Times can add is time-saving summarization—and attitude.
The Times is the closet-case of newspapers. Everybody knows that the political bent is liberal; that the newspaper’s reporters have opinions; and that they’re hungry for a juicy story, even if the rush to publish can introduce mistakes. None of these are crimes; they only become embarrassments because of the paper’s official position. Bill Keller needs simply to come to terms with the nature of modern newspapers. He and his colleagues will feel so much lighter if they do.
Of course, I agree. But I think The Times will be the last to admit it’s human. So if I were the editor of another paper in the U.S., I’d take down the divide and say that we’re all about our perspective with facts; that’s our value. The check on us is you and your opinions out there in the public, now that they can be heard (if the paper will listen).
Seth Godin dissects the language in just one piece of coverage of the campaign and reminds us all that what news media are really selling is drama:
. . . [A]s William Randolph Hearst taught us a long time ago, the goal is to sell newspapers, not to report the news.
There isn’t media bias in favor of Hillary (my friend Jeff is the first to point that out). Nor is there media bias in favor of floods. There’s media bias in favor of drama.
Most of us are inclined to believe that government officials, doctors and the media are making an effort to tell us the truth. Actually, just like all marketers, they tell us a story.
But, of course, they don’t control the story — the narrative — anymore, at least not as much as they used to. They are part of a larger narrative. And, no, I won’t say that gets us closer to the facts faster. It gets us more narratives, more memes, more drama. But at least the contrast is helpful: In this corner is most media saying that Hillary blew it on Tuesday (Time Magazine just couldn’t wait to declare the winner) but over here are Jeralyn Merritt saying that Obama did far worse in North Carolina than Virginia and he blew it.
They blather, we decide. It’s the war of the memes.
