Let’s fire a few missiles at politically correct ideas such as “Digital media makes all of us journalists”, “citizens will soon displace professional reporters”, and so on. That’s nonsense (I have more explicit words in mind). Does it means public input in news should be kept at bay? Certainly not. Quite the contrary, actually. Newsrooms have a challenge on their hands, they need to get better at handling such input.
First, would you trust a citizen neurosurgeon to remove your kid’s neuroblastoma? No, you wouldn’t. You would not trust a citizen dentist either for your cavities. Or even a people’s car repairman. Then, for information, why in hell would we accept practices we wouldn’t even contemplate for our health (OK, big issue), or for our washing machine?
Fact is, with the advent of digital media, the very notion of rigor and accuracy has become more… fuzzy, more analog. As I said here many times, we are now facing three types of news: the Commodity one (everyone gets the same account of the oil spill in Louisiana or the deadly unrest in Thailand); Mashup news (the more it buzzes, the better it works); and the Quality Niche, that tries to defend its standards. The first two are expanding and the third is getting to look like a Zant currant, (Raisin sec in French): good, tasty, but tiny and dry. And produced in small quantities.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a remarkable piece about fact checking at the New Yorker. In a loving and witty rendition, the author, John McPhee, details how an army of minutiae-obsessed researchers will spend days to check the smallest assertions in order to remove even the palest shadow of doubt. (I’m linking to the PDF file, hoping Condé Nast’s legal department will forgive this copyright infringement in view of my heartfelt homage; this article really deserves to be dissected in journalism schools).
A few years back, this colleague showed me a mail exchange he had with a sub-editor at a major US daily about a long feature story of his. Its original submission triggered a long email with dozens of questions about every aspect of the story: “Who says this? Could you add a source of this data? Isn’t there a contradiction between this figure and the other in paragraph six? Can you be more specific on this and that? It went on an on. The story was actually seen as a good one; the painstaking editing, checking and challenging process was merely standard procedure.
Who has the luxury of applying such treatment to news material, nowadays? No one, almost. Only some “Zant currant” news organizations are still holding firm on such a practice. Which leads us to my point: journalism is a profession; it comes with standards, techniques, and a certain level of demand, from the author and his/her editors.
These notions collide with the new information chain: Algorithm => Search => Filtering => Aggregation => Mashup => Social Feedback (i.e.: commenting, sharing, tweeting, blogging…).
We’ve been through the hardcore part (fact-based reporting, checking, sourcing, editing). Now, let’s sort out the new jargon.
Algorithm: it has become the main underlying engine for digital information consumption. Think about Google News traffic: 3.7 billion people exposed per week, according to GeographicalMedia . For many news sites, GN has fostered a dope-like addiction, with a 10% or more dependency level. New York University Professor Clay Shirky has theorized the “Algorithmic Authority“, one that leads to the shift from individual to collective expertise, sometimes self-organized through a Wikipedia-like structure.
Search, Aggregation and Filtering are just by-products of the algorithmic engine; in the better cases, they are supplemented by a small amount of human editing. See excellent examples such as Techmeme or Mediagazer; they combine a strong home-brewed algorithm with a thin layer of human intervention, hence the term of “Aggrefilter” coined by our friend Dan Farber.
In this context, Blogs range from the best to the worst. Professional blogs – either independent or hosted by traditional medias – can be the most advanced form of written journalism. Quite often, blogs produced by good journalists are as insightful as standard stories, but way more fun to read. (In France, I do know editors who wish their writers were as witty in the paper as they are on their blogs). Good bloggers sometimes border on columnists. Their work is solid, precise and, sometimes, edited; they take time to write their pieces and it shows.
At the other end of the spectrum, blogs can be utterly superficial, lacking precise facts, or agenda-driven and written with a shovel. Unfortunately, both kinds of blogs are sometimes found under the same roof. In many news organizations, big and small, instead of being considered as a more modern form of journalism, the “blog” name tag is a synonym for lower expectations.
The same kind of carelessness goes for comments. I do believe that opening news content to public feedback is a good thing. At its very core, journalism begs for argument; pundits need detractors. But most online editors satisfy themselves by opening the floodgate of comments, without a strategy, or even the slightest attention to content. As a result, everybody loses: the writer who sees painstaking work defaced by shouts; and the publication for allowing substandard, unmoderated feedback. Participation without relevancy is pointless. Unfortunately, in most news sites – including big ones, very little thought seems to have been given to raising the level of public contributions.
This leads us to the oxymoronic notion of citizen journalism. Using public contributions to compensate for the absence of a reporter on the scene is nothing new. For decades, finding pictures taken by witnesses (sometimes paying for such) has been part of the job. Today, Twitter has replaced the checkbook. In many instances, Twitter has proven extraordinary precious and efficient. But, soon, the spontaneous stream of accounts has to be supplemented by professional editing and checking. This is the kind of powerful combination that made the coverage of civil unrests in Tibet or Iran so compelling.
Last March, professor George Brock, head of journalism at the City University of London, gave an absolute must-read lecture on the evolution of journalism titled Is “news” over? (see video and text). Here is what he said about readers input:
This is a competition for trust between two different forms of collective intelligence. This argument is not being openly and clearly mapped by those who run news media. Perhaps understandably, no editor wanting to encourage the highest level of participation online wants to underline that the suggestions, tweets, tips and facts flowing in from this rich new sources are being filtered in a traditional way.
But the facts of news consumption on the web tell us clearly that filtering is exactly what people tend to prefer when they have the choice. Filtering used in the old days to be known as “editing”. If it’s done right, it should be for the benefit and protection of the viewer or reader. It should create trust.
These distinctions are essential to the preservation of quality journalism. Many wondered why the Yahoos, Googles, Microsofts, where unable to setup news organizations despite their incommensurable wealth (to put things in perspective: Google spends five times more each year for its datacenters than the New York Times spends for its entire newsroom). Part of the reason is the return on such an investment. Financially speaking, the news business is not very appealing. See for yourself in this revenue per employee table.
Google being the 100 index :
Amazon:……………85
Microsoft:…………..53
News Corp:………..47
Yahoo:……………..40
Washington Post:…19
NYTimes:…………. 22
Gannett:……………13
McClatchy:…………10
But, to thrive, journalism requires more than a checkbook. It has to be built around a set of cultural traits that are in total contradiction to the engineering efficiencies of a search engine or an internet portal. Evidently, the modern news business requires more technology; and journalists needs the dialectics from their public. But news requires more professionalism than mere crowd-powered demagoguery. Today and, I believe, for as long as trust is to be part of the relationship with readers.
—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
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20 Comments
> You would not trust a citizen dentist either for your cavities … These notions collide with the new information chain: Algorithm => Search => Filtering => Aggregation => Mashup => Social Feedback (i.e.: commenting, sharing, tweeting, blogging…). We’ve been through the hardcore part (fact-based reporting, checking, sourcing, editing). Now, let’s sort out the new jargon.
Ahem
In the USA, ANPA Association of Newspaper Publishers of America had a membership of 1,052 newspaper publishers printing at 852 plants. Out of these printing plants, more than 800 printed international news by teletypesetting. In other words, 800 out of 852 printing plants published international news unchecked and unresearched from Associated Press and UPI teletypesetting services that encoded the typesetting commands to paper tape (for Intertype and Linotype) and streamed the commands to subscribers. The subscribers saved the streamed the commands back to paper tape which was then fed to the line casting machines, see Harold Evans multi-volume title on newspaper production, chapter on the typography of text setting, page 23.
AT&T started a wire service in the mid-1930s and after a while AP and UPI joined.
Daniel Lyons is provocative, but not without a point when he says that, “As for all the hand-wringing about the great “in-depth” information that only a newspaper can provide, let’s be honest: the typical daily newspaper does a lousy job. It tries to provide a little bit of everything—politics, sports, business, celebrity stuff—and as a result it doesn’t do anything particularly well. Ask anyone who’s an expert in anything—whether it’s bicycle racing or brain surgery—what they think when they read a newspaper article about their field. Chances are they cringe, because the material is so dumbed-down, and because it’s so clear that whoever wrote the article has no real expertise on this topic.”
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2009/09/27/don-t-bail-out-newspapers-let-them-die-and-get-out-of-the-way.aspx
Henrik
For:
> ANPA Association of Newspaper Publishers of America had a membership of 1,052 newspaper publishers printing at 852 plants
Read:
ANPA Association of Newspaper Publishers of America had a membership of 1,052 newspaper publishers printing at 852 plants in 1969.
This offers some excellent perspectives on defining the evolving “pro-am” relationship in journalism. It echos the concept of the “fifth estate” that I first heard about from Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark (though Clark — in a column about a year ago http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=162674 — credits a Poynter presenter as introducing the concept to him). The analogies Fredric makes about “citizen surgeons” almost exactly parallel some of Clark’s thoughts.
Whatever the origin of the “fifth estate” term, it expresses a two-fold thought: (1) that there certainly is a place in the news ecosystem for citizen journalists; but (2) to think that professionalism in journalism is passe or pointless, or can be replaced by some sort of collective wisdom of the crowds, goes overboard. Certain types of information presentation that is crucial to effective operation of the public sphere is beyond what citizen/amateur journalists can be expected to produce. (Further thoughts: http://tinyurl.com/25ap6tr )
As much as you may want for surgery to be the same as journalism, it is not. You may be right that citizen journalists won’t displace professional reporters, only because they have already displaced them.
Those are the facts.
And the notion of people hungering for “quality” journalism is just wishful thinking.
I agree that something is lost in the new journalistic paradigm, but so much more is gained. I deeply value independent truth, but I think it’s preposterous to compare journalism to brain surgery. There are some conventions and rules, and lives are sometimes on the line, but our work doesn’t require the same level of training, risk and expertise demanded in the medical world. I can watch a million videos of surgery, but wouldn’t dare try it. But people can learn much about storytelling, interviewing, constructing a narrative by watching and then trying. And what they sometimes produce is better than karaoke reporting. What’s great about the new journalism is that it recognizes the importance of seeing the public as a collaborator, not just a passive recipient of information, breaking down the elitist ethos of our industry. Journalism-proper has never done a stellar job covering certain communities and certain issues. But now technology enables (and economics demands) that people can be engaged in being the media they wish to see in the world. And it’s not all blogospheric blather. Citizen journalism can also aid investigative journalism, adding more eyes to reading public documents and speeding up the process. Real people without degrees engage in random acts of journalism all the time. The sky is not falling. And if it is, we’ll hear about it first on Twitter and Twitpic, I’m sure.
Citizen journalists can make a big difference in niche areas. I follow tech VERY closely; and area the “pro” journalists are pretty bad at. I’ve followed Apple since the mid nineties. Everybody in the MSM wrote them off, because it takes a lot of effort to go into depth with such a complex subject.
Citizen journalists are free. The economics of the online news business (or any online content) is defined by the algorithms of Demand Media and Associated Content, which can determine the lifetime revenues of any piece of online content. The result is: not very much.
One of the most important problems we face is how to pay for the work that goes into producing quality content, news, etc. It’s the Gordian Knot of our time, if someone figures out how to slice it we all win.
You write: “A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a remarkable piece about fact checking at the New Yorker. In a loving and witty rendition, the author, John McPhee, details how an army of minutiae-obsessed researchers will spend days to check the smallest assertions in order to remove even the palest shadow of doubt..this article really deserves to be dissected in journalism schools.”
I thought it important to give you the balance of this factual information so your readers can judge for themselves if what you say is true.
While John McPhee was writing this for New Yorker as one of their employees, you might not be aware that the New Yorker fact checkers were in big trouble over a single source story written by Pulitzer prize winner Jared Diamond, (April 21, 2008).
Lawyers for two Papua New Guinea tribes people, who were named and called killers and worse in the story, but never called by famed fact checker to check facts before publication, demanded the removal from New Yorker’s web site (they immediately complied), that has since devolved into a libel lawsuit against New Yorker magazine and Diamond in New York State Court. See our investigation http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-149.php.
After reading the story, I became suspect of Diamond’s dubious claims in his New Yorker piece–such as the existence of an Ombal tribal warrior/leader, Henep Isum, who they reported was paralyzed after his spine was cut by an assassin’s arrow in 1995 revenge warfare. Incredibly, they claimed Isum was sitting in a wheelchair for 11 years in a remote New Guinea–that has no paved roads or sidewalks–with his spinal injury.
We easily found and contacted Isum who was clearing land and walking around carrying a heavy load of dirt when our research team member found him. No wheelchair in sight.
Not only did New Yorker and Diamond admit they never tried to contact Isum before publication, but they refused to call him afterwards even when offered his phone number–and despite the fact they were informed he was upset at being called a killer who Diamond asked why police were not called on him, in light of the truth which was Isum was a village policeman whose duty was to work for peace–he was not an Ombal warrior leader. He didn’t even belong to the Ombal tribe but was a Henep tribesman as his named indicated.
So bad was the fact checking that they never even bothered to check Google maps or Papua New Guinea government web sites to confirm, for example, that village locations and districts and to learn that “Ombal” is far away from and not in the same political district as “Nipa.”
Julie Drizin wrote, “Real people without degrees engage in random acts of journalism all the time.” Yet lacking training in the skills of reporting and writing and editing, real people create real noise far more than they create info. A million monkeys typing at keyboards may eventually produce a sonnet by Shakespear, but I don’t want to read any of the noise along the way, do you? To be sure, a very few citizen journalists may function as “black swans” or “outliers” to enrich us all with novel perspectives, but we still need professional journalists to cover most info.
As Tom Foremski wisely notes, the discussion really boils down to the issue of quality. We have info and noise to varying degrees in any journalism, and the advent of electronic media players (whether computers, pod/pads, etc.) has led to fascination with the sheer variety of new media streams available (RSS fed “aggrefilterbots”, .flv files, chatrooms, etc.). However, this “Gee wiz” factor should eventually wear out, as people slowly tire of the tedium and hype and noise the comes with free media, and accept modest subscriptions to quality niche information.
I do see the iPad/Zinio as showing one viable way forward (a very high quality experience). BTW, Jacek Utko (http://www.utko.com/) seems to show that even dead-trees can still make a profit if it’s done with quality in mind. Quality leads to trust; trust leads to a relationship; a relationship leads to loyal subscribers, loyal subscribers provide a sustained business…these are timeless fundamentals.
I agree that we shouldn’t have citizen doctors. I guess though we shouldn’t have freelance doctors either. Or doctors who learnt on the job, via apprenticeships or in-house training.
I guess we ought to look at licensing journalists, too. If you didn’t study journalism at an approved journalism school, you shouldn’t be able to practice journalism.
Or, you know, you could actually do some research into how journalists actually become journalists, and not use incredibly poor comparisons.
I think it is quite amusing to hear that the media operate “blogs.” The media do not operate blogs — they operate columns which they call “blogs” hoping to exploit on the authenticity that real blogs offer. Media “blogs” are counterfeits, the way Sauron made orcs in imitation of elves.
I’ve been blogging on the media and its relationship to reality here in Taiwan for about five years now (among other things), and have built a blog that is popular and widely read. My experience with the international media here in Taiwan is that they do fact check and seldom make actual factual errors when they report on basic facts (for example, they never mix up monday for tuesday when reporting the date of an event) but the concentration on “fact checking” is a smokescreen that obscures the political bias of the international media: the media may fact check, but it never reflects on its own biases (the media position is that it has no biases, precisely because it IS the media). Errors commonly occur at the level where reporters must make a judgment about what they are seeing. Worse, as I know from bitter experience, no matter how wrong a judgment in a media report is, it is nearly impossible to get them to admit error or apply a correction. Factual errors, by contrast, are readily and easily corrected.
‘Fact checking’ also obscures another severe problem with media presentations whether in reports or “blogs”, and that is their tendency to omit pertinent information. The media’s problem is the fact that the news is a construct with significant omissions, not that it is erroneous. A simple example of this is the construction one often sees in articles about China and Taiwan in which the reader is informed what China thinks of Taiwan: Beijing, we’re invariably told, considers Taiwan to be a territory awaiting reunification with the motherland. The reader will search in vain in all the thousands of articles that have been written in the major international English media for an article that, in the next sentence, tells you what Taiwan thinks of Beijing. That is always omitted.
A quality real blog is able to dissect a media report to show its ideological roots and biases. A quality real blog provides value-added commentary and analysis that the media won’t or can’t. A quality real blog thus offers both depth and authenticity. Most media “blogs” suck not because they are superficial or not witty or whatever, but because they never move off their (generally Establishment) biases in their discussions, simply extending the same ideological constructs to the more informal environment of a column which they label a “blog”. Such “blogs” invariably lack all the compelling qualities of good real blogs.
I do agree that Citizen Journalism is not possible. Citizen journalism is not possible because what citizens do when they write is both different and, when of high quality, much deeper than journalism. We need our journalists, not because they have expertise, but because they have resources, and we need our real blogs. Let’s not permit the media to confuse the two.
Michael Turton
The View from Taiwan
The worst is when low level blogging contaminates professional journalism. The high number of wrong death announcements on TV and in newspapers is linked to the race with blogs, and the competition for being first on google news.
Another source of “bad journalism” you did not mention are what I would call “aggregating blogs”, one of the worst example being for me acidcow, which just spread great photo reportages without any information or context (to be compared for example with the big picture on boston.com, where photos are credited and get full legend).
Though, blogging is also giving access to direct facts, through private people describing what they live and experience, and as long as the writer is honest in his assessments, and does not pretend his experience is absolute truth, this is one of the most powerful “real” information tool.
The second thing I really appreciate in “citizen journalism” in blogging is the access through translating sites like voices of america, to blogs and information in languages I don’t speak (equivalent to the professional Courrier International)
nice post, thank you
mantappss
You are so right. Times fact-checking is CRAZY.
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Io in realtà programmato per discutere i vostri post è incredibilmente realistico. Scelgo di sentire qualcosa di completamente nuovo con questo account di I realmente a disposizione il sito identico nella mia Stati Uniti durante questa materia in modo specifico questo aiuto? Abbondanza tutti s. Sono riuscito a guardare bene sull’argomento più notato un grande numero di blog, ma in contrasto con quella. Grazie per aver rivelato tanto all’interno del vostro sito web.
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Quand j’entends le mot culture……
En prenant ma dose quotidienne de Google News (je sais, c’est mal), j’ai noté que la rubrique Culture avait été renommée Divertissements. C’est anecdotique. Mais c’est peut-être aussi symptomatique….
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