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)

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

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.

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.

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….

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.”

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.

Those are the facts.

And the notion of people hungering for “quality” journalism is just wishful thinking.

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 )

> 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.

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