The perils of not staying current with your readers

"If you don't stay current with users, they invent around you."

More wisdom from the authors of Wikinomics.

Folks in the newspaper world might not think much of the new news organizations cropping up, like the West Seattle Blog or the "-ist" clan" (SFist / Gothamist / Austinist etc...), but the fact that places like these are vibrant sources of information for their communities means that they are staying current with something that readers value, and the traditional media ignores (or, moreover, disdains) them at their own peril.

Photo courtesy of TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³. Creative Commons license.

Data Point of One: Why podcasts trump newspapers

A friend in Seattle recently observed that, despite having grown up with a newspaper-reading habit, she couldn’t feel particularly distressed about the pending demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (The Hearst Corp. announced earlier this month that it would cease publishing a print edition of the paper in 60 days if it couldn't find a buyer.) My friend cares about the news. And she’s just the kind of accomplished, business school grad, tech industry veteran you’d expect to be interested in public affairs. But the fact is, she hasn’t subscribed to a local newspaper in years. The newspaper format just doesn’t work for her. With three kids under 10, the idea of having a window of time where she could actually sit down and read a newspaper is ludicrous.

What she does instead is listen to podcasts. Specifically, Slate’s weekly "Political Gabfest." Podcasts work for her. She can listen to them while folding laundry, exercising at the gym, or toodling around in the car on errands. Not only that, she actually looks forward to listening to them. This isn’t a “take your vitamins” kind of habit. She enjoys listening to Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz go back and forth on the week’s events. It’s sort of like grabbing a cup of coffee with a fun group of friends, she said.

Newspapers aren’t dying because people don’t care about the news. Newspapers are dying because the format doesn’t work for the average person. News organizations that can figure out how to deliver the news in formats that work for their target audience will find a future. Organizations that can figure out how to create a compelling offering that “readers” are excited to dive into will find a future. Organizations that continue to insist that news should be delivered in 500-word, inverted pyramid stories on pieces of paper that require you to devote your full visual attention to them them probably won’t.

It’s a mindset thing. Organizations that can break out of thinking that news is only news if it looks like your father’s news are doomed. Organizations that say to themselves, “How can we deliver this information in a way that fits people’s lifestyles today?” are on their way to finding the future of news.

Photo credit. Creative Commons license.

How Dan Rather could have kept his job

It's been four years since the flawed "60 Minutes" report on George Bush's National Guard service and Dan Rather's subsequent ignominious separation from CBS. But the incident still holds important lessons for newspeople today. Namely: Rather and his team tripped up not because they weren't doing good journalism, but because they were using the "old world" rules in a "new world" game. And it bit them in the proverbial patootie.

In the old world, investigative reporting went something like this: Get a hint of something juicy, spend months tracking it down, all the while holding your cards close to your chest to prevent competitors from finding out what you're up to and, dang it all, scooping you on your own story. Next, get your ducks in a row, double-check your piece, and then release it to the world in one fell swoop. Make a spectacular splash, and don't forget to take a victory lap so your journalism peers can genuflect in the face of your total awesomeness.

Because let's admit it, part of what motivates journalists to do kick-butt investigative reporting is to reap kudos from their peers. Don't get me wrong. Many reporters absolutely do care about the subjects they investigate. And for some, exposing wrongdoing is, in fact, their only motivation. But for many others, part of what keeps them slogging through the long, lonely, and distinctly unglamorous days of investigative reporting are visions of the recognition they will receive down the road. And not just reporters. What editor doesn't, after all, take into account "Pulitzer potential" when deciding whether to greenlight a story that will take one (or two) of their warm bodies out of the daily grind for the indeterminate future?

But here's the problem with playing the old game in the new world: Get one thing wrong, and you'll get skewered. Maybe even lose your job.

This didn't used to be a problem. Not because investigative reporters didn't make mistakes. They almost certainly did. But the difference is that reporters enjoyed what some today might call a special advantage: They owned the printing presses. Mechanisms for bringing their errors to light in any meaningful way simply didn't exist. No public commons existed for readers to get together and start bringing collective weight to things that seemed off. Like, "Hey, that thing you said about that boat was wrong. It doesn't use the XYZ motor. It uses an ABC motor." And, "Yeah, you're right. My dad had one of those when I was a kid. I remember him complaining that he wanted the XYZ motor, but it couldn't fit." And, "Indeed, I worked in a boat shop, and our customers used to ask for the XYZ motor, and we had to tell them they couldn't get it."

With the Web, all that changes. With the Web, everyone enjoys the special advantage. Errors no longer escape scrutiny. Just the opposite. Mistakes get analyzed and magnified six ways to Sunday. In the new world, reporters simply can't get away with the things they got away with before.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "60 Minutes" team knowingly had doubts about the documents which cast shadows on Bush's National Guard service. They purportedly consulted with independent experts to verify the documents' authenticity. All well and good. That's standard journalistic practice. And in the old world, that was probably good enough. In the new world, however, it's not even sufficient.

The difference is in the confidence rate. Let's say the experts' assessments give you an 80% confidence rate that what you have is kosher. The experts' credentials are impeccable, and they say they are reasonably sure that the documents are legit. But they're not 100% sure. With the amount of information at their disposal, they say they can't be 100% sure, only 80%. In the old world, 80% might have been as good as you could get. There wasn't an efficient mechanism to reach 100% confidence. So 80% was good enough, and you legitimately went out the door with that.

In the new world, however, you often can get to 100%. How? By putting the material out to the world and letting the crowd respond.

At the 2006 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, new media thought leader Dan Gillmor suggested that "60 Minutes" could have saved itself buckets of headaches if, sometime during its investigation, it had simply posted portions of the documents online and asked for help verifying their authenticity. Given the amount of totally random, yet holding-a-piece-of-the-proverbial-elephant regular folk who weighed in after the fact (typewriter enthusiasts, a guy who was a Navy clerk in the early '70s, a former Air Force personnel specialist), it seems reasonable to believe that CBS could have determined the documents were, in fact, suspect--long before their report went on air.

So this is the point: In the old world, an 80% confidence rate was perhaps as high as you could get. You could get away with going out the door with an 80% confidence rate. In the new world, however, you often can get to 100%. We didn't have the tools before. We do now. So a journalist today has no excuse for not using the tools at their disposal to achieve that 100% confidence rate.

"But what about our scoops?!" some will protest. "If we post to the world what we're working on, we'll lose our scoops."

Hmm. I see what you're saying. Here are some thoughts:

-- It's possible that Rather and crew could have gotten the help they needed without tipping their hand. Simply post a portion of the documents and see what people say.

-- It's more likely, however, that they would had to have been more forthcoming. Online audiences only get involved when they feel invested in the person/site asking for their help. It's hard to feel curious, much less invested in something if a reporter/website only offers a blind shred of something. It's much easier to feel invested if there's a big hullaboo going on.

So yes, in leveraging the new tools to try to get to 100% confidence rate about the veracity of their stories, reporters are more likely than not going to have to tip their hands about what they're working on. This is a bad thing only if your goal is to get scoops rather than to bring the truth to light. And given that prioritizing a scoop over getting to the truth can bite you in the butt, as it did "60 Minutes," it's increasingly going to be in every reporter's interest to go for accuracy, scoops be damned.

The good news is that scoops aren't going to mean as much in the future as they did in the past. Newspaper scoops were important in two-newspaper towns. When as a reader, you're only getting your news once a day, you want to subscribe to the newspaper that's not a day behind. Online, however, all sites get everything more or less immediately. Maybe there's a lag of a few hours between when one site breaks something and others confirm it. But a few hours doesn't mean much to readers. (Most are not spending their waking hours waiting for the next big news item. They do have lives....) Scoops are not going to drive reader preferences. Much more important are going to be things like accuracy, how well the site helps the reader understand the significance of the things it covers, how engaging the writing is, and how easy the site is to use. Scoops? Pshaw.

Photo courtesy of scriptingnews. Creative Commons license

Four ways of looking at Mayhill Fowler

You know Mayhill Fowler. She's the Bay Area woman who notoriously splashed Barack Obama's private "bitter" voters comments across the Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" blog -- setting off a furor in journalism circles about on-the-record and off-the-record quotes and about the long-held rule of identifying oneself as a journalist. People in traditional journalism might have thought Fowler "learned her lesson" after the incident, given the vitriol and diatribe launched her way by professional commentators. But apparently she didn't. Or, alternatively, perhaps she didn't believe there actually was a lesson to be learned. Because two months later, she was at it again.

Fowler is the person who launched Bill Clinton's evisceration of Todd Purdum and his Vanity Fair article on the former prez into cyberspace. You know, the audio of Clinton calling Purdum "sleazy", "slimy", and a "scumbag." The comments quickly made it into the mainstream media, provoking yet further examination and excoriation of Fowler's methods.

Those in the traditional media were outraged that Fowler wasn't "playing by the rules." She didn't identify herself as a reporter. She reported comments a source might reasonably have thought were off-the-record. One NPR journalist even asked whether what she was doing was "fair."

But this is the wrong way to think about Fowler and what she did.

These are the kinds of comments made by people who can't see how the world has changed. The're tantamount to GM asking whether it's fair that Toyota isn't using oil to power its vehicles.

So how should we think about Fowler's behavior?

-- If you're a politician: There is no off-the-record anymore
"Off the record" was an informal agreement between those who spoke and those who had the capability to publish or broadcast what was spoken. Now that anyone has the ability to broadcast anything, no one -- not only politicans, but also ex-husbands, former bosses, dubious retailers -- can be sure that their questionable behavior will not be thrown up on the Web for millions, from Auburn to Zimbabwe, to view. They used to say, "Don't put anything in email that you wouldn't want displayed on the jumbo monitors in Times Square." The new rule might be -- for politicians and private citizens alike: Don't do or say anything, anywhere that you wouldn't want showing up on YouTube.

This isn't a sign of anything that's changed in journalism. It's a sign of how the larger world has changed. When anyone can publish or broadcast anything to the world, nothing can be guaranteed to be kept out of the public sphere.

-- If you're a professional journalist: This is a good thing
Stop thinking about Fowler's posts as "bad journalism," and start thinking about them more like leaked documents. As a journalist, you're not allowed to go into a company or government office and steal documents. But it's kosher if an employee gives them to you. Similarly, if someone with access to a publishing platform posts useful information that you, as a professional, could not have ethically obtained, it's fair game.

Don't compare Fowler to yourself and berate her because she doesn't follow the same rules as you. She's an amateur, not a professional. So think of her more the way you'd think of a private blogger who wrote on their public blog that a veep in their company was embezzeling millions. If their revelations can be substantiated, all the better that this stuff comes to light.

-- If you're a professional journalist: You still need to follow the rules
Just because a blogger is operating by other rules doesn't mean the old rules go out the door for the professionals. In fact, not only is it all the more important for the professionals to adhere to them, they also become a competitive advantage. Subjects will increasingly evaluate individual reporters based on their personal reputations and will increasingly choose to do business with the ones who have proven themselves to be fair and ethical.

-- If you're Jay Rosen: Stop trying to defend Mayhill Fowler's work
NYU J-school professor (and author of one of our favorite blogs, PressThink) Jay Rosen directs HuffPo's Off the Bus project. Per Rosen, Off the Bus has 2,500 contributors, which Rosen calls "citizen journalists." I eschew the term; it's flopped around so much it doesn't mean anything. I call the people contributing to "Off the Bus": "Random people who happen to be places, see or hear interesting things, and are motivated to share them with the world in text, audio, and/or video via the 'Off the Bus' site."

The above description is not meant to disparage. I don't mean to imply that, just because someone is not a capital-J "journalist," that what they have to share isn't newsworthy, that their observations aren't interesting, or that they can't produce compelling copy, audio, and/or video. But I do think we need to be precise about the phenomenon. Calling them "journalists" confuses the issue because we do have certain attributes we associate with journalists, and these people are not necessarily exhibiting those attributes. So call them contributors; I'm good with that. But not journalists. Not yet, at least.

Similarly, Rosen should stop trying to defend Fowler as if she were an actual journalist. He should stop because he simply doesn't need to. Let me back up a second. After the Clinton broo-ha-ha, Rosen wrote the following to Politico's Michael Calderone:

“This wasn't an interview where the former president sat for questions with Mayhill Fowler. It was a shouted question at a rope line.... Would it have been better if she said, 'Mr. President, I'm Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for OffTheBus and I write about the campaign...'? In the interest of full disclosure, I guess it would be. But in the press of the moment I can understand why she didn't.”

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this explanation feels disingenous. What Off the Bus is doing is an experiment, an experiment in gathering news in new ways. Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting I think Off the Bus tells its contributors not to identify themselves. Rather, when you're working with 2,500 amateurs in the fast-paced world of a presidential campaign, you can't possibly expect that they're going to master traditional journalism practices and then follow them to-the-letter, even if you do have guidelines you've asked them to follow (which Off the Bus does, per Rosen's email to Calderone).

If I were Rosen, I'd simply say the following: "Off the Bus is an experiment in gathering news using 2,500 motivated amateurs. We do our best to instruct them in traditional journalistic practices, but we don't necessarily use their adherence to those practices as a criteria for deciding whether to publish their reports. At this point, we believe we are performing a greater public service by sharing the valuable facts, quotes, and insights they are gathering than in withholding material because it wasn't obtained according to traditional journalistic standards. In the long term, we will use the learnings from this experiment to innovate new ways of newsgathering that hopefully will strengthen the practice of journalism."

I'm fine with that. I don't think it's a big deal that Off the Bus is prioritizing scoops over traditional journalistic practices. It's the Wild West out there. We're all trying to figure out the future. But transparency is key. Just tell us what you're doing, why, and how, and we'll be good with it. And that's why Rosen really should simply call it like it is, rather than trying to shoehorn the new stuff they're doing into the old frameworks.